Required of all Ph.D. students. Advanced study in various fields, leading to a substantial piece of writing. Offerings vary from semester to semester. Students should consult the department's "Announcement of Classes" for offerings well before the beginning of the semester.

An index (from the Greek deixis, “to point out”) is a sign that points to the context in which it occurs (think footprint); in poetics, it registers a mutual hereness, a framed habitation for speaker and audience, “the stored activity of the maker [being] simultaneous to an implicit and reciprocal capacity for animation in the receiver,” according to Susan Stewart. This sense of hereness and thereness is why deixis has given us words such as “predicament” (finding oneself here) and “diction” (a sort of unconscious betrayal of the place from which you came). Linguists capture this sense of immediacy in the idea of “phatic” communication, messages exchanged “to check whether the channel works” (Roman Jakobson) where the purpose is to establish and maintain the social bonds of the interlocutors. The burden of such maintenance has made the indexical a particularly useful portal into what Wittgenstein called shared “forms of life.” Except, it appears, in the black radical tradition, where the phatic is often shadowed by the apophatic, where the connectedness we call blackness often sticks to utterances of the cannot-be-said. James Baldwin argued that wrestling with these black ways of worlding required the deliberate wreckage of American English (“No true account. . . of black life can be held, can be contained in the American vocabulary. . . [T]he only way that you can deal with it is by doing great violence to the assumptions on which the vocabulary is based.”) Toni Morrison called this listening for “the sound that broke the back of words” (Beloved). This graduate seminar will examine the art of Baldwin, Morrison, Aria Dean, Arthur Jafa, Kerry James Marshall, and others, in the context of the many strains of apophasis in black thought: the “anagrammatical” (Christina Sharpe), “mu” (Fred Moten), “troubled eloquence” (Nathaniel Mackey), “the opacity gradient” (Tina Post), “acousmatic voice” (Nina Sun Eidsheim), “the black catatonic scream” (Harmony Holiday). One goal of the seminar will be to plumb the theoretical depths of this divergence toward sounding unsounding within poststructuralism, philosophy of language, and critical theory.

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