Writing the Mind, Writing the Body

In this interdisciplinary course, we will explore how literary and philosophical texts by writers across the Black Diaspora portray the mind and body. The purpose of this course is to study how these writers of various genres employ language and style to portray, represent, or evoke mental and physical occurrences. In our close reading of these texts, we will study the ways literary and philosophical strategies for writing on the mind/body requires participatory work from readers. We also consider how race, gender, and disability revise and enhance our understandings of the mind/body nexus. Our theoretical readings are taken from various fields such as psychoanalysis, disabilities studies, dance criticism, phenomenology, lyric studies, and art theory. In addition to exploring questions of the mind/body, we also engage theories on the face and voice as thresholds between the mind/body. How does language capture or convey the mind/body? How does language fail to represent or portray what we would consider mental and/or physical experiences? How do these texts and our engagement with them blur the distinction of the mind/body or bring to light the strange connections between them? While considering primary texts from the Black expressive tradition, we also will investigate how race complicates - and perhaps conditions - these philosophical paradoxes.