Comparative Literature / Creative Writing, Editing and Publishing

David Spitzer (Independent Scholar)

This creative session seeks work that crosses, that inhabits several places or that moves relentlessly through and across places of genre, form, medium, and so on. It is meant as a partner and collaborator with the panel “Thinkings In and Out of Place,” though in this session the boundary-crossings activate and shape the works sought. The call is for scholarship|interpretive work projected into new forms with differently confluent streams of image and text, of prosaic and poetic, of academic and literary. Is there a way to project interpretation and theorization in such a way that resists or operates differently than the conventions of academic discourse, its unshakeable positivity and correlative thetic and agonistic stance? Offerings, rather than assertions? Readings and re-readings rather than misreadings and its metaphysics of identity and truth, etc.? Ephemerality and provisionality in place of durability and certainty?

This creative session desires boundary-crossing works of interpretation, performance, thinkings, works that dissolve the "scholarly" and the "creative" and that gain themselves and generate their potencies through various media and combinations. Collaborative efforts, performance, recitations, readings, screenings, suggest just some of the formal possibilities that would render this session as moments of art in and as the "liberal arts." This is a call for the different, the unexpected.