Prerequisites: Graduate standing in English or permission of instructor.

Recent offerings:

The Poetics of Difficulty in Modernist and Contemporary Avant-gardes (Spring 2011, Billitteri)

Across the history of twentieth-century literature, and spilling over into the twentieth-first century, avant-garde writers and their movements have taken an oppositional stance against normative ways of knowing, seeing, thinking, and representing through their works and manifestoes. Difficulty, whether of textual or conceptual nature, has thus become one of the distinguishing epistemic characteristics of the avant-gardes. It is in this sense that we can talk of a “poetics of difficulty” in modernist and contemporary writing.

This seminar will work through the goals of such poetics, which include a reconceptualizing and even transformation of sociality, subjectivity, embodiment, and gender. Readings will include theory as well as poetry and prose by the writers considered and literary criticism on their works and periods. Theoretical readings will bring together two different areas of intellectual inquiry: cognitive theory and the phenomenology of perception; the literary and critical readings will take up a representative selection of modern and contemporary authors including several of the following: the Symbolist poets Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valery, the Futurists Marinetti, Papini, and Palazzeschi, the Vorticists Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, the proto-Dada and Dada artists Guillaume Apollinaire and Tristan Tzara, and the anglophone writers Edith Sitwell, Gertrude Stein, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Barbara Guest, Rosmarie Waldrop, Theresa Cha, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Rodney Koeneke, and Rachel Loden.

A Pre-Stonewall Poetics (Spring 2010, Moxley)

The 1969 riots begun at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York are traditionally cited as the symbolic start of the gay liberation movement in the US.  The focus of this course will be the poetry and poetics of four post-WWII American poets: Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, James Schuyler, and John Wieners, all of whom were gay, and all of who came of age poetically and sexually before Stonewall. All of these poets were also included in Donald Allen’s landmark anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960. Through study of their lives and poetry we will examine the following: the emergence of gay identity, lyric address and gay male desire, straight-gay alliances, domesticity, camp, drag, femininity (as imagined through gay men), myth, pop culture, self-destruction, and creativity. Evaluation will be based on weekly responses and 20+ page seminar paper (or 10 page creative ms. Plus 10+ page seminar paper).

The Poetics of the Phonotext: Timbre, Text, and Technology (Spring 2009, S. Evans)

This seminar will offer a systematic introduction to an exciting new development in the field of poetics (and literary studies more generally), the emergence of “phonotextual” studies concerned with the analysis and interpretation of poems not just as printed texts but as voiced structures whose meaning can be “sounded” as well as seen. In addition to exploring the sonic archive of modern and contemporary poetry through on-line resources like PennSound and Ubuweb, we’ll work through a fascinating body of secondary literature from the fields of poetics, linguistics, literary criticism, prosody, speech pragmatics, psychoanalysis, and the new media as we seek to fashion a supple critical vocabulary for the description, interpretation, and evaluation of poetry soundfiles. Students will learn the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and to use sound editing and analysis software applications (Audacity, Praat) that allow us to visualize (and manipulate) the sound shape of poetic language. In addition to conventional writing assignments (including a substantial, research-based seminar paper), students can also expect to program a radio segment and to make regular postings to a course blog. One of the goals of the seminar will be to examine the way that concerns, concepts, and categories long associated with the field of poetics, from Aristotle to the modern age, can be restored to relevance in our digital age.

Note: No background in poetry, poetics, linguistics, or new media is required for this introductory course. May be of special interest to teachers interested in integrating new media into their lesson plans and to poets seeking to hone their performance styles.

Texts likely to be included on the syllabus (consult instructor before purchasing):

• Augoyrad, Jean-François, and Henry Torgue. Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds. McGill-Queen’s UP, 2005.
• Roland Barthes. “Listening” and “The Grain of the Voice.” Handouts.
• Bernstein, Charles, ed. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. Oxford UP, 1998.
• Dolar, Mladen. A Voice and Nothing More. MIT, 2006.
• Eisenberg, Evan. The Recording Angel: Music, Records, and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa. 2nd Ed. Yale UP, 2005.
• Eno, Brian. Excerpts from A Year with Swollen Appendices. Faber, 1996.
• Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Columbia, 1984.
• Nancy, Jean-Luc. Listening. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. Fordham UP, 2007.
• Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy. London: Routledge, 1982; rpt. 2002.
• Stewart, Garrett. Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext. U of California P, 1990.
• Tsur, Reuven. What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive? The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception. Duke UP, 1992.

Poetry and Experience (Spring 2008, Friedlander)

“Experience” is an important keyword in both poetics and philosophy, and some of its most important elaborations have been in works that bring the two fields together–Wilhelm Dilthey’s studies of Goethe and Hoelderlin, Walter Benjamin’s unfinished Baudelaire book, Jacques Derrida’s essays on Paul Celan. In this course we will sample those and similar works as well as others from history, psychology, and sociology, using two recent accounts of the topic as a guide: Martin Jay’s Songs of Experience (2005) and Dominick LaCapra’s History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (2004). The course will begin with two extremely influential essays by poets, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Experience” and Paul Celan’s “The Meridian”; it will conclude with a case study, the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks. Students will write weekly response papers (wks 2-11) and a final essay on a topic to be developed in consultation with instructor.

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