Graduage Seminar: Poetics
Spring 2012
WRIT 5500
Instructor: Amy England
Description: What is poetry? A mirror, a diagnosis, a
consolation, a beautiful escape, a call to arms, an arrow toward
utopia? What distinguishes poetry from prose? What place does it
hold in our culture, in comparison to other literary and
artistic forms? What responsibility does poetry have
toward society, history, politics, aesthetics, craft, or
inspiration? Who gets to be considered a poet and why? Who
reads poetry and why? This course is a semester long reading of
key historical texts in defining poetry. While some of the
readings are demanding, the class does not presuppose any
critical background (although any you may have is a welcome
contribution). While the course concentrates on poetry, it
necessarily involves much larger discussions about roles and
definitions of literature and art in general, and will have
something to offer practitioners of any genre.
Every week, we will be discussing at least
two readings from a given historical period or school of
criticism. Each week, students will write a one page response
paper to one or both critical readings. The final project is a
ten to fifteen page statement of your own poetics, with
reference to at least two of the readings, due in class (printed
on actual paper) on the 21st of November. The goal of the paper
is to locate your own artistic philosophy in relation to the
critical thinkers we have read. For students who would like
detailed feedback to their papers, I’ll arrange conferences
during critique week.
To pass the course: you can’t miss more than two class sessions
(including time lost to late arrivals and late enrollment), you
need to receive a passing grade on the final project and
complete at least eighty percent of the other written work, and
you need to participate in the discussion in a manner that
reflects your reading of the material. The response papers
should be a minimum of one double-spaced page, to be emailed by
noon on the day of class (please bring a copy of it with you to
class as a back-up, and to refer to during discussion). Late
responses will be accepted for half credit. It’s usually
difficult to treat the readings holistically in such a limited
format–instead, you might focus on one or two points that you
found worth developing or disagreeing with, or to use to compare
the two readings with each other. You can also give a
reading of one of the assigned poems through one of the critical
texts. If you find the readings totally opaque, try to
articulate your confusion, and include a few questions about it
that we can use to begin discussion. We will weigh the essays
more than the poems, so keep that in mind in your reading.
Required Text: The Critical Tradition, edited by David H.
Richter (should be available at the bookstore; be careful of
buying older editions, which may have different selections in
the 20th century sections)
Recommended: You might also want to pick up a copy of The
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics. The older editions are
more accessible; recent editions have more information on
contemporary theory. Good background information on poetic forms
and terms.
Week Date
Critical readings, poems
I Aug.
30 Plato; riddles and spells (handout)
II Sept.
5 Aristotle: Poetics; Horace: “The Art of
Poetry”
Poetic selections, Homer,
Catullus, Horace (handout)
(End of drop/add period Sept. 10)
III Sept. 12
Sidney: “An Apology for Poetry”; Pope: “An Essay on
Criticism”
Sidney, Shakespearean sonnet: “Let
Dainty Wits Cry on the Sisters Nine”
Wyatt, Petrarchan sonnet: “Whoso List
to Hunt”
IV Sept. 19
Shelley: “A Defense of Poetry”, Neitszche: “The Birth
of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music.” Shelley: “Ode to the
West Wind”, Yeats: “Among
School
Children”
V Sept.
25 Marx, all. Wordsworth: “The Solitary
Reaper”
VI Oct. 3
Freud, all. Coleridge:
“Christabel”
VII Oct. 10 New
Criticism: Eliot: “Tradition and the Individual Talent”;
Brooks: “Irony as a Principle of Structure”
Eliot, “The Wasteland”
VIII Oct. 17
Structuralism: Saussure, “Nature of the Linguistic
Sign”; Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics”
Stein, “Tender Buttons, Objects”
IX Oct.
24 Psychoanalytic Theory: Lacan, all;
Slavoj Žižek:“Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing.” Rosetti:
“In an Artist’s Studio”; Keats: “La Belle Dame
Sans
Merci”
X Oct.
31 Marxim: Walter Benjamin, “Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction”; Bertolt Brecht, “The Popular
and the Realistic”
Three poems by Aime Cesaire
LAST DAY TO WITHDRAW WITH A ‘W’: 10/28
XI Nov. 7
Feminist Criticism: Gilbert and Gumbar,
“Infection in the Sentence”; Dickinson and Sexton poems
included in text;
Barbara Smith: “Towards a Black
Feminist Criticism”
Gwendolyn
Brooks: “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi”
XII Nov. 14
Gender Studies, Queer Theory: Michel Foucault, from
History of Sexuality; Judith Butler: “Imitation and Gender
Subordination”
Sappho: “Poem of Jealousy” (handout)
XIII Nov. 21
Postcolonial Studies: Edward Said, from “Orientalism”; Ray
Chow: “The Interruption of Referentiality”
Rudyard Kipling: “A Song of the White Men”
FINAL PROJECTS DUE (see last page; hard copy to me in class,
copies emailed to other students); sign up for voluntary
conferences
Nov.
28: THANKSGIVING
XIV Dec. 2-6 CRITIQUE
WEEK, optional conferences
XV Dec. 12 Barthes:
“The Death of the Author”; Foucault: “What is an Author?”
Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”; Eric Elshtain: “The Dublin
of
Doctor
Moreau,” http://www.beardofbees.com/elshtain.html
FINAL PROJECT
The final project is a ten to fifteen page essay in which you
position your own theory of poetics and/or your work among the
readings we have covered.
1.) You need to refer closely to at least two of the readings
from the Richter book. This means using extensive and
contextually accurate quotes and references from those essays,
and building your essay in relation to those references. You can
of course use more than two of the readings, or bring other
critics or poets in as well. If a reading from the last two
classes looks like it would help your paper, you might want to
read ahead. And of course you do not have to like or agree with
any source you use.
2.) You need to use MLA or Chicago Manuel of Style methods for
citing sources.
3.) To a much greater extent than for the response papers, your
arguments should be detailed, cohesive, and well-thought out,
and your writing needs to be proofread for spelling and grammar.
Consider this as a manuscript that you might submit to a journal
for publication. In fact several students have published these
projects, so there are practical reasons for this level of care.
5.) The writing style does not need to be particularly formal or
to depend on jargon–clarity and readability are preferable, at
least to me, to some of the extremes of opacity we have
encountered in the readings.
6.) If the paper does not meet these criteria, I reserve the
right to require a rewrite for a passing grade.
Anyone who wants a response to the paper should schedule a
meeting during crit week, and I’ll go over it with you in
detail. If you want help working on the paper, I’ll be glad to
meet with you for that as well, provided I have enough notice to
arrange the meeting.
For final project: a list of possible questions to consider:
How do you define poetry? What is its purpose? How do you locate
yourself as a writer along all the axes of race, class, gender,
culture, position in history? How does this limit or
enable what you write? What poets would you claim as
ancestors for your poetics? What direction would you like to see
poetry going toward? Are there moral limitations to what you can
write in a poem? How much does the author’s intention count
toward the poem’s meaning? How much does its reception in
history count? What is the relationship between the poet and the
audience? Between the poem and the audience? Between the poet
and the distribution of texts? Where in these relationships does
meaning occur? Should poems be beautiful? What makes them
beautiful? What constitutes a bad poem? What questions does your
poetics refuse to address?
© 2014 Amy England,
rights reserved