SHUM 6715

Precarity Poetics

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2026-2027 Catalog.

The notion of precarity has been theorized in terms of environmental, class, race, and gender vulnerabilities. But how do these vulnerabilities—these complexly layered precarities—play out in poetic form? This course will consider the forms language takes in unstable economic, political, and environmental conditions. We will ask into the relationships between dislocation and scarcity, between language and the (disparately vulnerable) body, and between the human voice and modes of dwelling. Through the lens of diverse works by Octavia Butler, Gloria Alzaldúa, Ilya Kaminsky, Claudia Rankine, Ling Ma, and Cecilia Vicuña, we will explore stabilities and instabilities of form, experimentations in vulnerability and dehabituation, and practices of making in contexts of survival.

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