Rob S E A N Wilson
Rob Sean Wilson is a Western Connecticut native who was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, where he received a doctorate in English in 1976 and was the founding editor of the Berkeley Poetry Review. He has taught in the English Department at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa (which proved formative to his development as scholar and poet of Asia/Pacific) and at Korea University in Seoul as a Fulbright Professor and was twice a National Science Council visiting professor at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. In 2001, he became a professor of transnational/ postcolonial literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In the summer of 2009, he team-taught a summer seminar (with Chadwick Allen) at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan on Pacific Cultural Production, counter-conversion, and the ecological framework of "Oceania." Advisory editor for boundary 2 and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies journals among others, his earlier works include Waking In Seoul; American Sublime; Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production; Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary; Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics and the New Pacific; and Reimagining the American Pacific: From 'South Pacific' to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond. His study Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics appeared with Harvard University Press in 2009 and was selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Publication. A collection of cultural criticism from Asia/Pacific (co-edited with Christopher Connery) The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization appeared with New Pacific Press/ North Atlantic Books in 2007; and Beat Attitudes: On the Roads to Beatitude for Post-Beat Writers, Dharma Bums, and Cultural-Political Activists was published by New Pacific Press in 2010 & reprinted with Kindle Books in 2021. He has a book-length poetry book in the "Transpacific and Archepelagic Poetry & Poetics" series When the Nikita Moon Rose (Kaohsiung, Taiwan: National Sun Yat-sen Press, 2021) in English with Chinese translations by Tee Kim Tong, Melody Yunzi Lee, Chih-min Wang; as well as a collection of cultural and literary studies co-edited with Kim So-Young of Korea and Serena Chou of Taiwan called Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture: Worlding Asia in the Anthropocene (London & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). In terms of international academic service, he has been appointed to a two-year term to the Advisory Board for the Institute of European and American Studies at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan; and to a two-year term on the Asia/Oceania Regional Faculty Advisory Group to generate "Global Engagements" now that UCSC has become a new member of the Asia Pacific Research Universities consortium comprised of leading universities from 19 economies of the Pacific Rim known worldwide for their academic and research excellence. He is also coediting the following two special issues of international journals: Rob Wilson, Chih-Ming Wang, and Roxann Prazniak, ed. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, “Arif Dirlik: The Radicalism of Possibility,”( London: Taylor & Francis,2021); and Rob Wilson, Christopher Leigh Connery, and Isaac Blacksin, ed. boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture, “Norman O. Brown: Into the Future," (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2022). "Oceanic Becoming: The Pacific Beneath the Pavements" is forthcoming from Duke University Press.
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genres of comparative poetics makes the literatures of sites like Asia
Pacific, India, and Oceania better recognized in world creativity and
border-crossing archipelagic agency. World literature can become
enframed not just along “borderlands” of nations and regions but also
across “borderwaters” of entangled places, regions, and zones. Given the
increasing recognition of this postcolonial world-literary creativity and
agency—which implies taking seriously the reworlding power of these
literatures—world poetics will have to revise and decenter its literary
and theoretical frameworks.
“
Why was this needed? Because the world being delivered by “globalization” has been described as a de-worlding process and an unmaking the world: In a special issue of Symploke on "Theorizing Asia."
Coedited by Serena Chou in Taiwan, Soyoung Kim in South Korea, & Rob Sean Wilson in USA. Works included by 張錦忠 Andy Wang, R. Zamora Linmark, Karen-Tei Yamashita, Fritzie de Mata, 洪泠泠凌, Craig Santos Perez, Pin-chia Feng, Hye-young Kim, Isaac Blacksin, Pei-chen Liao, John Parham, Danielle Crawford, William Major, and Ranjan Ghosh...
ABSTRACT: By a transfigurative recoding of selfhood and a quasi-Biblical analogizing of historical events intertextually into figures across space and time, Bob Dylan has shaped his initial conversion as a poetic name-change from Zimmerman-to-Dylan (as he would later write more broadly across the larger body of his poetry). This theo-poetic transformation of identity into a more poetic and spiritual being is what Norman O. Brown had theorized, in Love’s Body and Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis if not throughout his works early and late, as the world-transforming tactic of “figural interpretation, [that] discovered world-historical significance in any [everyday trivial] event—an event which remains trivial for those who do not have eyes to see.” Transfiguration for Brown (as for the metaphor-rich Dylan) was not just a figural, inter-textual, or rhetorical shift of tropes, it also implies all the more so a biomorphic metamorphosis of self and world, soul and matter, bios and logos. This shift of self and world occurs via the morphological transformation of terms and forms in the event of metanoia. Such metaphoric twists and turns of apocalyptic metamorphosis aim to remake the world into more fluid, multiple forms of becoming and uplifting as befits what a flourishing imagination longs for (via transubstantiation) and what Brown defines (and Dylan performs as) so many feats of transfigurative metamorphosis: what Brown terms “Metamorphosis, or transubstantiation.” “Transubstantiate my form, says Daphne [as the muse to poet Apollo, archetypal Greco-Roman figure] through the incarnational claim, “be leaf” (belief).” In this essay, Brown will play the muse Daphne provoking and inspiring poet-figures like Apollo to embrace what he terms the process of “be leafing” (believing) patterns. Belief would take place relentlessly in a world-transforming poet like Bob Dylan, in many ways the most important poet of his world era.
We will discuss what this islands/oceans/ worlding nexus means in relation to the metaphors and master-narratives of global capitalism. Throughout, we will push towards not only theorizing but also creating tactics, terms, and tropes of an environmental eco-poetics: as we enter and try to survive the endangered geo-planetary period called the Anthropocene. We now confront a time of dry lightning, warming and rising oceans, extreme weather, precarious economy, and a global pandemic called COVID-19 that pushes us beyond given forms or tactics and (for example) to teach and study via Zoom.
The Pacific Ocean stands at the outset of global modernity as a Euro-American construction as a region of ideological investment, romantic fantasy, ethnographic investigation, and geopolitical interest. The Pacific reflects desires and goals erupting between Western powers and Asian and Pacific sites n uneven modes of colonial and postcolonial mediation across the modern global-capitalist era. But we will also study archipelagic Caribbean poetics, and get an entangled worlding sense not only of the “American Pacific” but of the German Atlantic as it reaches north to displace England and the US as maritime hegemons and south into the Mediterranean in its aspirations to become global empire. Samoa remains its Pacific expansion and dream, entangled yet decolonizing as is Hawai’i as US settler state. Expressive constructions-- from poems and stories to theoretical and historical essays—will help us to construct, critique, and comprehend oceanic, archipelagic, and insular world regions from the Mediterranean and Atlantic Caribbean to the Pacific-becoming-Oceania as we push toward an “archipelagic” approach to islands-oceans as interlinked formations that is reshaping American studies. Our goal is to produce a more historicized, multiple, and critically informed grasp of oceanic modes of belonging to region, ecology, and planet: what has been called more “creative cartographic mappings” of spatial and temporal belonging to this planet.
genres of comparative poetics makes the literatures of sites like Asia
Pacific, India, and Oceania better recognized in world creativity and
border-crossing archipelagic agency. World literature can become
enframed not just along “borderlands” of nations and regions but also
across “borderwaters” of entangled places, regions, and zones. Given the
increasing recognition of this postcolonial world-literary creativity and
agency—which implies taking seriously the reworlding power of these
literatures—world poetics will have to revise and decenter its literary
and theoretical frameworks.
“
Why was this needed? Because the world being delivered by “globalization” has been described as a de-worlding process and an unmaking the world: In a special issue of Symploke on "Theorizing Asia."
Coedited by Serena Chou in Taiwan, Soyoung Kim in South Korea, & Rob Sean Wilson in USA. Works included by 張錦忠 Andy Wang, R. Zamora Linmark, Karen-Tei Yamashita, Fritzie de Mata, 洪泠泠凌, Craig Santos Perez, Pin-chia Feng, Hye-young Kim, Isaac Blacksin, Pei-chen Liao, John Parham, Danielle Crawford, William Major, and Ranjan Ghosh...
ABSTRACT: By a transfigurative recoding of selfhood and a quasi-Biblical analogizing of historical events intertextually into figures across space and time, Bob Dylan has shaped his initial conversion as a poetic name-change from Zimmerman-to-Dylan (as he would later write more broadly across the larger body of his poetry). This theo-poetic transformation of identity into a more poetic and spiritual being is what Norman O. Brown had theorized, in Love’s Body and Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis if not throughout his works early and late, as the world-transforming tactic of “figural interpretation, [that] discovered world-historical significance in any [everyday trivial] event—an event which remains trivial for those who do not have eyes to see.” Transfiguration for Brown (as for the metaphor-rich Dylan) was not just a figural, inter-textual, or rhetorical shift of tropes, it also implies all the more so a biomorphic metamorphosis of self and world, soul and matter, bios and logos. This shift of self and world occurs via the morphological transformation of terms and forms in the event of metanoia. Such metaphoric twists and turns of apocalyptic metamorphosis aim to remake the world into more fluid, multiple forms of becoming and uplifting as befits what a flourishing imagination longs for (via transubstantiation) and what Brown defines (and Dylan performs as) so many feats of transfigurative metamorphosis: what Brown terms “Metamorphosis, or transubstantiation.” “Transubstantiate my form, says Daphne [as the muse to poet Apollo, archetypal Greco-Roman figure] through the incarnational claim, “be leaf” (belief).” In this essay, Brown will play the muse Daphne provoking and inspiring poet-figures like Apollo to embrace what he terms the process of “be leafing” (believing) patterns. Belief would take place relentlessly in a world-transforming poet like Bob Dylan, in many ways the most important poet of his world era.
We will discuss what this islands/oceans/ worlding nexus means in relation to the metaphors and master-narratives of global capitalism. Throughout, we will push towards not only theorizing but also creating tactics, terms, and tropes of an environmental eco-poetics: as we enter and try to survive the endangered geo-planetary period called the Anthropocene. We now confront a time of dry lightning, warming and rising oceans, extreme weather, precarious economy, and a global pandemic called COVID-19 that pushes us beyond given forms or tactics and (for example) to teach and study via Zoom.
The Pacific Ocean stands at the outset of global modernity as a Euro-American construction as a region of ideological investment, romantic fantasy, ethnographic investigation, and geopolitical interest. The Pacific reflects desires and goals erupting between Western powers and Asian and Pacific sites n uneven modes of colonial and postcolonial mediation across the modern global-capitalist era. But we will also study archipelagic Caribbean poetics, and get an entangled worlding sense not only of the “American Pacific” but of the German Atlantic as it reaches north to displace England and the US as maritime hegemons and south into the Mediterranean in its aspirations to become global empire. Samoa remains its Pacific expansion and dream, entangled yet decolonizing as is Hawai’i as US settler state. Expressive constructions-- from poems and stories to theoretical and historical essays—will help us to construct, critique, and comprehend oceanic, archipelagic, and insular world regions from the Mediterranean and Atlantic Caribbean to the Pacific-becoming-Oceania as we push toward an “archipelagic” approach to islands-oceans as interlinked formations that is reshaping American studies. Our goal is to produce a more historicized, multiple, and critically informed grasp of oceanic modes of belonging to region, ecology, and planet: what has been called more “creative cartographic mappings” of spatial and temporal belonging to this planet.
Thinking Literature Across Continents (Duke UP, 2016) activates a mode of collaborative thinking and (as Heidegger punned poetically) thanking “the world” we inhabit across entangled yet discrepant theorizations of the USA and India, Europe and Asia, inside and outside, between and across the theory-rich Yale and UC Irvine of J. Hillis Miller to the more situational and worldly—in Edward Said’s committed sense of this pedagogical ethos-- English Department of India’s University of North Bengal that prolific transcultural and trans-lingual scholar Ranjan Ghosh calls home. Facing the entangled fates and criss-crossed contexts of a liberal humanist globalization under attack in this our era of the “world-wide web,” these two Socratic theorists of learned disciplinary immersion and Anglo-global facility begin to wonder what exactly is this “so-called world literature” paradigm, as Miller slyly puts the term under global-local contestation (or erasure) from the prefacing outset (xii). By questioning the “world” of world literature, the two all the more so will go to question in this back-and-forth study what is the “global” or the “globalization” telos that it can now presume to map, track, frame, market, and discipline the world as such into its totality of totalities.
-- Bob Dylan [Robert Allen Zimmerman]
Course Description: Rather than offering an impossible album-by-album survey of Bob Dylan’s life and works from his first work to his recent songs over the course of his 60 years performing (Bob Dylan born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota), this course will provide an intensive focus on ten important works that help to track Dylan’s evolution as a poet and song writer working in recurring genres (such as protest songs, muse love songs, , blues and gospel genres, Jeremaic critical vision, love lyrics). Each week one song will form the basis of a reading both in textual detail and social scope: heard and discussed as connected to readings from Dylan himself as well as from important critics, writers, and cultural historians (like Sean Wilentz, Timothy Hampton, Richard F. Thomas,, Anne Waldman et al). The goal is to offer a way into grasping Dylan’s “world” as a timely.ever-mutating, and influental poet in tactic and vision, discussing his modes of writing, song genres, political-cultural aims, and his overall transfigurative and redemptive imagination, and so on.
The course approach aims to show that, by concentrating on hearing and discussing these ten important works from the whole body of Dylan’s work, we should become better able to read such works backward (into the whole inter-textual archive of Dylan works and the past forms he draws upon and transforms), outward (into the modern times of the present) and forward (into the prophecy of the future and tactics of self-transformation and social redemption Dylan offers). This will allow us to achieve insight into the recurring poetic and song genres Dylan uses, the “prophetic” vision and critiques of America he offers in the transnational era, the themes and problems his work has used and transformed, and his metamorphosis as a poet of tropological power and cultural-political importance from the 1960s until receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.
To give a sense of Dylan’s times and works as well as writing, we will read his trope-laden autobiography, Chronicles: Vol. 1. This will help us approach his vision of America and cultural-political tactics, or his poetics. To give a sense of his ties to the leftist cultural populist front as well as to the Beat literary movement, we will read Sean Wilentz’s Bob Dylan in America. Timothy Hampton’s Bob Dylan’s Poetics: How the Songs Work will provide insights into Dylan’s prosody and world-literary influenced poetics. Richard F. Thomas’s Why Bob Dylan Matters offers a quasi-canonical reading of Dylan linking him intertextually to an array of classical sources from Roman and Greek literature and showing how Dylan’s tactics of “love and theft” enriches the texts he often collages and (like a postmodernist magpie) riffs on in his own multiple voices. Rob Sean Wilson’s Beat Attitudes (to be provided as a free PDF) offers a collage of sources and influences that open up the force-field of Beat and America transendental sources that Dylan relentlessly draws upon to achieve his own poetic greatness in multiple voices not just his. We will also see Martin Scorsese’s voice-rich documentary No Direction Home and the Dylan-persona movie on the downfall of the American empire, Masked and Anonymous when relevant. We will in effect make links to a range of Dylan works primary and secondary through these assigned readings, which you need to keep up with.
All of the written lyrics for the assigned 10 songs can be found on Bob Dylan’s official site with Columbia Records: https://bobdylan.com/songs/. By searching around on sites like YouTube and Vimeo, you can also access recordings of each of these 10 songs on the web, both from the original Dylan album and in various live performances, unless you prefer to purchase each one of the 10 songs we will study. The instructor will also provide links to the relevant songs for each week on his Spotify site, and also aim to provide relevant YouTube links via weekly Canvas messages to the class.
Required Texts: We will use each of the following required texts.(These books can be purchased from UCSC Bay Tree Bookstore on campus and/or online as well as from online sites from Amazon to Powell Books et al: these five books have also been placed on reserve at McHenry Library on campus.):
1) Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Vol. One (Simon & Schuster).
2) Timothy Hampton, Bob Dylan’s Poetics: How the Songs Work (Zone Books).
3) Richard F. Thomas, Why Bob Dylan Matters (Harper Collins).
4) Sean Wilentz, Bob Dylan in America (Anchor).
5) Rob Sean Wilson, Beat Attitudes (New Pacific Press). To be provided as free PDF.
*****
Some Suggested Background Readings:
Robert Shelton, No Direction Home; The Life and Music of Bob Dylan (Da Capo Press).
Michael Gray, Song and Dance Man 3: The Art of Bob Dylan (Continuum).
Michael Gray, ed. The Bob Dylan Encylopedia (Continuum).
Kevin Dettmar, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan (Cambridge UP).
Christopher Ricks, Dylan’s Visions of Sin (Ecco Press).
Jonathan Cott, ed., Bob Dylan Interviews (Wenner Books).
*********
Comprising what Raymond Williams tracks in The Country and the City as a “[world capitalist] structure of feeling,” pastoral allows us to grasp shifting dialectical relations between city wealth and rural labor, urban splendor and hinterland resource, and (at a more imperial-global level), the inter-relation between first world and third and fourth world peripherilization. If the basic ethos of pastoral literature concerns the tensions/ironies between a rural way of living, close to the mandates of nature, and an urban way of living close to the progressive imperatives of civilization, such stable frameworks (as in Richard Brautigan’s mock-agrarian Trout Fishing in America) are wobbling and deforming locally and globally. Pastoral, in this reconfigured world frame, has increasingly become a way to deal with theorizing more “ecocritical” perspectives upon city/ country/ world relations, such that the “back country,” “watersheds” and “ocean commons” are figured in as a necessary part of this “post-pastoral” urban/ rural/ world-space relations.
This will allow us to achieve insight into the recurring poetic and song genres Dylan uses, the “prophetic” vision and critiques of America he offers in transnational era, the themes and problems his work has evoked and transformed, and his metamorphosis as a poet of tropological power and cultural-political importance from the 1960s until, rather amazingly, his receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.
To give us a better sense of Dylan’s times and works as well as modes of writing, we will also read his autobiography, Chronicles: Vol. 1. This will help us approach his vision of America and cultural-political tactics, or, simply put, his poetics. To give a sense of his ties to the leftist cultural populist front as well as to the Beat literary movement, we will read Sean Wilentz’s Bob Dylan in America. Various readings from Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader will help us to contextualize each song as well as Dylan’s evolution as a poet and musician over the various decades, from the 1960s to the present. We will also see Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home and the Dylan-persona movie Masked and Anonymous when relevant, and make links to a range of Dylan works primary and secondary through the assigned readings."
This course by no means provides a linear history of San Francisco, but it will serve as an example-rich study of the tropes, myths, narratives, visions, ethnic communities, and multiple life-styles that this “left-coast city on the far-out edge of the world” has generated from 1850 to the present: representing San Francisco as a space of cultural re-invention, political provocation, and identity-transformation; San Francisco as a material and visionary "edge" where myths of Europe, Asia, and the Americas meet Asia/Pacific and Latin American forces and forge creative energies, literatures, and tactics of renewal and rebirth; San Francisco as a beginning, contact zone, and promise to remake the city, nation, and world.
In studying various spatial, temporal, and world-making practices, we will examine the rise of the Pacific Rim as regional idea and fantasy formation: its historical background, ideological assumptions, and cultural-political manifestations, from the 1970s to the present. Expressive constructions (from works of critical theory to poems, memoirs, novels, and travelogues) will help us to construct, grasp, and critique the Pacific Rim as world region.
This workshop thus examines spatial, temporal, and worlding practices generated around the geo-material reality and shifting figurations of the Pacific Rim as an imagined transnational community: tracking its historical emergence, ideological assumptions, and cultural manifestations. "Other Asias" and "Oceania" will be discussed as "worlding" challenges to the ascendancy of the Pacific Rim as geoimaginary norm. Moving beyond its perilous geographical materiality as geo-tectonic plate and tsunami site, "Pacific Rim" serves to link transnationalizing economies of globalization from Australasia, north to Japan and China, around the Pacific Basin to the coasts of North and South America. All the more so tied to inter-Asia and trans-Pacific flows, sites of concentrated globalization like Hong Kong, Honolulu, and San Francisco become Rim sites expressing these altered transpacific flows and contradictory tensions of cross-border globalization.
The ocean of global-capitalist dynamism remains riddled with antagonisms of political, territorial, and commercial conflict any version of the “Pacific Rim” needs to conjure. In an environmental sense as well, we all but forget the ocean while dwelling in an urban life-world that depends for its material well-being on, from, and across the ocean. As in long-standing Romantic tropes, the ocean becomes alien presence of elemental sublimity, at once threat and source of curative powers, as in deep-sea microbes that eat up the potent greenhouse gas, methane. This ocean of alien obliviousness can flip into site of waste and remainder, from oil spills to radioactive contaminants, as the waters become filled with the heaviness of our military history and technological blunder. From the Bikini atoll atomic testing to the latest nuclear disaster in Fukushima Japan, we threaten not just the water and air of locality but the Pacific as planetary bioregion. The tsunami reminded Pacific dwellers from Sendai in coastal Eastern Japan to Santa Cruz in Northern California that the Pacific Rim is not just discourse or trope, it is also a geologically interactive bioregion. Figurations of oceanic interconnection could move us towards a vision of “Becoming “Oceania” projected as a site of transpacific and transnational solidarity. Transpacific ecopoetics (in writers like Epeli Hau’ofa, Juliana Spahr, Brandy Nalani McDougall, and Craig Santos-Perez) can push towards figurations of a Pacific connected to planetary belonging, ecological confederation, and trans-racial solidarity.
Rob Wilson did get a job teaching literature and writing, from composition to creative writing, and for some years taught at the University of Hawaii. Wilson did get a job, and for some years taught at the University of Hawaii. It was at his daughter’s graduation from UCSC that Wilson made connections with faculty from the literature department. In 2000, he began teaching at UCSC. It was his move back to California that reignited his interest in Beat literature, an interest he feels may not have been explored had he remained in Hawaii. Of his transition back to California and his years of being here since spring of 2001, Wilson says, “All of this interest in Beat and San Francisco I wouldn’t have developed in Hawaii. I mean, I taught Dharma Bums over and over among other stuff, but I just had to be here to reconnect to San Francisco and the West Coast and the Beat tradition as it built up here and got transformed—and I kind of stay in touch with Bay Area writers. So it’s opened up my world in terms of what I had ties to in the 1970s, but then I took it to a higher level.” “
imagining and witness or the severest ideological de-creation...Imaginary audiences would bridge the traumatic kernels of social space: the model here is Whitman identifying with and speaking as the country in the act of symbolic construction. Small coalitions, resistant regions, local collectives do emerge: against the impossible unity or will to globalization of 'en masse.'
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power.
Once there were ‘neighborhoods,’ like Kaimuki.
across Anaheim heavens Fourth of July offering as
if Our Lady of Guadalupe writhes from red fumes
and blue smoke of I-5, Bless You Bless You
Orange County bless you for your patriotism
your neoliberal prayers, which rise again like
exploding shopping malls desert heats blown tires...
Your hand in mine we walk out into the renovated Fillmore./
But do not sing those thin blue songs tonight by the taco counter;/ The ravens of the soul stand ever-watch on the Turk street corner/ Without reason or time they come and ask for more pimp flesh,/ Never ask the same way, just freak out sorry soul into sad-sack/ Refrains, amid an elite army of thousands marching by the Peace Pagoda....
dank corners of Powell with wooly dogs, scrawled pleas, begging bowls/ crying Mercy, Compassion, Spare Change to cosmopolis flow/ over which the Nordstrom tower hangs its 200 garden of wears...
"This is a book about becoming. With the kind of courage that can only be nurtured by extensive scholarship, Rob Wilson challenges one of the most profound intellectual questions in human behavior. He takes on the exploration of life-altering change. In particular he focuses on religious conversion and amplifies such facets of change as deconversion, counter- conversion and rebirth, in short the converging, diverging and cross-cutting processes of becoming..."