Between the Seams: Hybrid Works

Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works Of Billy The Kid is part novel, poetry sequence, and visual collage; Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red is novel and poem. If, as Georges Bataille has put it, literature is a series of dislocations rather than a continuum, these “hybrid” works and others mark important breaks in the literary status quo. We will take inspiration from writing in which structures rub up against each other. Using poetry and prose, we’ll seek intuitive logics in juxtaposition of text and image, and look at writers using hybrid forms as models for documenting ways of knowing and unknowing.