CUNY Academic Commons

the first chapter of Bernstein’s book Freud and the Legacy of Moses (Cambridge University Press), which is helping to introduce me to Freud’s last published work, highly controversial at the time, that he nonetheless brought into publishing (including a Hebrew translation) at a time where the Jews were in a turbulent and precarious position. The…[Read more]

This is from the Whitney show which just closed of Cecil Taylor’s work. I saw him perform there last week, which was amazing. But was also amazed by the exhibition in the back, which had his original notations and poems, which are uniquely drawn and written, sometimes following musical notation (and poetry lineation) conventions but more often not.

Just a syllabus for Baruch first years, i’ll be teaching this course next year… The requirement for the course is to lead instruction towards a set of writing goals. The subject matter that is “responded” to is open-ended. Interestingly, this teacher taught on The Crowds, and introduces this with a quote from Baudelaire about the mad, orgiastic…[Read more]

This is a 1995 conversation turned book between leading French sociologist Pierre Bordieu and renowned German “institutional critique” and conceptual artist Hans Haacke. I’ll look at how both attempted to resist the “postmodern condition” epitomized by Baudrillard, and the elitism of institutions through recourse to self-reflexive critique and…[Read more]

Shield somewhat convincingly argues that Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads highlights a shift from the designative referential linguistic theory of Locke to a theory of cathartic self-expression common to our idealized and contemporary notion of “Romantic poetry.” However, he complicates this idealism by showing Wordsworth’s…[Read more]

From the British Library’s digitized literature collection. I’m studying Wordsworth’s preludes in Josh Wilner’s Romantic autobiography class. I’ve always found W’ quite boring, though I am enthralled with all the other Lake Poets, including his sister Dorothy. Doing class readings of the poem, which transformed many times, and especially this…[Read more]

This essay argues that Wordsworth is not merely the egocentric subjectivist poet he is often thought to be, but rather sought to transcend his own poetic subjectivity. In this way, Wordsworth foreshadowed Heidegger’s assertion that language speaks, and then Lacan’s notion of the unconscious structured like a language. By de-centering the authorial…[Read more]

This chart was used in Auden’s Swarthmore class “Romanticism from Rousseau to Hitler,” in which he taught Kierkegaard, Kafka, Baudelaire, and Melville, among others. It’s fairly hard to make out the chart in this scan, available on the Swarthmore website for Auden. But points to his eclectic and varied interests in symbols, themes, and writers,…[Read more]

In a review of his selected writings and selected journals, Bomb posted an original page from Weiners’ journals (much archival research of his work is conducted at CUNY as part of the Lost & Find project). These journals have just this year come out (in clean type), in the book “Stars Seen in Person.” I’m interested in the distinction between the…[Read more]

Here, British Marxist, poet, and scholar Keston Sutherland reads John Weiners, a favorite poet of mine. In this text he uses Derrida’s concept weak grammar to categorize and explain the fragmentary nature of Weiners’s poetry but also, though it is not explicitly mentioned, the often abject (gay, schizophrenic) subject position that Weiners takes on.

This 1912 mocking rejection letter from a London publisher to Gertrude Stein is not related to my research topic per se but, as a writer who submits poems and essays regularly, it is funny to see an earlier era’s crude rejection of a now (fairly) ubiquitously celebrated poet. Would be interesting to figure out how to cite this…the image…[Read more]

This 1986 essay by CUNY professor Richard Wolin relates to my research interest in contemporaneous critiques of post-structuralism and postmodernism’s rise in popularity. Wolin’s unique tracing of Foucault to Nietzsche (who Foucault rarely mentioned) and Heidegger is stark, polemical, and in the end very compelling. I also downloaded other…[Read more]