ENGL 983 - Smnr: Am Auth/Them Lit Thry - Summer 2008
As Rachel Blau DuPlessis observes, “Poetry, most particularly the lyric, has generally been construed (in its university and critical reception) as opposite to society and its discourses. As a mode (and a conglomerate of genres), poetry is often positioned as untainted by the social, in pursuit of higher things, a bastion of transcendence and the aesthetic, privileged by the expression of timeless universal emotions, set apart by specific conventions in its language, and, in its versions of romantic subjectivity, by non-participation in, non-compliance with historical debate. “
Following Du Plessis and others, we explore how such self-enclosed reading practices, associated with New Criticism, are fundamentally ideological. This seminar asks students to step beyond the new critical habits to think about how to read and teach poetry as engaged with the social, enmeshed in particular instances of publication, circulation, and performance. We engage with what could be called the turn towards Materiality, Pedagogy, and Culture in late 20th-century poetics, as explored by critics like DuPlessis (Gender, Race, and Religious Culture in Modern American Poetry), Cary Nelson (Repression and Recovery), Paul Naylor (Poetic Investigations: Singing the Holes in History). The formalism of the mid-twentieth century has been reworked into grounded readings the link the cultural work of poetry with its specific materialities and forms by Jerome McGann (Textual Condition), Barrett Watten (The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics), Spahr and Retallack (Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary).
Shared literary readings will be in 20th-century American poetry, but the methodological and critical readings address broader issues that will allow students, should they choose, to pursue final research essays on texts from other national traditions or earlier periods.
Anthology of Modern American Poetry. Ed. Cary Nelson. Oxford UP 0195122712
http://www.amazon.com/Anthology-Modern-American-Poetry-Nelson/dp/0195122712/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209954725&sr=1-1
Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945. Cary Nelson. Wisconsin UP 0299123448
http://www.amazon.com/Repression-Recovery-American-1910-1945-Wisconsin/dp/0299123448/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209954075&sr=1-1
A Concise Companion to 20th Century Ameican Poetry, ed. Fredman. Blackwell P 2005. 1405120037
http://www.amazon.com/Companion-Twentieth-Century-American-Companions-Literature/dp/1405120037/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209954018&sr=1-1
Genders, Races and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry. DuPlessis. Cambridge UP 0521483352
http://www.amazon.com/Religious-Cultures-1908-1934-Cambridge-Literature/dp/0521483352/ref=dp_return_1?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books
My Way: Speeches and Poems. Bernstein. Chicago, 1999. Chicago 978-0226044101
http://www.amazon.com/My-Way-Speeches-Charles-Bernstein/dp/0226044106/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209953736&sr=8-1
