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32356
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Lecture-Discussion
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E
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1:00PM
-2:50PM
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M
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113 English Building
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Foote, S
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- Part of Term:
- 1
- Date Range:
- 08/27/12-12/12/12
- Section Title:
- Realism & its Discontents
- Section Info:
- Topic Section E: Realism and its Discontents: 1880-1917 Literary histories generally refer to late nineteenth-century US culture as the ?age of realism? yet no term in the period was more contested than the ?real.? In the social and political arenas, mechanisms for determining who and what counted as ?the real thing? and opportunities to transform one?s social place and invent a new social identity seemed to be multiplying. Similarly, realism?s formal methods for describing the interior life of literary characters drew on emerging discourses of psychoanalysis and sociology, and thus appeared to provide an especially compelling narrative of the emergence of the subject as both separate from and yet completely formed by the social. This class will track two analytic strands that intersect with the formal and historical work of realism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One trajectory of the class will give students of American literature and culture a grounding in scholarly arguments about the role of the genre of realism in literary history. We will look at the self-conscious formation of literary realism, studying its relationship to the social field that produced it and that it in turn helped to produce. We will look at the strategies of the realists for making sense of a world whose very social multiplicity challenged any easy way to classify persons. We will also look at the tradition of literary criticism in the United States that helped to privilege realism as the generic totem of the nineteenth century, and we will look at the literary and critical texts that challenged its primacy. The second trajectory of the class contextualizes our inquiry into realism. As we look at debates over the meaning and proper expression of the real, we will also look closely at the development of the interior life of the subject as an object of special fascination for a variety of other disciplines. Through the emergence of other disciplinary discourses that also sought to make sense of the emergence of the subject in a social field, we will study the meaning of the social distinctions that helped to create the middle class readers of realism. How were they solicited by advertisements? How did they make (quite unstable) distinctions between high and low culture? How did they understand the relationship between capital and status? How were new categories of social difference narrated by the age of realism, and how did realism fail them?
- Restriction(s):
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Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.
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32358
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Lecture-Discussion
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T
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3:00PM
-5:50PM
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R
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113 English Building
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Nelson, C
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- Part of Term:
- 1
- Date Range:
- 08/27/12-12/12/12
- Section Title:
- American Poetry Since 1950
- Section Info:
- Topic Section T: American Poetry Since 1950 I often wonder whether the first or second half of the twentieth century was the most innovative in terms of poetic history. In truth over a period of a hundred years every decade saw the arrival of a series of radical aesthetic breaks with the past. In the 1950s the Beats and confessional poets together put to rest the modernist goal of impersonal detachment. At the same time, a great many poets seemed to retreat from the social and political commitments that characterized the 1930s; yet we can now recognize that they addressed the anxieties of the cold war by indirecton. Then in the 1960s the Black Arts movement intensified the issues raised by the Harlem Renaissance and open form poetry radicalized the collage techniques of the early part of the century. They took on new political inflections in the 1960s and 1970s in response to Vietnam. The last 25 years have seen a multicultural renaissance in American poetry, along with a series of challenging linguistic experiments. These are some of the innovations we will study, using Anthology of Modern American Poetry and its accompanying web site as major texts, supplemented by critical essays and photocopied poems. We will take a look at 9/11 poems at the end of the seminar. The URL for the web site (MAPS) is http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps. MAPS makes it easy to review the history of commentary on individual poems. You simply click on the poet's name and then on a poem title. The site also has extensive (and still growing) historical background on line. In the days before each seminar meeting we will all engage in an email dialogue about the poems and the criticism, raising issues to discuss in class and offering comments and challenges to one another. The syllabus for the last time I taught this seminar is on MAPS. I?ll no doubt tinker with it, but it gives you a good idea of what we'll be covering. The first writing assignment will then be a short poem analysis designed to go on line on MAPS. These analyses will be shared with all class members so that you can incorporate their suggestions before going on line. The site is approaching 3,000 hits per week, so you will have a very large audience for your analysis, which you should list on your vita as an online publication. There will also be a research paper due at the end of the class. It can focus on one poet, a group of poets, or an issue of particular interest to you. Please email me with any questions. Seminar participants will also have the opportunity to be involved in the editing of a new, expanded edition of Oxford University Press?s Anthology of Modern American Poetry?by reading and commenting on potential additions to the book.
- Restriction(s):
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Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.
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