Autumn 2014 Courses
Comparative Literature
19th Century French Poetry in Translation (CMLT 36012)
A study of modern French lyric poetry at the graduate level: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Apollinaire. Texts will be read in English with reference to the French originals. Close reading, references to poetry in English, and focus on problems in translation. Students with French should read the poems I the original. Class discussion to be conducted in English; critical essays to be written in English.
Instructor: Rosanna Warren. Day and Time: Wednesday, 1:30 to 4:20 PM
English
Introduction to Poetry (ENGL 10400)
This course involves intensive readings in both contemporary and traditional poetry. Early on, the course emphasizes various aspects of poetic craft and technique, setting, and terminology, as well as provides extensive experience in verbal analysis. Later, emphasis is on contextual issues: referentially, philosophical and ideological assumptions, as well as historical considerations.
Instructor: Lisa Ruddick. Days and Time: Tuesday and Thursday, 10:30 to 11:50 AM
English Renaissance Lit & the Poetics of Place (ENGL 20134)
This course explores major lyric poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by focusing on their treatments of diverse places and locales, including city, court, and country (the traditional topographical and ideological divisions of English society), homes, churches, colleges, prisons, and imaginary and fantastical landscapes. Poets might include Wyatt, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Herrick, Lovelace, Milton, Marvell, Philips, and Cowley. Genres might include sonnet, epithalamion, satire, pastoral, georgic, epistle, epigram, country-house poem, and ode.
Instructor: Joshua Scodel. Day and Time: by arrangement with the instructor.
Thomas Hardy: The Novels and Poetry (ENGL 21922)
This course will provide students with in depth knowledge of the life and work of Thomas Hardy, from the early fiction of the 1870s to the experimental poetry of the late 1920s. In addition to reading extensively in Hardy’s oeuvre, we will also consider the ways in which his often iconoclastic work absorbed and responded to various currents in philosophical, sociopolitical and literary discourse over the half-century during which he was active. These will include Schopenhaurian pessimism, Nietzschean nihilism, and Freudian psychoanalysis; British Imperialism (esp. the Boer War), fin-de-siècle feminism, Victorian censorship, and the continued transition from an agricultural to an urban industrial economy; the social and literary ramifications of Darwinian theory; and the relation of Hardy’s late work to innovations in modernist poetics.
Instructor: Zachary Samalin. Days and Time: Tuesday and Thursday, 12:00 to 1:20 PM
MAPH
Poetics (MAPH 34800)
This intensive seminar focuses on recurrent tensions in poetics: for instance, voice and text, object and event, semantics and prosody, invention and representation. The historical span will reach from Plato to Prynne, and discussion will advance between constellations of poems and theoretical texts.
Instructor: John Wilkinson. Days and Time: Tuesday and Thursday, 10:30 to 11:50 AM
Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
Arabic Sufi Poetry (ARAB 40300)
The course will focus on the love poetry of three 7th/13th century Sufi poets: Ibn al-'Arabi, Ibn al-Farid, and Abulhasan al-Shushtari.
Instructor: Michael Sells. Day and Time: Tuesday, 1:30 to 4:20 PM
Persian Poetry: Shahnameh of Ferdowsi (20320)
Abu al-Qâsem Ferdowsi of Tus (940 – 1019?) completed his verse rendition of the tragic history of the Iranian nation just over a millennium ago, in early March of 1010.
Conventionally classed as an “epic,” the Shahnameh’s various episodes include a variety of disparate genres and themes: creation narrative, mythology, heroic saga, folk tale, romance, royal chronicle. Through a close reading in Persian of several prominent episodes, and discussion this course aims to create a deep understanding of the language, the characters and the themes of the Shahnameh, analyzing the poem as an example of both national epic and world literature, reading with an eye toward literary structure; genre; Indo-Iranian mythology; political theory; ideals of masculinity, femininity and heroism; the interaction of text, oral tradition, illustration, scholarship, and translation in the shaping and transmission of the literary tradition; and, of course, the meaning(s) of the work. The aims of this course will be to gain familiarity with the style and language of Ferdowsi, to understand his rhetoric and esthetics, to understand the martial values animating the culture of the military and the zur-xâne, and to understand how individual episodes contribute to the broader overall meaning of the text. Alongside the selected episodes in Persian, we will read the entire Shahnameh in English translation and discuss some of the wider scholarly issues surrounding Ferdowsi’s text and the Shahnameh sources, transmission, illustration, and popular and scholarly reception. Class discussions will be in English
Instructor: Franklin Lewis. Days and Times: Monday, 3:00 to 5:50 PM
Romance Languages and Literatures
Poesia Novohispana con practica ecdotica (SPAN 22314)
The study of poetry written in New Spain, working with manuscripts as well as with "editiones principes."
Instructor: Martha Tenorio. Days and Time: Tuesday and Thursday, 3:00 to 5:50 PM
Creative Writing
Intermediate Poetry Workshop : Poetry's Pathways(CRWR 13000/33000)
One way to think of a poem is as a series of linguistic routes, or pathways, from sound to sound, word to word, line to line, image to image. Of course, these routes don’t always move in a linear fashion: they often loop, overlap, interweave, crisscross, and create enchanting entanglements. Many disciplines, such as neuroscience and geography, practice “hodology,” or the study of pathways, to assess and understand similarly interconnected pathways. In comparative fashion, this poetry workshop will borrow hodological approaches to develop the practice of poetry writing. We focus on poems’ potential pathways in an effort to expand formal, thematic, and craft choices. While this class will emphasize workshop discussions of your poems and your experiments with craft, we’ll read widely, including work by Frank O’Hara, A. R. Ammons, T. S. Eliot, Alice Notley, Emily Dickinson, James Wright, Charles Baudelaire, Gilles Deleuze, and Harryette Mullen. Students will be expected to submit poems weekly and to write two short essays on craft.
Instructor: Nate Hoks. Day and Time: Thursday, 10:30 to 1:20 PM