A New Poetry Course with Professors Chang & Hsy

On the eve of the first day of National Poetry Month, the English Department announces a dynamic new course on poetry. This course is ideal for students curious about the relationship between literary analysis and composition practices, and it can be taken to fulfill a requirement for Creative Writing majors (see below):

The ABC’s of Poetry: How Poetry Matters

Fall 2015, T/Th 11:10am-12:35pm

Prof. Jennifer Chang and Prof. Jonathan Hsy

Clockwise from top left: Dickinson, Chaucer, & Agbabi.

How do poems make meaning? In this course, we will approach poetry as a creative practice and a provocative tool for thought, tracing a history of the symbiotic exchange between form and content from the Middle Ages to the 21st century. In asking how poetry matters, we will study poems as not only rhetorical structures and prosodic occasions, but also material objects and encounters.  Poets make poems out of language, among other things, that generates new ways of thinking about the world and new habits of mind. This class is team-taught by a poet (Prof. Chang) and literature scholar (Prof. Hsy), and the class aims to rethink the distinction between literary interpretation and creative composition.

Our class will focus on six poets: Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Wyatt, Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, Anne Carson, and Patience Agbabi. As we read selected poems by these authors, we aim to understand how form and content interact and where theory and practice meet in collaboration and, sometimes, in conflict. This course will give students exposure to poetic forms (lyric, sonnet, ballad, free verse), and it will consider how the physical presentation of any poem shapes its meaning (manuscript, fascicle, printed text, textile, YouTube video, collage, etc). Assignments may include translation assignments, analytical essays, and creative adaptations.

*This course may be substituted for one of the ENGL 3210 (Techniques) requirements toward the Creative Writing major.  

Read More

Graduate Seminar: Crip/Queer Theory with Professor Mitchell

Professor Mitchell Reading
Jacques Ranciere's Mute Speech

Fall 2015 Graduate Seminar: Crip/Queer Theory

Crip/Queer Theory charts out key intersections between Disability, Queer, and Critical Race Studies.  Our goal will be to mine the spaces between historically pathologized sexuality, ability, and racialized statuses. In particular we will focus on questions of "agential materialism" where one cannot only find experiences of oppression, but also alternative ethical maps for living.  How are contemporary theorists beginning to conceive of bodies beyond the limits of social constructivism's passive, culturally inscribed surfaces?  What can the artful navigation of inhospitable social terrains tell us about what crip/queer and racialized lives might offer as viable counter-cultural options outside of homogenizing norms?  Key works covered may include:  Alison Kafer's Feminist Queer Crip, Tobin Siebers's Disability Aesthetics, Asma Abbas's Liberalism and Human Suffering, Alexander G. Weheliye's Habeas Viscus, Elizabeth Grosz's The Nick of Time, Jacques Ranciere's Mute Speech, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder's The Biopolitics of Disability, Jose Munoz's Cruising Utopia, Jack Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure, and Robert McRuer & Anna Mollow's Sex and Disability.

Thursdays 6:10-8 PM CRN 66741; ENGL 6520.10 Ethnicity and Identity; 3 CR; Rome 771; 8/31/15-12/09-15; Professor Mitchell.

Read More

American Poetry to WWI with Professor McAleavey

A course to consider for Fall 2015!

Walt Whitman
(Library of Congress)

ENGLISH 3620.10   FALL 2015                  American Poetry to WW I

TR 4:45-6:00                        CRN: TBA                  Room: TBA

David McAleavey     Rome 655      202-994-6515           Office Hours: TBA

This course satisfies the CCAS Oral Communication G-PAC requirement.

(Syllabus still subject to change.)

General Description:

This is the first half of a broad survey of American poetry from its beginnings to the present. In 3620, we will read from the 17^th century up into the very early 20^th century. (In 3621, offered in Spring 2016, we will continue forward chronologically, ending with vital living poets.) The two most important poets we’ll be examining in 3620 are Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, both of whom did crucial work from mid-century through the Civil War and in the decades after. However, we will start with earlier poets whose work has continuing artistic appeal and historical relevance, Anne Bradstreet (17^thcentury) and Phillis Wheatley (18^th century) among them. From the earlier part of the 19^th-century, we will consider William Cullen Bryant, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and John Greenleaf Whittier; later poets we will read include Emma Lazarus, E. A. Robinson, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar.

Requirements:

Because this course is designed to address the CCAS oral communication requirement, students will be expected to deliver multiple brief informative presentations about specific poems throughout the semester. These presentations will be graded in terms of their effectiveness. There will be a midterm and a final (formats to be determined), as well as a documented persuasive paper (8-10 pp., prior to Thanksgiving).

Read More