Wednesday, January 7, 2009

SS Course 2009: The Collaborative Imagination

Course 241
Date: 26–30 January
Time: 6.00 pm
Full Price: R270,00 Staff: R135,00 Reduced: R70,00

The Collaborative Imagination
Presented by Dan Simon, publisher, Seven Stories Press, biographer and translator

As society becomes more technology-based and less based on reading and writing, it has become urgent to understand the nature of collaborative interactions. This course will look at selected literary collaborations and the way different epochs develop models suited to their historical moments. Each lecture will look at a particular historical moment and group of collaborative processes. The first lecture will consider Kafka and his collaboration with publisher Kurt Wolff and friend and editor Max Brod. Then we will look at the relationships between the American editor Maxwell Perkins and Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, and why they were tinged with tragedy. The writers that coalesced around Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, Kerouac and Burroughs in particular, raise the issue of why that moment required the attempted destruction of their literary forefathers. We will also discuss contemporary technologies such as YouTube, FaceBook and others which are intensely collaborative, although in ways dissimilar to past collaborations. The last lecture will reflect on how to make our collaborations as fruitful as possible. Using the established roles of writer and editor as examples, how do these paradoxical relation- ships, where intensely individual activity is immersed in collaborative processes, really work?

LECTURE TITLES
  1. Kafka: most solitary of writers.
  2. Wolfe, Fitzgerald and Hemingway: achievement and tragedy.
  3. Ginsberg and the Beats: literary parents under attack.
  4. New technologies, new forms of collaboration.
  5. Collaborations: containing and/or exploding contradictions.
Recommended reading
  • Scott Berg, A. Max Perkins: Editor of Genius. Berkely Publishing Group, 2008.
  • Scott Fitzgerald, F. The Great Gatsby. (Any edition.)
  • Algren, N. Nonconformity: Writing on Writing. Seven Stories Press, 1998.
  • Handouts of other selected material will be provided at the lectures.

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