Metaphysics of Literary Production and the Death of Publishing
So I'm getting to teach a four-week masterclass at the Columbia University MFA program in the Spring. Here's the course description (note that the title is borrowed in part from a talk by Harold Augenbraum.)
Forty years ago Roland Barthes announced the "Death of the Author," yet not only are there more authors than ever, but more with more blogs, websites, and YouTube trailers. Now, it is the "Death of Print" that has been announced. Is this obituary greatly exaggerated? Or, if true, is print even mourned?
With the help of a tremendously eclectic reading list comprising philosophy, gossip, true crime, cultural anthropology, poetry, and fiction of all stripes, we're going to examine the evolution of the book publishing industry so as to delineate the possibilities for the cultural and economic role of the writer and editor in the coming decades. Over the course of the four weeks, students will be following a social media feed from me called FriendFeed that provides links to article to read, a kind of real-time syllabus. From those texts and in relation to the class readings and discussion, students will write a short essay or story towards inventing their own definitions of how they are going to act as cultural producers, rather than slot themselves into pre-existing categories.
[This assignment will take the form of Lethem's Ecstasy of Influence but there wasn't enough space in the course description to explain that.]
So, you know, any thoughts about the forgoing, the reading list, possible structures to think about etc. fire me an email. (It's looks like I need ot upgrade to the next generation of Movable Type in order to enable comments, and I sadly just don't know how to do that :-(