ENGL 396

Spring 2014 All Classes

All Classes

Honors Seminar I

Credit: 3 hours.

Themes, movements, and forms in British, American, and Anglophone literature.

May be repeated. Prerequisite: A 3.33 grade-point average or consent of the English Department's Director of Undergraduate Studies. Restricted to English and Rhetoric majors.

My Favorites

My Schedule

Section Status updates every 10 minutes.

ENGL 396 class schedule data for spring 2014
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	32114	Lecture-Discussion	G	3:00PM -4:50PM	W	125 English Building	Nelson, C	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/21/14-05/07/14 Special Approval: Departmental Approval Required Section Title: Holocaust Poetry Section Info: Topic Section G: Holocaust Poetry The Holocaust is one of the most challenging and unforgettable subjects in modern poetry. The questions Holocaust poems pose?Are any human values reliable and transcendent? Are there limits to the destructive behavior a culture can adopt? How can we give witness to unspeakable acts? What does art mean in a world where we no longer know what it means to be human? Can poems triumph over absolute horror??amount more to subjects for discussion rather than questions we can answer. In a sense, Holocaust poetry begins with the anti-Semitic poetry that saturated Germany during the Nazi era. That is certainly poetry we need to study. But more properly, Holocaust poetry begins in the Nazi concentration camps and forced labor brigades as Jews and others felt the need to reach out to poetry to express what could not be expressed in any other way. Some poetry survived because it was hidden or memorized and shared by survivors. One group of poems was found in a writer?s pocket notebook after his body was exhumed from a mass grave. Some Holocaust era survivors kept writing poems for the rest of their lives. But in the 1960s and 1970s poets across the world from the next generation, including many from the United States, began to feel the need to write Holocaust poems as well. Of course they were then writing about a reality they hadn?t experienced directly, which is also our situation as readers. In some ways that changes what the poems can do. Between wartime and post-war Holocaust poems the total corpus of several thousand texts is a truly international one. In the seminar we will read key poems from a range of countries. Among the poets we will read are Lily Brett, Paul Celan, Sylvia Plath, Miklos Radnoti, Charles Reznikoff, Nelly Sachs, and Abraham Sutzkever, although we will work with English translations, we will also take advantage of any foreign language ability among the students in the seminar. Key languages are German, Hungarian, Polish, and Yiddish. We will use several paperbound collections, including Holocaust Poetry, edited by Hilda Schiff , Holocaust by Charles Reznikoff, and Blood to Remember, edited by Charles Fishman. Some of these books are available used. We will also read several essays of historical background, as well as the best literary criticism on Holocaust poetry. I do not assume that any of you are experts on the Holocaust, merely that you are interested in learning more about how poets responded it. Feel free to email me with any questions about the course: crnelson@illinois.edu