21W.750  Experimental Writing

Looks like a book, feels like a book, reads like a book, but: what constitutes a BOOK? This creative writing workshop explores and plays with the material and historical components of the BOOK in order to derive, (re)generate, edit, and publish individual and collective writings. Reading authorial appropriations of particular components of the BOOK (for instance, using the index as a means of memoir, sequencing stories and poems exclusively through footnotes, treating the colophon as a pet that needs to be tended), we will take apart the BOOK in order to put it back together again: in reimagined ways, shapes, and forms. Would you like to contribute to a phantom library? Edit a chapbook? Handle rare books and manuscripts in MIT's Archives? Readings by authors like David Foster Wallace, Shelley Jackson, Jorge Luis Borges, Mark Danielewski, and Oulipians will be supplemented by scholarship about book history and artists’ books. From the revolutionary reproductions of Gutenberg’s printing press, to Tristram Shandy’s famous “marbled page” (unique to each volume), to our current culture of technotexts and collaborative narratives (even a Twitterature version of Tristram Shandy), we will ponder and pander to the BOOK as object, as history, and as mystery to consider where this technology has come from, to envision where it might go.