An Aesthetic of Cognitive Mapping: The Boundaries of the Unseminar

An Aesthetic of Cognitive Mapping: The Boundaries of the Unseminar In memoiiam Ernst Behler (1928-1997) Anthony L. Geist Department of Romance Languages Jeff Hitchin Independent scholar Lynn Purl Department of Comparative Literature Yvonne Unnold Department of Comparative Literature Michael Weingrad Department of English University ofWashington Anthony L. GeiSt: This project grew out of a seminar that began as an idea in the Spring of 1993, at which time I had to submit the list of courses I intended to teach the following year. Would I give as my graduate offering another seminar on Lorcas poetry or on the Spanish detective novel? Postmodernism and poetry since rhe death of Franco? I decided instead to offer a "contentless" seminar, or rather, one whose content would be deteimined by the students. I quote from the flyer I circulated at the time to graduate students in Romance Languages, Comparative Literature and English: Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 1, 1997 170 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies The "postmodern condition" is generated by a crisis of knowledge and by the failure of master narratives. One such master narrative may well be the graduate seminar. At the same time, this crisis opens a space for the circulation of new structures and concepts. In the waning of the 20th century, perhaps we can redefine the At first I had in mind a seminar leading, perhaps, to the organization of a conference or to something related to performance art. After several planning sessions, it turned into something quite different , a meditation on borders. We have come to understand borders both in a strict geopolitical sense, as well as more figuratively as that equivocal boundary between literatures, cultures, ethnic groups, genres and genders, a boundary which by its very nature demands an interdisciplinary analysis. The "Unseminar," as it came to be known, raised more questions for me than it answered. As the professor, I intended it to empower rhe srudents, to redraw the lines of authority and authorship. Yet I constantly had to ask myself: if / was empowering them, was I not merely reinscribing my own authority? Michael Weingrad: The experience of the unseminar was one of education as process and accretion, an effort constantly to retrace the traditional boundaries. The five of us entered the course for different reasons, wirh different interests, areas of specialization, and levels and types of theoretical knowledge. Therefore, an important part of the process of the course was the development of a common language we could use to articulate our concerns, a language construcred of shared rexts, ideas, and discussions. Each parricipant was responsible for organizing and running the unseminar for two weeks, and we came up with a remarkably heterogeneous constellation of texts: Jameson and Garcia Canclini, Christopher Columbus and Isabel Allende, Robert BIy, Orson Welles and William Burroughs, Elizabeth Bishop and Ross Perot, among others. The course grew more rewarding as it lengthened , both because we were continually adding more conrents to the pot, and because we were learning how to talk about it. We never managed to reconcile these different discourses, but then we never really inrended to. We have tried instead to inhabit the borderland rhat their colliding boundaries trace. Pedagogical Perspective 171 We didn't want to terminate our course with the tradirional seminar paper, written and received in isolation, a silent contract berween "professor" and "student." A course conceived as open-ended process is only reluctantly transformed into product. We decided to collaborate on a presentation, something that would give a sense of the unseminar's variety, and something that might generate further discussion rather than ending it. We chose the exhibit "La Frontera/The Border," on display at the Tacoma Art Museum at the end of 1993, as the site where our different critical and personal discourses might intersect . Therefore, the success of the unseminar is to be determined now, in this presentation, and in its unforeseen results, to which we hope you as readers will contribute with your responses and questions . ALG: We visited the exhibit together and each wrote an individual response to it, circulated those texts amongst ourselves, and discussed them at length. We often disagreed—some members of the...