ENGL 574 A1: The Poetry and Poetics of Research Creation

Jordan Abel 

In Natalie Loveless’s latest book, How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation, Loveless asks the question: “what if the most powerful way to communicate the research embodied within a certain ‘chapter’ is not to write about it on a page, but to ‘write’ it through video? Or in a multimedia installation? Or with a live performance event? Or through an art-activist installation? How do we begin to understand these latter as ‘publications’ of research that can be tied up with, and be disseminated as part and parcel of, a larger academic research project?” However we might imagine shifting our presentations of (and entwinements with) research, what’s clear is that Research-Creation—much like poetry—invites us to seriously consider the relationship between form and content. In this course, we will begin to explore the multiple valences of Research-Creation—research-for-creation, research-from-creation, creative presentations of research, and creation-as-research—as set out by Owen Chapman and Kim Sawchuk in their essay “Research Creation: Intervention, Analysis, and ‘Family Resemblances’”—in order to think through how we might reimagine our relationships to our disciplines, our research, and our writing. While we will attend to some of the ways in which scholars have engaged the Research-Creation, the primary focus of this course will be on generating our own Research-Creation projects and will require multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary strategies as needed. 

Tentative Course Texts: 

Prison Industrial Complex Explodes by Mercedes Eng (Talon)

Citizen by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf)

Zong! by NourbeSe Philip (Wesleyan)

Keywords; For Further Consideration and Particularly Relevant to Academic Life, Especially as it Concerns Disciplines, Inter-disciplinary Endeavor, and Modes of Resistance to the Same by A Community of Inquiry (Princeton University Press)

NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field by Billy-Ray Belcourt (Anansi)

Calamities by Renee Gladman (Wave)

Operation by Moez Surani (Book*Hug)

Whereas by Layli Long Soldier (Graywolf)

How to Make Art at the End of the World by Natalie Loveless (Duke)

Knowings and Knots: Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-Creation edited by Natalie Lovelesss (University of Alberta Press)