We walk and sleep almost every day, but we rarely think specifically about walking and sleeping as either significant aspects of our daily lives or worthwhile subjects of critical inquiry. Instead, walking and sleeping are often understood as banal, unconscious acts that we carry out all the time to sustain our livelihood: We always travel, and we must rest.
This course hopes to suggest alternative possibilities. Throughout the course, we will expose ourselves to art and literature that describe and reflect upon the experience of walking and sleeping. As we slowly become familiar with their history, cultural significance, and poetics, this course hopes to imagine walking and sleeping beyond unconscious acts of life, to instead think of them as sites of social institutions, creative performances, and critical practices.
We can imagine the course itself as a collective walking tour, where we, with a tour guide, saunter, meander, wandering off to enticing places of interests and returning back to our travel. We will also zoom in and sleep with certain ideas with greater attention. The course, eventually, hopes to constitute a practice of thinking both in microscopic details and in macroscopic layers: We will walk and sleep in specific milieus (Woods near Concord, Massachusetts in 19th Century America? Bustling streets of early 20th Century metropolitan Paris? Or a dilapidated, about-to-be-closed-down movie theater in Taipei? Or…the mind of a second-generation Chinese immigrant bryologist living in contemporary Brussels?), but we will also take many steps back to investigate their implications, meta-critically reflect on the specificities of the medium of walking and sleeping, and think about how these instances inform our alternative understandings of walking and sleeping as institutions, performances, and practices.
The tour guide of our journey is Bas Devos, a Belgian filmmaker who has dedicated many of his works to the investigation of walking and sleeping. We will begin our class with two of his most recent films, Ghost Tropics and Here, and use his films to map out key routes and coordinates of our journey. We should note that Devos is not the central inquiry of the class; instead, his works, I believe, could provide accessible entry points to many threads of our discussions, and we will constantly return to him in discussions to ground ourserlves and reflect in our class.
The course is designed to be flexible and aims at addressing two main groups of students. On one hand, I’m imagining it as an undergraduate course at the introductory & intermediate level that I will potentially teach if I ever, many years later, become a PhD student. This is also in accordance with the research for my senior honor thesis, as I’m using the medium of syllabus as a tool to teach myself more on the subject of walking and sleeping that I'll be writing about soon. On the other hand, I'm also imagining the course (more realistically) as a course for a summer camp for high school graduates in China where I’ve taught before.
Despite the fact that there are certain differences in primary and secondary texts as well as expected level of engagement with the content—some of which I’ll elaborate later in the syllabus specifically—the shared idea behind the course is a commitment to a critical-creative practice, in which students will be both exposed to a diverse range of media (primary & secondary; creative & theoretical, etc.) and allowed the freedom to chart their own course along the way, with the necessary skills developed over the course of the semester & the summer camp.
My goal in this course, less as a teacher but more as a fellow traveler, is to facilitate collective knowledge-making and scholarship as closely as possible. This entails (but is certainly not limited to) setting the preliminary travel plan and the starting station of each of our classes, charting the perimeter of our discussion to initiate focused, critical reflections, as well as fostering an inclusive environment where everyone feels absolutely safe to listen, participate, contribute, and collectively create knowledge, especially when ideas are not fully fleshed out. On one hand, this is very much a class about alternative experience, so welcoming partial, provocative, even seemingly unreasonable ideas is especially central to our discussion. On the other hand, I wholeheartedly believe that the most precious knowledge is formed precisely in those moments of indeterminacy and vulnerability.
To learn and understand various approaches and vocabularies that different academic and popular discourses use to engage with different texts and media.
To be able to critically read, investigate, and engage with different texts and media with the approaches and vocabularies learned throughout the course.
To practice thinking meta-critically, through zooming into microscopic details and zooming out to engage with larger institutions, discourse, and media forms.
To practice responding to texts and media in critical-creative manner.
To bridge texts and media with your lives, through engaging in potential performances and practices.
And above all…to form a loving community of fellow walkers!
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Some notes on overall structure:
An undergraduate course typically spans 14-15 weeks for a semester-system school, and 9-10 weeks for a quarter-system school. The summer camp I have taught/potentially will be teaching is an intensive two-week camp with 10 teaching days in total. Both of them take the format of a 3-hour-long seminar, and the class meets either weekly or daily.
I’m sticking to the longer time span for the general course design, which leaves room for further adjustment according to specific format. I’ll try to think about both formats as much as possible when setting the schedule (curating a range of primary & secondary texts of different levels, prioritizing texts that are available in Chinese translation, etc.), but if certain activtities/assignments may be suitable to only one of the two formats, I’ll constantly adjust in the future when necessary.
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Some notes on limitation:
The idea of this course begins as an inquiry into both walking and sleeping, but because of the limitation of my current stage of research, the course content has weighed disproportionately on walking over sleeping. However, because I really love the way walking & sleeping provides for the framing of the class, I decided to preserve the framing in the overall structure while focusing more closely on walking over sleeping in the course schedule. I’m still working on a more organic connection between these two drastically different modes of existence (which I believe there is!), and when the time comes and when I’ve read more for my research, I intend to continue modifying this syllabus for renewed versions.
Another limitation of the project is that I have very little knowledge of alternative academic scholarships in Chinese (and I’ve read very much primarily in English for scholarship), so some of the texts I’ve chosen for the course are not readily available in Chinese, for the possibility of this syllabus being used for the summer camp. I’ve marked all such texts in the syllabus, and I intend to continue searching for alternative texts or alternative manners to present these texts to my future students.
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