ENG 566 - Studies in Poetry: Beauty and the Poetic Text

What makes us perceive things as beautiful? Why do certain works of art move us emotionally, while others engage us intellectually? The concept of aesthetics is nothing if not fluid: it can relate to perception through the senses; the philosophy of beauty; the art or science of what is pleasing; the study of good taste; the standards by which art is judged-the list goes on. We will embark on a transhistorical exploration of beauty and the senses pairing English and American poetry with aesthetic philosophy, beginning with Plato and moving through the ideas of beauty and the sublime in the medieval world, representation and the self in the Renaissance, taste and sentiment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, finally ending with modernism and the turn toward self-conscious artistic creation and its heightened awareness of history and society. The course will give students an introduction to a major line in philosophical inquiry from antiquity to the late twentieth century together with reading culturally influential and literarily significant English-language poetry beginning with Thomas Wyatt and ending with T.S. Eliot, and including Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Shelley, Gray, Wordsworth, and Dickinson. Philosophy will include: Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Eco, Sidney, Pope, Burke, Kant, Emerson, Wilde, Freud, Shklovsky, Benjamin, Adorno, Croce, Didi-Huberman.

Unit(s): 0.5
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Notes: Graduate course. Offered spring 2024.
Not offered: 2023-24