Is it possible to experiment as part of an educational process? To not only learn about experimentalism, but to formally experiment while engaging in the process of learning? How might experimentalism be situated within a community of learning individuals who are actively shaping what there is to learn; who are shaping, in turn, their environment? What is the relationship, finally, between experiment and experience? Questions like these are of an equally aesthetic, political, epistemological, and ethical nature. They are at the heart of the proposed seminar, which traces and engages the literary and artistic history, as well as the legacy, of Black Mountain College, a liberal arts college in Black Mountain, North Carolina, that was operative from 1933 until 1957. Largely based on the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey, it was a hub for creative, progressive, and democratic thinking during and after World War II. More precisely, it was at Black Mountain College that several authors and artists emerged who would have a significant impact on American literature and culture in the second half of the twentieth century: poets, such as M. C. Richards, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and Ed Dorn, and artists, including Josef and Anni Albers, R. Buckminster Fuller, Franz Kline, John Cage, Cy Twombly, and Robert Rauschenberg.
Participants of this seminar will make themselves familiar with the works of these and other seminal figures, while discussing the notions of “experiment” and “community” throughout the semester in a both creative and scholarly manner. All textual and visual materials will be made available digitally, after the introductory session.