Oblique Strategies: Process, Chance and Play in Cross-Disciplinary Literary Artmaking

Building on the musician Brian Eno’s concept of “oblique strategies”, this course will introduce students to a variety of tactics to shift the burden of literary and artistic creation away from the conscious ego and towards a constraint and process-based approach. The first part of the course will focus on self-knowledge as a foundation for artistic practice, using generative writing exercises to generate raw material for subsequent projects. In the second part, we will introduce concepts of instructional, constraint and process-based art and experiment with a variety of strategies to decenter the creative ego with the goal of generating first drafts in a free and unselfconscious manner. The final part of the course will focus on constraint-based strategies for importing that same freedom into the editing process.