| What does literature teach us about the art of failure? Why is failure, and all the bad feelings that go along with it, worth our attention? Lingering in the muck and mess, this course interrogates the structural conditions of possibility in failure. As J. Jack Halberstam observes in their book The Queer Art of Failure, “failing, losing, forgetting, unmarking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (2-3). We’ll look at examples of failed texts, from the Romantics to the present, and consider if there are particular genres that share certain family resemblances with failure (e.g. the fragment, the thesis, the translation, the found poem). We’ll discuss how the space in which we study these texts, the university, is structured in relation to failure, and is itself, as Bill Readings would have it, “in ruins.” But we’ll also consider how narratives and institutions of failure might have the curious power to revive, revitalize, and recover both readers and worlds.Prerequisites: Must have permission of Director of Graduate Studies |
