001: Workshop



Clarice Lispector: “It’s Not Literature. It’s Witchcraft”*






Time9 November 2024 - 18  January 2025
Saturdays,  10am - 1pm EST
LocationOnline (Zoom)Cost120 USDAges18+AccessScholarships  and Payment Plans Available
Closed Captioning
Class Notes
Limited Recordings
Office Hours

InstructorKameelah Janan Rasheed
Enrollment 1 July - 31 July  2024

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Over our eight weeks together, we will
s     l     o     w     l     y  read Clarice Lispector’s, Água Viva alongside some paratext**.

Topics we will likely discuss: translation, Jewish mysticism, possession, psychedelics, evasion, transgression, seduction, orifices - holes + methods to create them, and consumption.

*"Be careful with Clarice. It's not literature. It's witchcraft." (José Castello,  Source)
**The French literary theorist Gérard Genette developed the concept of PARATEXT. Genette describes paratext as "those liminal devices and conventions, both within and outside the book, that form part of the complex mediation between book, author, publisher, and reader: titles, forewords, epigraphs, and publishers' jacket copy are part of a book's private and public history."


Instructor Notes + Reflection

Archiving is an opportunity to create traces, not a transcribed record of the class. At The Little Octopus School, the class archive is a gift from the students and instructor. The gift is taking the interior of the class and turning it inside out to send it outward as a s




[Archiving] - PlayPLAY: lo-fi playthings



Parrish, Allison. Nothing survives transcription, nothing doesn’t survive transcription (This is the text of a lecture she delivered at Iona University’s Data Science Symposium in April, 2023)



Archiving is an opportunity to create traces, not a transcribed record of the class. At The Little Octopus School, the class archive is a gift from the students and instructor. The gift is taking the interior of the class and turning it inside out to send it outward as a series of prompts. Perhaps what is more useful than recordings or transcripts is the ability to perform scores beyond this class.



Using every sentence from Água Viva, KJR Studios designed a plaything that invites you to rearrange a random sentence into a new sentence. 


The students in the course crafted writing constraints and prompts based on Água Viva. Toggle through some writing prompts and get started!

© Kameelah Janan Rasheed 2025