01 MW5 CAC 12193 MCGILL AB-2200
Since its importation into England in the mid-16th century, the sonnet has become the preeminent poetic genre for exploring the conjunction of love and power. In this class, we will study the history of the sonnet and bring our growing understanding of this compact poetic form to bear on a number of large questions in poetic theory.
Our sustained study of the sonnet will give us a testing ground for a number of theories about the nature of lyric poetry: do short poems invariably project or ratify the existence of a speaking subject? Must lyric poetry be understood as fundamentally asocial in nature, or to have social and political significance only insofar as it sets itself in opposition to cultural norms? Is the sonnet a form or a genre? Is there such a thing as “lyric time”? And if so, how might we think about the play of meditative arrest and narrative exposition across a sequence of sonnets?
We will spend significant time with the early sonnet sequences of Sir Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare, then will trace the many uses to which sonnets were put by major poets such as John Donne, John Milton, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Meredith, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Countee Cullen, Robert Frost, John Berryman, Robert Hayden, Robert Lowell, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, James Merrill, Tony Harrison, and Harryette Mullen.
We’ll read these sonnets in the context of theories about lyric poetry including those of J.S. Mill, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, M.H. Abrams, Jonathan Culler, Helen Vendler, Sharon Cameron, Barbara Johnson, Virginia Jackson, Yopie Prins, Christopher Nealon, and Craig Dworkin. We’ll explore the long history of feminist appropriations of the form; the importance of poetic competition to the sonnet, and the importance of the sonnet to the imagination of literary tradition. We will study sub-genres of the sonnet, such as elegiac and portrait sonnets, and experimental uses of the form by poets, visual artists, and musicians.
Students will complete three brief critical and/ or creative exercises, write an in-class mid-term, and a 7-10-page final paper.
This will be a tech-free classroom. Readings will be available in books and in a course reader I will provide for the class. Most sessions will involve some kind of in-class writing. The final paper will be outlined and the first draft will be composed in class.