The Body in Time [Maggie Nelson]

In his review of French writer Herve Guibert’s collected journals, The Mausoleum of Lovers, Wayne Koestenbaum writes: “I hope that Guibert’s journal will bring this philosophically inclined subset of body-smeared literature back into prominence. What else is there to write but the body?” This class is shaped by that same hope, and will inquire into that “philosophically inclined subset of body-smeared writing.” To do so, we will look at examples of writing that engages problems of embodiment, temporality, mortality, pleasure, and pain while also producing our own texts and discussing them.