Scribner Seminar Program
Course Description
Weird Books
Instructor(s): Paul Benzon, English
When we think of literature we often think first of language, narrative, and characters. But we don’t often think about books themselves—it’s all too easy to see the book as a transparent container for the literature we read, and thus not to see it at all. What happens when that changes, when we look at the book rather than through it? What new possibilities might we see for storytelling, poetic imagination, artistic experimentation, and social engagement?
In this course, we will take up these and other questions as we study a range of unconventional, experimental, and weird books from different disciplinary perspectives. We’ll explore how novelists and poets play with typography, images, and the space of the page to produce different literary effects, and what it means for authors to construct a book as a collage of historical material. We’ll look at artists’ books on campus at the Tang Museum and Scribner Library’s Special Collections in order to consider what it means to treat the book as an artistic object, and we’ll think about how creators across a range of disciplines use the form of the book to engage with questions of power, justice, and representation. Our ultimate goal will be to develop a more complex interdisciplinary understanding of the book as a literary, artistic, and social form.
Course Offered: