Ecstasy Facsimile

Application summary

Engaging with the precedent set by hybrid writers such as Paul Preciado, Maggie Nelson, and Claudia Rankine, my project—part-sonnet-sequence and part-autotheory—uses “ecstasy” as a generative notion, pursuing its various definitions and usages, contiguities and associations. Saint Teresa of Ávila’s experience of divine ecstasy is a fundamental element, along with theoretical explorations of the term by Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and José Esteban Muñoz. Incorporating related materials from philosophy and cultural studies, other literary texts and popular media, my project aims for a critical but also personal reflection on issues of self, religion, queer sociality, diaspora, class, and precarity. I would like to approach my project by grounding it in specific realities; which is to say, I write about my own conditions as a member of the precariat, defined by Lauren Berlant as a “new global class … whose bodies and lives are saturated by capitalist forces and rhythms”: the arrangement offered by the Saari Residence is one such manifestation of precarity that, through firsthand experience, I would like to draw from. Ecstasy is ephemeral; the two-month residency would function as actual context and material for my project. A sizable portion of the sonnet sequence has already been written, and several have been published in literary journals—I intend to devote most of my time during the residency to polishing the individual poems, readying them for book-length publication, even as I dive more deeply into the research and collation process necessary to craft the autotheoretical component of the project.