Patrice Nganang

On Saturday, March 8th, in Mildred Sainer Auditorium, Patrice Nganang will give a talk on the personal and collective politics of African writing: “The Library of Njoya: The Dream from which I Write”

The talk is free and open to the public; a reception will follow.



In addition, there will be two forums where students can meet and speak with Nganang:



First, an open session at the Four Winds on Friday March 7, from 3-5:30 for students who want to talk to Nganang—in English, French or German—about his work, African literature, graduate study in comparative literature, etc.



Second, a lunch & roundtable on Saturday March 8.? Seating will be limited at this; if students want to attend, they need to contact Agne Milukaite or Marilee Pray (@ncf.edu) for details.



More information about Nganang follows.



*****



Patrice Nganang is a fascinating, powerful and provocative writer, academic & speaker. Originally from Cameroon (he left Cameroon in the wake of the protests in the early 1990s that came close to toppling the regime of Paul Biya), he holds a doctorate from the University of Frankfurt (Germany) and is currently on the faculty of SUNY Stonybrook (in comparative literature). He is a young and prolific author (he has published 3 novels to date, collections of poetry, short stories and novellas, as well as works of literary criticism on topics ranging from contemporary theater (a comparative study of Brecht and Soyinka) to African film. He has been awarded two prestigious French literary prizes, the Prix Marguerite Yourcenar in 2001 and the Grand Prix de la litt?rature de l’Afrique noire in 2002, both for his novel “Temps de chien” (which I translated as “Dog Days”).



His work is very political and inspiring. His fiction touches on issues ranging from the social manifestations of political oppression in Cameroon to the silenced history of the Bamileke genocide that followed Cameroon’s independence. Because he is most interested in creating a space for silenced voices to be heard, he weaves stories that are compelling, poignant and vibrant with humor. His essays are very political – whether challenging the passivity of African elites in the face of political violence or the self-important attitude of literary critics who judge African literature. This winter he traveled to The Hague to witness the trial of former Liberian president Charles Taylor.



Nganang will be on the New College campus for 3 days, holding discussions and roundtables with students, and capping off his visit with a public talk on Saturday.

week four

Week Four
Appropriation and Finding
Found Poetry. Shakespeare, Rezinkoff, Acker.

Sources of Shakespeare's works:
http://www.shakespeare-w.com/english/shakespeare/source.html

http://www.elizabethanauthors.com/sources.htm

Shakespeare AS a source (and adaptation)

Charles Reznikoff's TESTIMONY
at MAP (great resource)
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/reznikoff/testimony.htm

from wikipedia:

Testimony was, initially, a prose retelling of stories that Reznikoff had discovered while working on court records. In these stories, Reznikoff discovered something of the story of America between 1855 and 1915 both in its diversity and its violence. Tellingly, he chose to omit the judgements...

why would that be?

Acker's resources were as diverse as Charles Dickens, Cervantes, Hawthorne, the film Key Largo, and pirates in general.


At the Academy of American Poets:
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5780

We've already talked about this a little bit, especially vis a vis the cento. Mantis, and Mantis: An Interpretation, by Louis Zukofsky are arguably the most fun to argue about. But today my thought is how centos are very like dictionary definitions, with their sample usage sentences, and how definitions are like centos.

Why and how is this? There are several pretty obvious ways and reasons, many of which have to do with some of the purposes of writing or words in writing & meaning.

chaps

originally "cheap books"

At the request of several students interested in DIY / small press
publishing, or just interested in seeing and talking about issues in
and around chapbooks, I have reserved

WRC 6 - 7:30 the following evenings:

Tues. 2/26 -- recent online and print chapbooks
Tues. 3/18 -- collaboration, layout, and the work
Tues. 4/15 -- production and distribution

chapbooks are not just for writers!

those interested in portfolio-making for graduate applications,
producing ephemera to sell or provide free at shows / performances, or
thinking about works in series will be as surprised and pleased as
those needing practice with .pdf distilling and printing / xeroxing two
sided copies

literary nonfiction

tends to be slightly, but definably different, from creative nonfiction

some of these are more nonfiction with literary qualities

what examples can you think of? leave a comment...

Edwidge Danticat
James Agee
William Carlos Williams, IN THE AMERICAN GRAIN
Vita Sackville-West
M.F.K. Fischer
Joseph Mitchell,Up in the Old Hotel
Virginia Woolf

an invitation...

based on some discussion at the last writing collaborative meeting, I thought to repost

a new collaborative, multidisciplinary, multilingual blog
project called nuzzled sentence:

http://nuzzledsentence.blogspot.com

You can read more about it on the blog and see what kind of work is
being done there, but basically, it's a melting pot of work based on
the concept of "writing through" James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake." It
includes work in poetry, visual poetry, video poetry/film, audio work,
digital poetry, visual and digital art -- you name it.

We've begun with the Ten Thunderwords from the Wake as the first
artistic "catalyst" and will move on to other excerpts or aspects of
the Wake after that. We post original work, as well as collaborative
pieces done among participants.

I'd like to invite any who are interested in participating to
join us. I'm especially interested in a female take on FW, or "writing
(or re-writing) through" Joyce's text in a woman's voice (female =
anyone who self-identifies as a female). I would also like to
encourage bilingual or multilingual writers and artists who might be
interested to join us. It's not a huge commitment; participation is on
an "as-can," "as-inspired" basis.

Week Three "After Workshop"

Things that evolved from discussion week three were:

ars poetica (specifically within a work -- a work or portion of a work which discusses how art "should be")
vs. manifesto and poetics statement
in the work of John Ashbery

Murial Rukeyser, and specifically US 1

I neglected to bring Langston Hughes, Montage of a Dream Deferred, in.

Research and Readings

Week Three

How could a work be a reading of a theory, another text, another author?

Reader Response Theory
Stanley Fish
from Wikipedia

The reader is an active agent who imparts "real existence" to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation. Literature should be viewed as a performing art in which each reader creates his or her own, possibly unique, text-related performance.

As opposed, see New Criticism, T.S. Eliot, for example, or I.A. Richards

a text can display multiple simultaneous meanings
overdetermination
disregard authorial intention
disregard reader response

Or see formalism,
interpreting or evaluating literary works that focus on features of the text itself rather than on the contexts of its creation or the contexts of its reception.

Why and how could a creative work require information and interpretation?

Masterplots. How to write a story. The failure of "how to write a poem." Exercises and recipes for poems.

Bernadette Mayer
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/library/Mayer-Bernadette_Experiments.html

More standard ones:
http://www.meredithsuewillis.com/writingexercises1-20.html