Studies in Romantic Literature (451-0-20)

Topic

Lyric Environments

Instructors

Tristram Wolff

Meeting Info

University Hall 312: Thurs 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, 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. As time allows, we'll refer as well to work by living poets that distinctively (and sometimes self-consciously) reconfigures conventions for lyric space and scenes of address laid down in the romantic era. Teaching Method: Brief lectures, seminar discussion. All readings available on Canvas.

Class Materials (Required)

Readings:

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, Erica Hunt, Barbara Johnson, William Wimsatt, Rei Terada, Paul de Man, Virginia Jackson, M Ty.