Studies in Romantic Literature (451-0-20)
Topic
Lyric Environments
Instructors
Tristram Nash Wolff
Meeting Info
University Hall 418: Mon 2:00PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
This course serves as an introduction to the "greater romantic lyric," as well as an abbreviated survey of lyric theory. While tracking the sequence and dialogue of a handful of key critical paradigms from the last half century (and more), we will investigate how lyric poetry situates its reader in a universe of discourse through rhetorical address, affective cues, and social disposition. The "environments" in question do connote familiar romantic scholarship on "nature poetry," and the relations of language to nature; but we'll be thinking about "nature" here bearing in mind that for the romantics and their newer interlocutors, natural "environments" implicate social space and psychic geographies as well. Relevant critical work will be drawn from romantic studies, phenomenology, critical race theory, feminist standpoint theory, affect studies, critical geography, and linguistic anthropology. Alongside the romantics, we'll read a handful of works by living poets that distinctively (and sometimes self-consciously) reconfigure conventions for lyric space and scenes of address laid down in the romantic era. Teaching Method: Brief lectures, seminar discussion.
Class Materials (Required)
Poetry includes readings by Wheatley, Coleridge, Robinson, Wordsworth, Clare, Smith, Barbauld, Keats, Hemans, Shelley, Yearsley. Theory and criticism includes readings by G. W. F. Hegel, J. S. Mill, Frantz Fanon, Roman Jakobson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Williams, V. N. Voloshinov, Denise Riley, Lauren Berlant, Stanley Cavell, Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, Donna Haraway, Erving Goffman, Judith Butler, Sara Ahmed, Doreen Massey, Bakary Diaby, Susan Stewart, Nate Mackey, Camille Dungy, Geoffrey Hartman, Barbara Johnson, William Wimsatt, Rei Terada, Paul de Man, Virginia Jackson, M Ty.
Required Texts (please note, this list is tentative for now):
Tommy Pico, Nature Poem (Tin House 2017; ISBN 1941040632)
Maureen McLane, Mz N: the serial: A Poem-in-Episodes (FSG 2016; ISBN 0374537054)
Erica Hunt, Veronica: A Suite in X Parts (selva oscura 2019; ISBN 0990945332)
Daniel Borzutzky, The Performance of Becoming Human (Brooklyn Arts 2016; ISBN 0990945332)