Can real poetry live on Instagram? Can a short story be art when it is composed via AI? When poets and artists today take up questions of value (the good and the bad), they sometimes focus their attention on art itself. This unit looks at some challenging forms of literature and other art as a way to explore question the boundaries between good and bad, high art and the popular, class and kitsch, literary and non-literary. Many significant cultural movements in the 20th century, especially those labelled experimental or avant-garde, can be seen as raising questions about what was thought to be good (“classic,” established, fine art, literature) and critiquing, parodying, or pushing against its limits in some way.

In this unit, we'll look at some challenges from outside the realm of literature (the painter, Duchamp; the composer, Cage), consider literary theoretical questions about value and culture, and then move to readings from 21st century writers associated with electronic literature, Flarf and Conceptual Writing. In their works, these writers not only raise questions about literariness and originality but attempt to absorb the information overload of net culture, chatter-bots, and artificial intelligence. They create by inventing procedures, adopting constraints, and even employing computer programs to compose literature in ways that may indeed be transforming writing and reading. If your prior English classes have presented you with an accepted list of “great” works – we'll now look at works where the value is up for debate. We will also attempt to convince our classmates