VIS1020H S
Instructor: Lauren Fournier
Meeting Section: L0101
Synchronous
Wednesday, 9:00AM - 12:00PM

This seminar course is structured around close and considered readings of writings by contemporary artists and writers that practice what has come to be called “autotheory” or “auto-philosophy”—a practice of theorizing the self and one’s work in relation to research and citation. “Autotheory” and “auto-philosophy” are two emergent notions in contemporary art practice and adjacent fields (including comparative literature, art history, social and political thought, and criticism) that will be considered in relation to the course texts, shaping our conversations around the relationship between an artist’s writing practice and the production and dissemination of “knowledge”—of the “self,” but also of social, political, cultural, aesthetic, and ethical issues. The course coheres around four major themes: (1) artists’ writing and/as reflection on artistic practice; (2) artists’ writing and/as autofiction; (3) artists’ writing and/as psychoanalysis; (4) artists’ writing, language, and politics. Issues related to neoliberalism and the cult of individualism, present-day “identity politics,” self-reflection and selfinscription, the politics and aesthetics of “narcissism,” and the relationship between “self” and an “other” will be considered, alongside the specifics of form when it comes to decisions a writer makes around fictionalization, philosophical writing, and memoir. Students will explore different approaches that artists take to both writing the self/one’s work and writing alongside others, with the new politics of citation and reference considered in relation to emergent ideas of “intertextual intimacies” and “intertextual identification.” This course is offered as a series of seminars, with assigned readings, presentations, and critical-creative papers by students.