Spring 2027
Spring 2027
350:531 - Medieval Poetry and Poetics
Course No: 350:531
Index #:
Distribution Requirement: A1, B
Mondays - 10:20 AM
MU 207
Medieval Poetry and Poetics
Stacy Klein
“Poetry is the devil’s wine.” (St. Augustine, Confessions, 397-398 AD)
This course takes the genre of poetry and the topic of poetics and poetic theory as a point of entry for exploring some of the central texts, contexts, and theoretical concerns of medieval literary studies. Our goals are threefold: 1) to introduce students to the rich and diverse array of poetry and poetic forms produced and/or circulating in England from approximately 680-1500 AD; 2) to read widely in poetic theory, both medieval and modern, so as to enlarge our understanding of poetic production, reception, and interpretation; and 3) to explore the resurgence of interest in form, aesthetics, and poetry within literary studies, as well as the implications of this resurgence for medieval literary studies.
Primary readings for the course will encompass a broad range of medieval poems and poetic forms, among them the earliest poetry recorded in the English language (i.e., Caedmon’s Hymn, The Dream of the Rood and Cynewulf’s verse hagiography), anonymous Old English elegies, dream visions, and heroic verse (e.g., Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf), Ælfric’s alliterative prose saints’ lives, early post-Conquest verse, learned scholastic poetry and verse romance of the twelfth through fifteenth centuries, and some of the more well-known later medieval poets such as Dante and the Pearl-poet. We will conclude with works by Chaucer, the “father of English poetry,” and his numerous fifteenth-century imitators (e.g., the Scots makar, Robert Henryson). We will devote some attention to poetry and material culture (e.g., poetry as manuscript marginalia, inscriptional poetry on objects such as jewelry, weapons, stone crosses or monuments), and to the relations between premodern “aesthetics” and culture. Other topics for consideration include: poetry and devotional practice, oral-formulaic composition, poetry-asprayer, the politics of poetic style, vernacular verse, and the relations between poetic form and the premodern “self.”
This course requires no previous background in medieval literature and will provide a solid foundation for students who may be asked to teach medieval texts at some point in their careers. Most of our texts will be available in Modern English translation. However, some course time
will be reserved for introducing students to (or increasing students’ facility with) Old and Middle English.
Requirements: two short papers (8-10 pp. each) or one longer paper (20 pp.), attendance, participation, and brief class presentations.
350:588 - C21 African American Poetry
Course No: 350:588
Index #:
Distribution Requirement: A5, C, D
Mondays - 2:00 PM
MU 207
C21 African American Poetry
Evie Shockley
The first quarter of the 21st century is officially behind us, and from this vantage point we should be able to take stock of what this (admittedly arbitrary) period has meant for African American poetry. In so doing, we will learn a good deal about American poetry across the board, as well as about life in these United(-ish) States, in this no longer new century. African American poetry has exploded in significance over the past 25 years, within literary and popular culture, in ways that are reminiscent of the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement while being quite different from both. In this course, we will read individual poetry collections from this period, working towards a sense of how (very) contemporary Black poets in the US have navigated questions of influence and legacy, history and futurity, identity and collectivity, politics and form. We will read with the recognition that poets are producing theory and critique in their work, and will engage theoretical and critical scholarship that attends significantly to poetry. While we will be immersed in 21st century work, we will also think—through the collections’ paratexts, the contents of poetry anthologies, and the concerns of poetry criticism—about how poets and scholars in this period are retrospectively shaping the way we understand the whole three-hundred-year tradition of African American poetry. What subjects have preoccupied 21st-century African American poets? What do the forms and conventions of this genre, in particular, afford them? What role have Black poetry collectives played in this period? How do genders, sexualities, regions, ethnicities, languages, class identifications, religious backgrounds, and so forth inflect Black subjectivities and materialize in the poetry? What are the primary affects of the work these poets create? We will follow the poets to wherever their work may take us.
Poetry collections under consideration include: Travesty Generator, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram; The Tradition, Jericho Brown; Brutal Imagination, Cornelius Eady; A Swarm of Bees in High Court, Tonya Foster; Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, Ross Gay; M Archive, Alexis Pauline Gumbs; Lighthead, Terrance Hayes; The Age of Phillis, Honorée Fannone Jeffers; Buck Studies, Douglas Kearney; The Natural Order of Things, Donika Kelly; Voyage of the Sable Venus, Robin Coste Lewis; In the Language of My Captor, Shane McCrae; Sleeping With the Dictionary, Harryette Mullen; Citizen, Claudia Rankine; Bluff, Danez Smith; Native Guard, Natasha Trethewey; Or, On Being the Other Woman, Simone White. Critics we may read: Terrance Hayes, Erica Hunt, Meta DuEwa Jones, Bettina Judd, Douglas Kearney, Michael Leong, Sequoia Maner, Dawn Lundy Martin, Harryette Mullen, Kevin Quashie, Anthony Reed, Ryan Sharp, Laura Vrana.
Evaluation: regular attendance; one in-class presentation; two review essays (4-5 pp.); and a culminating conference-paper length essay (8-9 pp.).
350:633 - Readings in Romanticism
Course No: 350:633
Index #:
Distribution Requirement: A3, A4
Tuesdays - 10:20 AM
MU 207
Readings in Romanticism
Colin Jager
Romanticism is often associated with topics like individualism, solitude, and subjectivity; might it also be a social theory as well? This course will feature some of the major canonical texts of the Romantic period: Burke’s Reflections, Blake’s Europe and America, Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Austen’s Mansfield Park, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, and Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. These ambitious texts strive to comprehend an era understood by all concerned to be one of unprecedented social, economic, and political change. On alternate weeks, we will read some classic works of mid-century social theory: James’s Black Jacobins, Koselleck’s Futures Past, Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, and Fromm’s Escape from Freedom. Though these works generally proceed without direct reference to Romanticism, they too try to map an era of social and political upheaval at the level of the individual. Because the course connects “Romanticism” to a set of transhistorical and transcultural questions, it will be relevant for students regardless of their prior experience with the period or its literature. No familiarity with Romanticism is assumed; rather, the course aims to demonstrate that careful, thoughtful immersion in a handful of major literary and theoretical texts will cast a mutually-illuminating light upon that thing we call “modernity.”
Requirements: several short response papers; class presentation based on a short annotated bibliography; 15-minute conference paper presented on the final day of class; final paper (25 pages).
350:650 - Henry James
Course No: 350:650
Index #:
Distribution Requirement: A4, A5, D
Tuesdays - 2:00 PM
MU 207
Henry James
David Kurnick
Central to the work of critics studying the theory of the novel, psychoanalysis, ethics, aesthetics, consciousness, and literary form, James’s work has also been convincingly claimed by several sectors of the discipline, including American studies, Victorian studies, modernist studies, and queer studies. But he has never been definitively owned by any of these fields. This situation makes him a particularly fruitful author for thinking through the strengths and limitations of the current division of intellectual labor structuring literary study. And as one of the most sophisticated theorists of novelistic form—and of the ethical and intellectual obligations of criticism—James also gives us an opportunity to revisit debates over forms of reading (close, distant, surface, machine-, critical, suspicious, reparative …) and to test these approaches against a stable but stunningly complex literary object. The course will take up the theory of the novel, sexuality and gender, the politics of culture, ethics and aesthetics, consciousness, literary method, and the issue of national tradition for a writer who seems to evade that category even as it forms one of his principal themes.
The course includes the option of two short papers (10 pp each) or one long research paper. Students will also present on theoretical/critical material.
James texts (This list is subject to minor revision):
“Daisy Miller”
“The Art of Fiction”
“The Aspern Papers”
“In the Cage”
Washington Square
The Portrait of a Lady
What Maisie Knew
The Ambassadors
The Wings of the Dove
The Golden Bowl
Secondary readings may include work by Leo Bersani, Stephen Best, Wayne Booth, Pierre Bourdieu, Sharon Cameron, Stanley Cavell, Dorrit Cohn, Fredric Jameson, Myra Jehlen, Julia Jarcho, Mark McGurl, Andrew Miller, Franco Moretti, Toni Morrison, Sianne Ngai, Kevin Ohi, Richard Poirier, Kent Puckett, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Kaja Silverman, The Stanford Literary Lab, Ian Watt.
350:595 - Caribbean Aesthetics
Course No: 350:595
Index #:
Distribution Requirement: A5, C
Wednesdays - 2:00 PM
MU 207
Caribbean Aesthetics
Carter Mathes
“The land participates in the transformation of the tongue.”
Guyanese writer, Fred D’Aguiar’s point speaks to the multidimensionality of Caribbean history, socio-political life, artistic expression, and the aquatic-terrestrial-littoral-archipelagic contours of this region. In this seminar, we will explore and critically engage with the aesthetic worlds of the Caribbean as they are manifested through vernacular performance, the literary/sonic/visual imagination, and ecological thought. Considering the distinctive geographic, linguistic, historical, and political dimensions of the region, we will explore various national and cultural contexts within the archipelago as we analyze the entanglements of identity (in terms of gender, sexuality, class, nation, and race) and narrative form that shape Caribbean literary practices.
While this course offers an intensive survey of aesthetic innovation primarily within and in 20th and early 21st century Caribbean literature, we will spend significant time considering what Pablo Gomez refers to as the “cacophonous early modern Caribbean” as a space of artistic entanglement between Africa, Europe, the early hemispheric Americas, and the Caribbean. We’ll consider the ways in which the European gaze and philosophical ideas fueled extractive and expansionist political and economic agendas in the Caribbean, and how these perspectives and agendas were confronted with indigenous and emerging Black Atlantic aesthetic forms and epistemologies.
Our readings of creative and critical work will help us think carefully about questions such as, how do practices of aesthetic innovation enhance Caribbean writers’ explorations of their political, social, and cultural realities, and how might they complement and exceed more empirically grounded forms of knowledge? How have the environmental and ecological (terrestrial and aquatic) specificities of the Caribbean generated forms of knowledge and subjectivity that expand horizons for artistic creation? How do ideas of Caribbean history, identity (and is this a monolithic concept), and futurity become framed within narrative forms, and how central are practices of innovation to these narrative projects?
Our critical readings will familiarize students with debates over creolization, nationalism, post-nationalism, diaspora, and Pan-Africanism within Caribbean literature. We will also examine relationships between modernist (Surrealism will be a significant point of inquiry) and postmodern Caribbean literature, between literary and musical aesthetics, and across fictional and poetic representations of Caribbean identities. Students will gain a critical overview of major themes and theoretical positions in Caribbean literature and will closely examine the aesthetic thought (and practices) of several prominent Caribbean writers.
Primary texts may include (very preliminarily and tentatively): The Hills of Hebron (Sylvia Wynter), The Kingdom of this World (Alejo Carpentier), Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (Aimé Césaire), In the Castle of My Skin (George Lamming), The Bridge of Beyond (Simone Schwarz-Bart), Zong! (M. NourbeSe Philip), Abeng (Michelle Cliff), The Dragon Can’t Dance (Earl Lovelace); Grenada Notebook (Nancy Morejon), A Brief History of Seven Killings (Marlon James), Tentacle (Rita Indiana).
Critical writings may include work from: Édouard Glissant, C.L.R. James, Mayra Santos-Febres, Gordon Rohlehr, Belinda Edmondson, Shalini Puri, Faith Smith, Anthony Bogues, Pablo Gómez, Simon Gikandi, Wilson Harris, Kaima Glover, Antonio Benitez Rojo, J. Michael Dash, Kamau Brathwaite, Elizabeth DeLoughery, Nick Nesbitt.
Requirements: 2 short papers, annotated bibliography, in class presentation