Modernism and Cultural Poetics
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E - Reserve |WebCT | LINKS | Syllabus
REVISED readings/Presenters
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Notices Archive
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Notes for Oct 5th: Please note, the Kora reserve has been updated to include missing page 105. In addition, the Marjorie Perloff article on Kora is available, see the ereserve title: Lines Converging. Link to an image of the original Cover Art There's a relevant piece by James Clifford on "For Elsie", as well as many intriguing critical excerpts at MAPS
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| Course Description: At once one of the most read and widely misread of canonic American poets, William Carlos Williams will be the central figure in this course. Our engagement with his work will proceed though a series of concentric reframings. Beginning for instance with the famed short lyrics so familiar from anthologies (e.g. “So much depends / upon // a red wheel / barrow...” or “I have eaten/ the plums/ that were in/ the icebox”), we will place our readings into the context of the original magazine appearances and the Dadaist volume Spring and All, which we may then find encircled by the tensions between a vernacular aesthetics and the developing of an international high modernism. I anticipate that subjectivity, ideology and poetic form, canon formation, gender and ethnicity will emerge as significant themes. With respect to research projects, the course should help students move towards what Duplessis calls “culturalist readings--that is, readings alert to the material world, politics, society, and history—but which also attend to “the poetic assumptions and textual choices that animate” Williams’ work. Students will be free to look beyond Williams’ lyrics to his work in other genres (which includes: the epic poem Paterson, short fiction, an autobiography, novels, drama, critical essays, an educational treatise and a mythologizing revision of American history). Brief readings from Mikhail Bakhtin will augment the complement of theory students bring to the class. | |||||
Courses |
Sherwood |IUP English | IUP |
