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"I, Too, Dislike It": American Poetry from 1830 - 1950

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Beschreibung

“One reads poetry with one's nerves.”
- Wallace Stevens, “Adagia”

In the first line of Marianne Moore’s programmatic poem “Poetry” (1919) the speaker declares “I, too, dislike it” and goes on to muse that “there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.” While Moore’s “Poetry” is, of course, ultimately a defense of poetic expression, the self-aware skepticism displayed in its opening lines probably speaks to many students of literature who often avoid any text with artificial line breaks at all cost: Too difficult, too dense, too obscure, too — well — poetic. Beyond alphabetizing rhyme schemes, counting meter, underlining metaphors, and then guessing whether the poem is either about “love” or “death” (a safe bet in many cases), students are frequently at a loss when it comes to engaging with this genre.

This seminar will face the challenges head-on and explore American poetry from romanticism to modernism not only as a genre of linguistic experimentation, but as a genre wrestling with BIG philosophical and social ideas and questions crucial to the American project at large. Moving from the spiritual nature poetry of the American Renaissance to Edgar Allan Poe’s borderline necrophilic love poems, from Walt Whitman’s sprawling free verse to Emily Dickinson’s consternating poetic riddles, from the reduced forms of modernism to the sometimes shockingly personal works of the Harlem Renaissance and 1950s confessional poetry, this seminar will trace a condensed literary history of the United States from 1830 to 1950 as refracted through its poetic productions.

The course will not boil down to counting rhymes and meter in order to produce empty formal descriptions of poems, but it will help you to read poetry, as the modern American poet Wallace Stevens declared, with your nerves by enabling you to appreciate American poetry in its many historical articulations. While it is not required that you know a lot about poetry prior to attending this course, the seminar is only directed at students who have both a fundamental interest in poetry as well as a willingness to personally engage with a poem. Don’t sign up for this class only because poems tend to be on the shorter side of things. Our readings of the poems won’t be.

Weitere Angaben

Ort: nicht angegeben
Zeiten: Di. 16:00 - 18:00 (wöchentlich)
Erster Termin: Dienstag, 14.04.2020 16:00 - 18:00
Veranstaltungsart: Seminar (Offizielle Lehrveranstaltungen)

Studienbereiche

  • Veranstaltungen > Anglistik; Englisch > Kulturwissenschaft > Master
  • Courses in English > Language and Literary Studies