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Course Description:
Beginning with
Whitman's privileging of the spoken vernacular in his 1856 celebration of
"an American rude tongue," the important [innovative (i.e.
avant-garde, otherstream, marginal, and minority)] movements in American
poetry have invariably involved the articulation of a poetics in
relation to: vernacular speech, orality, music, performance, audio
recording, and the expressive materiality of language. Growing
recognition of the centrality [pertinence] of oral/aural
issues to 20th-century poetics has inspired a number of recent critical
collections that will inform this course, including: Sound States:
Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies, Morris; Close
Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, Bernstein; Ghostlier
Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word, Davidson; and
Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext, Stewart. This course will
introduce students to the theory and practice surrounding sound in modern
and postmodern American poetries. Guided by recent theory and criticism,
we will explore a range of poets, sampling their poetry (on the page and
through available recordings) and their own aesthetic statements. Students
may be exposed to writers such as [....] The course will incorporate
a web-ct discussion and class presentations; the critical essay will ask
students to more deeply explore the work of one of the poets, engaging in
research and producing an analysis that draws upon an audio recording or
performance document. |
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