• Love and Loath in Contemporary American Poetry/3 credits/Dr. Raphael Schulte

This seminar course will focus on American poetry written since 1950, a time of burgeoning variety and experiments, but also a reversion to formalism. We will examine a number of poems that involve feelings of love and loath: poems that are about interpersonal relationships; while at the same time we will address topics related to social, political, institutional, and gender issues revealed or concealed in these poems. I would like this class to be eye-opening by its seemingly contradictory juxtaposition of love and loath—especially as the poetic expressions of repudiation and spurn are often under-discussed—when, in fact, these two counterpointing emotions co-exist or reverberate within a single text. We will primarily focus on poems by four well-known poets: Sylvia Plath, James Wright, Bob Dylan, and Mark Doty. But we will also have interludes in which we will look at an array of texts by contemporary poets, including Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorine Niedecker, Robert Hass, Donald Hall, Jane Kenyon, John Cage, Jorie Graham, Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Rafael Campo, and others. As always, I welcome your input in our choice of poets and texts.

You may be responsible for three in-class presentations, depending on the size of the class. In one of the presentations, you will lead the discussion of a particular aspect of the poem(s) being assigned; in the second, you will briefly summarize and critique a recent critical writing about the poems under discussion; in the third, you will apply a critical methodology of your choice to some aspect(s) of the poems we will read. You may be expected to write regular response journals. You will have the choice of writing two papers (the first due during midterm week; the second due at the end of the semester) or one long paper due at the end of the semester. You will also be expected to fully engage in class discussions. Your final grade for the semester will be based on the assigned writings, presentations, participation in class discussion, and attendance.

Our texts are (1) Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath ; (2) Above the River: The Complete Poems by James Wright ; (3) Bob Dylan's lyrics at <http://www.bobdylan.com>; (4) Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems by Mark Doty; (5) additional online materials and handouts.

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• Cather and Faulkner/3 credits/Dr. Joseph Murphy

This course introduces two major American modernists who rose to prominence in the 1920s and 30s: Willa Cather and William Faulkner. Although they both achieved literary recognition—Cather winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1923, Faulkner eventually receiving the Nobel Prize in 1950—they stood apart from the disillusionment of the Lost Generation (Hemingway, Fitzgerald) and political turmoil of the Depression era (Steinbeck, Dos Passos). They faced the cataclysmic changes of modernity through the filters of American regional geography and history, reaching back to the nineteenth century and earlier: Cather in, among other places, the American West and Southwest, and Faulkner in the rural Mississippi county he called Yoknapatawpha.

Despite this strain of conservatism, Cather and Faulkner both wrote complex and experimental novels, and their styles define two extremes of modernist form. Cather's "unfurnished" style is deceptively simple, as clear and open as the prairies and deserts she describes. Faulkner, by contrast, often wore his complexity on the surface in unwieldy sentences and fragmented narratives as murky as the humid savannahs and river bottoms of his settings. In their larger projects, however, Cather and Faulkner have much in common. Both bring the modernist exploration of consciousness (in the tradition of Henry James and James Joyce) into contact with the demands and possibilities of peculiar American landscapes, historical legacies, and racial/ethnic identities; and both, through a complex web of stories and voices, create powerful characters of profound sensibility.

Readings will include Cather's My Antonia (1918), The Professor's House (1925), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927); and Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Light in August (1932). Requirements include class discussion, a PowerPoint presentation, a short paper, and a longer paper.

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• 19th-20th Century American and British Satire/3 credits/Fr. Daniel Bauer

This course will begin with a brief focus on famous scenes of satire from predecessors of our 19th-20th century writers simply to acquaint students with the history of modern satire. The first two weeks of the course will thus find us reading a sampling (compiled in a folder-handout) of a few pages of the work of Laurence Sterne (Tristram Shandy), Henry Fielding (Joseph Andrews). With that fleeting introduction to a few of satire’s techniques, we will then dig in and focus on a number of writers famous for satire in the 19th and 20th centuries. Among the writers we will read will be Charles Dickens (a brief sampling of Bleak House), Herman Melville (Bartleby, the Scrivener), Mark Twain (The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court), and George Orwell (Animal Farm and 1984, and Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse – five) ). A personal note: I would like to do some research this summer on Evelyn Waugh, a major 20th century English satirist, but until I made some advances there, I cannot yet say which of his texts we will read. At this time I am projecting at least one Waugh novel. Students should be prepared to write four journals of 4 pages each and a final 15 – 20 paper. The reading plan thus includes a brief scan of models of satire previous to the 19th century, followed by the two short stories by Melville and Twain, a sampling from Bleak House, and approximately 6 novels.

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• Revolutionary Poetics: The Beats and Beyond/3 credits/Dr. Kurt Cline

With the advent of WWII, many of the Modernist groups came to a standstill, their movements dispersed by the impingement of new cultural, political and spiritual imperatives. It was up to a new generation of American writers to re-instill a fresh voice and new perspective. The first full-blown post-modern group to emerge after WWII was The Beats. The works of these poets and novelists affected not only the style and structure of poetry and experimental fiction, but also the nature by which their new works could be received and interpreted, as they seemed to demand direct political, cultural, spiritual, and aesthetic actions by the readers themselves. The Beats rejection of American Academic poetries, its emphasis on orality and the principles of spontaneous, free-floating composition learned from the Jazz and Blues musicians, as well as its engagement with human liberation strategies (women’s lib, the battle for African-American voting rights, the anti-war movement) combined with a deep seeking of spiritual truths as revealed by Buddhist Meditation, Zen, and esoteric forms of spirituality taken from both east and west. All of these factors, taken together, presented a challenge often conceived as dangerous to the All-American status quo, both socially and aesthetically.

Luckily, the Beats were not alone in their Quixotic quest. Other groups of that time, working in other parts of the country, including the Black Mountain Writers and New York School poets. albeit in their own distinctive ways, also engaged themselves in the revolutionary spirit of the times, as did many other individual writers whose works defy easy characterization into "schools" or "movements.". We will make a study of such groups and individuals to see in what ways they re-envisioned the Beat aesthetic, and reshaped the radical postures of the Beats in a manner altogether less-dualistic (less "us vs. them," "hip vs. square"), while still maintaining the Beats spiritual and moral integrity as well as the freshness of their poetic conceptions.

This course will focus first and foremost on the Beats, examining their (decidedly diverse) oeuvre in relationship to the Black Mountain and New York School writers. We will also examine works by Ted Joans, Stephen Jonas, Kenneth Rexroth, Theodore Roethke, and Anne Lauterbach—all poets who do not clearly answer to any particular school's style or body of aesthetic concerns, or who perhaps combine such concerns together in unlikely ways, In our own time the legitimate heirs of the Beats might well be considered the Language Oriented Writing movement, which looked back for guidance to the avant-garde Modernists and Post-Modernist experimental writers but were faced with still more complex aesthetic, political and spiritual challenges. Our final stop along the way will be to examine these highly experimental language oriented writers (often called the "language poets"). Through this course of study we will be in a good position to make am informed determination of what long-lasting effect the Beats have had on literature and culture. It should be a fun and intellectually stimulating to discover in what ways the Beats are the ancestors (or not) of the most interesting writers and thinkers of the post-modern age.

Course will be conducted in a seminar style: grading will be based on student participation in discussions, the giving of an oral presentation, the keeping of an informal journal, and the preparation two writing assignments.

TEXT

Course hand-out including selected works by Bob Kaufman, Jack Kerouac, Diane Di Prima, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, Anne Waldman, Diane Wakoski, John Weiners, Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Ted Joans, Stephen Jonas, Kenneth Rexroth, Theodore Roethke, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Anne Lauterbach, Leslie Scalapino, Lyn Hejinian, Bernadette Mayer and Nathaniel Mackey.

GRADING

25% Class Participation and Journals
25% Midterm Paper
25% Oral Presentations
25% Final Paper

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