Chris L. Gortmaker

The idea of automatic writing, or writing undertaken without conscious control, animates some of literary modernism’s most groundbreaking works. This course traces a history of automatic writing from late-nineteenth-century hypnotism and literary impressionism, through Gertrude Stein and Surrealism, to midcentury photography and the emergence of postmodernism. Readings in psychology and literary criticism will guide us as we investigate not only the modes and meanings of automatic writing, but also, and more fundamentally, the concept of the “automatic” that underpins how we think about art, mindedness, and agency. Course texts may include the prose of James Agee, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Ford Madox Ford, Guy de Maupassant, Frank Norris, and Muriel Spark; the poetry of André Breton and Gertrude Stein; and the critical writing of Stanley Cavell, Sigmund Freud, Michael Fried, Pierre Janet, and Ruth Leys.