ENG 366 - 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 in Western literature across multiple genres, 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, sentiment, and the senses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, finally ending with the modern period and the turn toward self-conscious artistic creation. Likely texts include Shakespeare’s Sonnets and T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, as well as works by Longinus, Aquinas, Donne, Thomas Gray, Edmund Burke, Wordsworth, Emerson, Dickinson, Wilde, and Walter Benjamin. This course will assume familiarity with prosodic analysis.

Our Emily Dickinson
This course will focus on the poetry of Emily Dickinson, a monumental figure in American poetry. We will approach her oeuvre through reading literary criticism that uses various analytical frames-historicism, queer theory, feminist theory, lyric theory, textual and material studies-but our primary concern will always be the poems themselves, which continue to reverberate. Our course will begin with a brief exploration of context: the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the poetry of Walt Whitman. It will end with an interrogation of inheritance as we examine a selection of contemporary poetry, and movies and a TV show about Dickinson.

Phenomenology of Early Modern Lyric
Early modern England was home to a flourishing of lyric poetry arguably unmatched before or since. Often used as a blanket term for short-form poetry, the essence of lyric lies in its vivid representation of a voice, whether as a script for the reader or a dramatic depiction of a scene, rendering the reader a spectator. But how is this voice on the page made “real” to readers? How do early modern poems situate readers with respect to the action or moment of a lyric poem? Literary and linguistic theory interested in semiotics, phenomenology, reader response, and material culture will frame our approach to answering these questions, testing the boundaries between spoken and silently read word and song to better understand the ways lyric was and can be read and used. Focusing in equal part on the major poets (Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, Milton) and less canonical figures like Anne Locke, Richard Barnfield, and Mary Wroth, we will consider the reader’s relationship to the speaker imagined in a poem-how readers are interpolated by texts rhetorically, grammatically, and materially, as audiences and as speakers. Students will develop a working knowledge of ancient and early modern rhetoric; modern theoretical texts will include Bergson, Saussure, Jakobson, Agamben, Austin, Barthes, de Certeau, de Man, Derrida, Wright, Culler, and Johnson, among others. This course will assume familiarity with prosodic analysis.

Remixing the Canon
Why would a British-Nigerian poet rewrite Chaucer’s fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales? How might a translation of the Old English poem Beowulf speak to the Irish Troubles of the 1970s? What happens if you set Homer’s Odyssey in the postcolonial Caribbean? In this course we will study creative retellings of canonical works by contemporary anglophone poets including Patience Agbabi, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and Daljit Nagra. Our guiding concept will be the remix: “a reinterpretation or reworking, often quite radical, of an existing music recording.” Spending roughly equal time with the original works, the modern retellings, and the contemporary poets’ broader oeuvres, we will explore topics such as the durability of poetic form across time, the relation of lyric poetry to narrative and epic, the nature of literary influence and originality, and the value of aesthetic tradition generally. Supplemental readings will include selections from older and newer poetry criticism and background material on relevant cultural contexts (e.g. Black British, Northern Irish, Sikh Punjabi).

Renaissance Lyric
What are the capacities and limits of the idea of “lyric”? Of “the Renaissance”? This course will survey lyric expression and the development of major poetic forms in English from 1500 to 1640, grounding itself in attention to cultural context and formal poetic analysis. We will read sacred and profane poetry, beginning with Petrarch’s Rime Sparse (in historical and modern translations) and its central role in shaping the English Renaissance lyric. Focusing in equal part on the major poets (Wyatt, Sidney, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, Herbert) and on less canonical figures like John Skelton, Anne Locke, and Isabella Whitney, to name a few, we will examine these poems for their commentaries on love, religion, gender, and politics, putting them in conversation with literary and poetic theory from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and modern theory and criticism about the category of “the lyric.” This course will assume familiarity with prosodic analysis.

Sounds of Lyric
When we read, what do we hear and why? How can lyric poems, appealing to the ear through the eye, demand to be heard? There is no single way of encountering the sound of a text, of hearing it, of listening to it: we are conditioned by the idiosyncrasies of disposition, education, and habit which affect us from the moment we learn to read. This class will seek to explore that range of experience in the context of lyric by bringing standard literary critical approaches such as formalism, histories of reading and the book, and critical theory into contact with disciplines such as sound studies, media studies, psychoacoustics, cognitive psychology, and linguistics. For example, we will study connections between voice and literary audiation-the mind’s ear-reviewing the voice-focused critical tradition in the study of poetry and its ramifications, using cognitive and neuropsychological research to consider the wide variety of silent reading experiences of sound. Alternatively, we will track how the visual arrangement of poems prompts and reflects different experiences of mental sound-especially rhythm and silence-and turn to manuscript and print poems from the Renaissance through the present for evidence of how particular writers and readers of poetry heard form. We will also read literary and philosophical accounts of the imperceptible (to humans) musica universalis-the music of the spheres-together with poetic representations of other impossible or inaudible sounds, considering their functions as prompts to the reader’s eye, ear, and mind.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Prerequisite(s):

Sounds of Lyric: ENG 211 , ENG 212 , or ENG 213
All other topics: Two ENG courses at the 200 level or higher

Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Repeatable for Credit: May be taken up to 4 times for credit if different topics.
Notes:

Recommended: ENG 211 , ENG 212 , or ENG 213 .
Not all topics offered every year.
Review schedule of classes for availability.
Review descriptions for specific applicability to department requirements.
Beauty and the Poetic Text: This course applies toward the department’s pre-1900 requirement.
Our Emily Dickinson: This course applies toward the department’s pre-1900 requirement.
Phenomenology of Early Modern Lyric: This course applies toward the department’s pre-1700 requirement.
Renaissance Lyric: This course applies toward the department’s pre-1700 requirement.

Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).