Index # TBD
Distribution Requirement: A4, D, B
Time: Tuesday - 12:10 p.m.
Location: MU 207
Poetry and Media
How would our histories of Anglo-American poetry change if we considered the rise of print and other media as formative events in the history of poetry? What would happen if we took the media for the circulation of poetry as seriously as we do questions of form and genre? And how does taking seriously poetry’s engagement with media change how we think about media history? This course will approach these questions through a series of case studies in which we will consider a poet’s works and poetics in dialogue with shifts in media history.
Given my own areas of specialization, our case studies will mostly be drawn from US literary history and from the long nineteenth-century, but students will be encouraged to use our common theoretical readings to develop a final essay on a topic from any time period, so long as it speaks to both the history of poetry and the history of media.
We will divide the semester into four units, taking up clusters of poets under the following headings (likely case studies indicated in parentheses): (1) handwriting and print (Sir Philip Sidney, Anne Bradstreet, George Moses Horton, Emily Dickinson); (2) poetry and print formats (Jonathan Swift, Lydia Sigourney, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman); (3) poetry and oral performance (Edward Taylor, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Langston Hughes); (4) poetry and technological mediation (microscopes, panoramas and photographs, disembodied radio voices, digital poetics).
Students will write two short responses to weekly seminar readings and draft an article-length essay based on a proposal circulated to the class ahead of time. I hope to arrange visits to area libraries to view and handle some of the manuscript and print sources we will study as digital facsimiles.