Current Course Offerings

Spring 2023

AAS 205: Introduction to Choreopoem

Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:00-12:20

Chesney D. Snow

A creative performance lab that engages spoken word, storytelling, devised theatre, and physical movement to explore domestic and international structures of liberation, expression, oppression, social movements, and political power. Research assignments, as well as observations and analysis of masterworks, including Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Ntozke Shange’s For Colored Girls, and the documentary film series Plutocracy, will generate critical responses to theories of colonization, power structures, as well as political and domestic forms of violence and peace.

CLA 357: Being and Reading Sappho: Sapphic Traditions from Antiquity to the Present

Mondays, 11:00-12:20

Barbara Graziosi, Sherry Lee

Who was Sappho? And what do we make of her today? In this course, students will consider in detail what remains of Sappho’s work (including the latest discoveries, published in 2014), and also how her example informs later literatures, arts, identities, and sexualities. Students with no ancient Greek and students who already know it are equally welcome! One session per week will focus on reading and translating original texts with one group, while a parallel session will focus on translations and adaptations through time. One joint session per week will draw perspectives together.

CLA 538: Latin Poetry of the Empire: Lucan and Post-Virgilian Epic

Mondays, 1:30-4:20

Yelena Baraz

This course studies Lucan’s historical epic in its Neronian context and in relation to the preceding literary tradition, not only epic, but also historiographic and declamatory, and considers the poem’s influence and reception. We focus on the treatment of civil war, religion, and the supernatural, and the relationship between tradition and contemporary relevance.

COM 542: Feminist Poetics and Politics in the Americas (1960s to the Present)

Tuesdays, 1:30-4:20

Susana Draper

This course aims to explore different forms that the question of liberation has taken in writings by women philosophers and poets whose work helped to create cultural and political movements in the U.S. and Latin America. Starting in the 1960s, it studies different philosophical concepts and poetic figures that have shaped the language of feminist struggles (intersectionality, care and the commons, reproductive violence, “feminicidal” violence, social reproduction). Readings include Gloria Anzaldua, Angela Davis, Silvia Federici, Veronica Gago, Raquel Gutierrez, Audre Lorde, Bety Ruth Lozano, Cristina Rivera Garza, among others.

CLG 108: Homer

Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, 9:00-9:50

Johannes Haubold

Introduction to Homeric dialect, oral poetry, and meter, we will discuss literary techniques, the historical background of epic, and Homer’s role in the development of Greek thought.

CWR 202: Introductory Poetry

Various Times

Marilyn Chin, Michael C. Dickman, Kathryn Farris, Kathleen Ossip, Patricia Smith, Susan Wheeler

Practice in the original composition of poetry supplemented by the reading and analysis of standard works. Criticism by practicing writers and talented peers encourages the student’s growth as both creator and reader of literature.

CWR 302: Advanced Poetry

Various Times

Marilyn Chin, Ilya Kaminsky

Advanced practice in the original composition of poetry for discussion in regularly scheduled workshop meetings. The curriculum allows the student to develop writing skills, provides an introduction to the possibilities of contemporary literature and offers perspective on the places of literature among the liberal arts.

CWR 206: Creative Writing (Literary Translation)

Fridays, 2:30-4:20

Jenny McPhee

Students will choose, early in the semester, one author to focus on in fiction, poetry, or drama, with the goal of arriving at a 20-25 page sample of the author’s work. All work will be translated into English and discussed in a workshop format. Weekly readings will focus on the comparison of pre-existing translations as well as commentaries on the art and practice of literary translation.

CWR 306: Advanced Creative Writing (Literary Translation)

Fridays, 2:30-4:20

Jenny McPhee

ENG 325: Milton

Tuesdays, 1:30-4:20

Russ Leo and Friederike Ach

John Milton’s writings reflect a lifelong effort to unite the aims of political, intellectual, and literary experimentation. This class explores Milton’s major works, especially Paradise Lost. We’ll consider Milton’s highly original characters, especially Satan, with whom we are invited to sympathize, but also Adam, Eve, and Samson. We’ll encounter Milton’s startling poetic innovations, his controversial ideas about sovereignty, marriage, and God, and we will consider Milton’s writings in relation to other genres, from late antique theology and medicine to much more recent sci-fi and crime fiction.

ENG 341: The Later Romantics

Mondays and Wednesdays, 11:00-12:20

Susan Wolfson

The flamboyant second generation of British Romantics: Keats, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Byron, Hemans, Jewsbury. Careful attention to texts — ranging from novels, to odes, to romances, and modern epics — in historical and cultural contexts, with primary focus on literary imagination.

ENG 405: Contemporary Poetry

Tuesdays, 7:30-10:20

Joshua Kotin

This seminar focuses exclusively on books of poetry published in 2022 and 2023. We’ll read and discuss work by established and emerging poets, and attend poetry readings. Poets will also visit the class to discuss their work and the work of their influences. Students will write reviews, rather than essays, and in the process learn about (and contribute to) the contemporary poetry world.

ENG 563: Poetics: Poetry, Law, and the PoetiX of Justice in Forensic Landscapes

Wednesdays, 9:00-11:50

M. NourbeSe Philip

This course invites us to think of borderlands where law and poetry intersect. What the law excises in its pursuit of justice, poetry celebrates as essential. Within a global context of literature, we ask: how do the many and varied mother tongues of poetry that will not be silent confront the law’s exorbitant capacities through which human becomes chattel and homeland wasteland? What does it mean to live in landscapes made forensic through the legacy of unlawful acts carried out under colour of law? In the poetiX of justice, X marks the place/s where crime jostles with evidence, history and memory as well as the unknown — the terrain of poetry.

HIN 305: Topics in Hindi/Urdu: Poetry, Performance, and the Public Sphere

Wednesdays, 7:30-10:20

Fauzia Farooqui

Poetry occupies a significantly large space in the public sphere in South Asia. In addition to the expected areas of literature and performing arts, poetry is routinely performed in different domains of everyday life. This course will introduce students to various traditions, texts, and genres of Hindi-Urdu poetry that are routinely publicly performed as part of religious rituals, social practices, performing arts, and protest rallies. We will closely read some of the most widely performed Hindi/Urdu poems as independent literary texts, experience them as performances, and then analyze both texts and performances in their own contexts.

HUM 423: Poetry and War: Translating the Untranslatable

Wednesdays, 1:30-4:20

Sandra L. Bermann

Focusing on Rene Char’s wartime “notebook” of prose poetry from the French Resistance, Feuillets d’Hypnos (Leaves of Hypnos), this course joins a study of the Resistance to a poet’s literary creation and its ongoing “afterlife” in translations around the globe. History, archival research (traditional and digital), the practice of literary translation, and a trip to France that follows in Char’s footsteps as poet and Resistance leader will all be part of our exploration. We will conclude with a dramatic performance of the “notebook” in multiple languages, as created by seminar participants.

SLA 411: Selected Topics in Russian Literature and Culture: Survey of Russian Poetry (19th and 20th Centuries)

Mondays and Wednesdays, 11:00-12:20

Michael A. Wachtel

This course will serve as an introduction to major Russian poets from Pushkin to the present. No prior knowledge of Russian literature is assumed. The focus of the course will be on close readings of individual poems, but the intention is, by generalization, to reach an understanding of the development of Russian literature as a whole. All readings will be in Russian, but discussion will be in English. There will be an additional (optional) hour for those wishing to discuss the poems in Russian.

SPA 550: Poetry Seminar in Colonial Spanish American Literature: Poetic Violence and License in Epic Works

Wednesdays, 4:30-7:20

Nicole D. Legnani

This course explores the ethics and poetics behind representations of violence in Colonial Latin America, with a special focus on epic poetry, though primary readings also include examples from relaciones, historias, and lyric. Topics include horror and terror; massacre; indigeneity and maternity; curses; the supernatural; marronage and piracy. Relevant selections from Virgil, Lucan, Ovid, Petrarch, Camoes, and Ariosto are included as suggested readings for students who may not be familiar with their texts. Theorists and critics on violence and its depictions include Greene, Fuchs, Martinez, Rabasa, Radcliffe, Restrepo, Scarry, and Quint.

Past Offerings

Fall 2022

CWR 201: Introductory Poetry

Various Times

Craig Morgan Teicher, Lynn Melnick, Marilyn Chin, Michael C. Dickman, Kathleen Ossip, Paul Muldoon

CWR 301: Advanced Poetry

Various Times

Michael Dickman, Patricia Smith

FRS 102: Poetry in the Political & Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and 70s

Mondays, 1:30-4:20

Alex Dimitrov

What does artistic production look like during a time of cultural unrest? How did America’s poets help shape the political landscape of the American 60s and 70s, two decades that saw the rise of the Black Panthers, “Flower Power,” psychedelia, and Vietnam War protests? Through reading poetry, studying films, like Easy Rider, and engaging with the music of the times (Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors), we will think about art’s ability to move the cultural needle and not merely reflect the times but pose important questions about race, gender, class, sexuality, and identity at large.

ENG 328/ GSS 407: Topics in the Renaissance: Erotic Poetry

Mondays, 1:30-4:20

Bradin T. Cormack

This class considers short poems of the 16th and 17th centuries that are variously concerned with love, desire, and sexual intimacy. What are the modes of address in the erotic lyric? How do poems represent the subject and object of desire, and how do they represent the ethics of the erotic encounter? What is the social, political, and philosophical work of a personal and intimate poetry? Alongside a wide range of poems (including at least one contemporary collection placed in dialogue with the earlier poems), the course will include several short theoretical readings on the representation of desire.

ENG 405: Topics in Poetry: Early Modern Verse by Women and Men

Mondays, 1:30-4:20

Nigel Smith

In received tradition there are no women authors writing in English before the very late 17th century, with a few very notable exceptions in the Middle Ages. This course charts the recovery and revaluation of early modern poetry by women, and contrasts it with verse by men, some of it well known. We’ll learn how distinctively good it is, how unusually enjoyable and entertaining, as we encounter poems that range from recording the harrowing loss of grown-up daughters to smallpox to bold, insightful political verse. We’ll follow the detective work that uncovered this lost poetry, and how the Internet has been used to make it.

ENG 422/ MED 422: The Work of Grief: Select Old English Poetry

Mondays, 1:30-4:20

Sarah May Anderson

Advanced The “art of losing isn’t hard to master,” writes Elizabeth Bishop in “One Art.” We’ll examine that art of representing what we’ve lost, or longed for, in songs of transience and yearning that are brilliant, painful constructions in Old English. What could be mourned, who could grieve, how console? By methods comparative and critical, we will read how these poets of the earliest stage of English comprehended, maybe even mastered, their losses.

ENG 532: Early 17th Century: Polygot Poetics: Transnational Early Modern Literature

Tuesdays, 9:00-11:50

Nigel Smith

Early modern vernacular writers did not simply imitate classical antiquity or later Italian or French verse as if it were ancient, but traded verse horizontally and multilaterally. Languages faded into one another through proximity, trade, and war. We explore this cross-lingual, transnational literary field through the poetry of diplomats, colonists, itinerant prophets and pharmacists, and the work of traveling theatre companies. The Netherlands is the polyglot hub for much of this activity, but we also chart rising interest in English beyond the British Isles, and tackle how we can think of an early modern global literature.

ENG 563: Poetics: Poetry’s Nature

Mondays, 1:30-4:20

Susan Stewart

We should consider all poetry as “nature poetry” in that poems have a relation, beyond aesthesis alone, to the boundary between the phenomenal and the noumenal. In this course, we think about nature not only as a theme in poetry, but as well as a force in its practice. We take up such issues as the non-semantic and counter-logical, theories of rhythm, representations of the invisible, the temporal, the causal, and the sociology of genres.

SLA 512: The Evolution of Russian Poetic Form

Wednesdays, 1:30-4:20

Michael A. Wachtel

This course serves as an introduction to Russian verse forms and genres. Considerable attention is given to translations into Russian (and conceivably out of Russian) to understand the qualities of Russian poetry that distinguish it from other European verse traditions (English, German, French, Italian). To some extent, exemplary texts are chosen in conjunction with students’ linguistic competencies and interests.

NES 539: Jurjanian Poetics

Thursdays, 1:30-4:20

Lara Harb

Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani’s 11th century Arabic work of literary theory, Asrar-al-balagha (The Secrets of Eloquence) is arguably one of the most sophisticated treatises on poetics in the world. His aesthetic theory of simile and metaphor, which he develops over the course of his almost 400-page work, resonates with several modern conceptions of the poetic and with Aristotelian poetics. Students will be able to read the entire work for the first time in English as translated by Prof. Harb. We will discuss questions of translation, terminology, and the applicability of Jurjani’s poetics cross-culturally.

Spring 2022

CWR 202: Creative Writing (Poetry)

Various Times

Michael C. Dickman, Kathleen Ossip, Rowan R. Phillips, Nicole Sealey, Patricia Smith

CWR 302: Advanced Poetry

Various Times

Tyehimba Jess, Kathleen Ossip

ENG 266: Poetry and the Arts

Mondays and Wednesdays, 11:00 am – 12:20 pm

Jeff Dolven

A poem moves, and sings, and paints pictures; it tells stories, it takes the stage, and it can play like a movie on the inside of the eyelids. This course explores what poetry can do by considering the powers it shares with neighboring kinds of making, both their expressive potentials and their technical resources. In collaboration with a wide variety of guests from Princeton’s arts programs, and by means of a mix of practical and critical exercises, students will rethink the place of poetry in culture and society, historically and into the future.

ENG 295: The Art of Loving

Wednesdays, 1:30 pm – 4:20 pm

Diana Fuss and Ingrid Norton

Love is a many splendored thing. Love is dangerous. Love is a drug. Love is carnal ecstasy. Love is supernatural sympathy. Love is a subject of art; loving well is an art in itself. Many experiences, emotions, actions, and ideals travel under the name of romantic love. This course will contrast the wild and wide depictions of romance in drama, fiction, letters, poetry, and other mediums: from medieval courtiers to modern blues musicians, from yearning love letters to ecstatic sonnets. Why do we worship and worry about this singular feeling? What do the different forms and phases of love’s passions have to tell us about being human?

ENG 312 / MED 312: Chaucer

Thursdays, 1:30 pm – 4:20 pm

Andrew Cole

Many challenges we face today are expressed in Chaucer’s works but in a form different enough to shake us out of our heads so we can think honestly about what beleaguers human societies. On the one hand, his poetry is unfamiliar–high art from the fourteenth century cast in a language not ours, Middle English. On the other hand, his poetry is familiar, putting before our minds serious subjects we encounter today like military (and police) violence, sexual assault, racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, class conflict, political protest, and social autonomy. This Chaucer class is about the politics of art and the art of politics.

AAS 341 / ART 375: Enter the New Negro: Black Atlantic Aesthetics

Mondays, 1:30 pm – 4:20 pm

Anna Arabindan Kesson

Born in the late 1800s, the New Negro movement demanded political equality, desegregation, and an end to lynching, while also launching new forms of international Black cultural expression. The visionary modernity of its artists not only reimagined the history of the Black diaspora by developing new artistic languages through travel, music, religion and poetry, but also shaped modernism as a whole in the 20th century. Incorporating field trips and sessions in the Princeton University Art Museum, this course explores Afro-modern forms of artistic expression from the late 19th-century into the mid-20th century.

AAS 353 / ENG 352: African American Literature: Origins to 1910

Mondays and Wednesdays, 11:00 am – 12:20 pm

Autumn Womack

This introductory course traces the emergence of an African American literary tradition, from the late-18th century to the early 20th. In readings, assignments, and discussion we will consider the unique cultural contexts, aesthetic debates, and socio-political forces underpinning African American literary cultural and practice. Over the course of the semester, we will investigate the poetry of Phillis Wheatley and Paul L. Dunbar, the political oratory of Sojourner Truth and David Walker, slave narratives by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Wilson, writing by W.E.B. DuBois, and novels by Frances Harper.

CLG 108: Homer

Monday – Thursday, 9:00 am – 9:50 am

Barbara Graziosi

Introduction to Homeric dialect, oral poetry, and meter, we will discuss literary techniques, the historical background of epic, and Homer’s role in the development of Greek thought.

COM 335 / ENG 236 / ECS 336 / HUM 338: Poetries of Resistance

Wednesdays, 1:30 pm – 4:20 pm

Sandra L. Bermann Michael G. Wood

Poetry can be seen as a mode of reflection on history and, very often, as an act of resistance to it. This course will examine works written in Europe, Latin America and the US during the 20th and 21st centuries in different languages and historical contexts. We will explore their oppositional and also their liberatory effects: their ability to evoke their times, to disrupt our usual understandings while offering new political, artistic and ethical perspectives. The course will pay special attention to the work of René Char and Paul Celan, as ideal points of focus for questions of language and resistance.

FRS 102: Poetry in the Political & Sexual Revolution of the 1960s & 70s

Mondays, 7:30 pm – 10:20pm

Alexander Dimitrov

What does artistic production look like during a time of cultural unrest? How did America’s poets help shape the political landscape of the American 60s and 70s, decades that saw the rise of the Black Panthers, ‘Flower Power,’ and Vietnam War protests? Through reading poetry, studying films and engaging with the music of the times we will think about art’s ability to move the cultural needle and pose important questions about race, gender, class, and sexuality. We will study Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, Eileen Myles, and others. We will talk about The Beats, The San Francisco Renaissance and The New York School poets.

GER 372 / ART 342 / ECS 384: Writing About Art (Rilke, Freud, Benjamin)

Mondays, 1:30 pm – 4:20 pm

Brigid Doherty

This seminar explores the significance of works of art, and of practices of writing about art, for three great writers of the early 20th century: poet Rainer Maria Rilke, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, and critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin. Readings include: lyric poetry, experimental prose, psychoanalytic theory, cultural analysis, and aesthetic theory. Topics include: the situation of the work of art in modernity; art and the unconscious; the work of art and the historical transmission of culture in modern Europe. Course taught in English. Readings also available in German for those who wish to work with texts in the original language.

NES 370 / COM 459 / MED 370: Wonder and Discovery in Classical Arabic Literature

Wednesdays, 1:30 pm – 4:20 pm

Lara Harb

It is due to wonder, Aristotle tells us, that man began to philosophize. In the premodern Islamic world, wonder was also an experience linked with the pursuit of knowledge and discovery. It defined a spiritual attitude, an aesthetic outlook, and the encounter with strange and unknown worlds. We will explore the manifestations of wonder in medieval Arabic culture through reading travel narratives, medieval Arabic texts on the marvels of the world, fables, fantastic tales, poetry, and the Quran. We will also study medieval Arabic theoretical discussions of wonder as a literary effect.

ENG 550: The Romantic Period: Why The Prelude?

Thursdays, 1:30 pm – 4:20 pm

Susan Wolfson

More than 170 years after its surprise, posthumous publication, Wordsworth’s autobiographical epic is recognized as the most consequential long poem after Paradise Lost. With close reading, historically contextualized reading, deep reading, brain/psychological reading, critical reading, we study this stunning, radical experiment in genre, narrative temporalities, haunted historiography, literary history, & textual history, meta-narrative, meta-history, meta-autobiograph–pulsing with durably influential literary modernity. 13/14 bks (1805/1850, early drafts) supplemented by Tintern Abbey & the Great Ode on childhood.

ENG 567: Special Studies in Modernism: 1922

Tuesdays, 9:00 am – 11:50 am

Joshua Kotin

1922 has been described as the “annus mirabilis” (miracle year) of modernism, James Joyce’s Ulysses. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows. All published in 1922. This seminar surveys these books (and others) and considers their influence today. We also discuss the history and future of modernist studies, and do extensive work in the Sylvia Beach Papers and other archives at Firestone Library.

FRE 532: Charles Baudelaire

Wednesdays, 1:30 pm – 4:20 pm

Efthymia Rentzou

This course discusses Charles Baudelaire’s poetry, prose, art and literary criticism, autobiographical texts, and translations, and their pivotal role for perceptions of modernity. Baudelaire’s oeuvre is approached through different perspectives, ranging from poetics, aesthetics, literary history, the political and social context of his time, sexuality and gender, popular culture, reception history, trauma studies, etc. We take into consideration influential readings of Baudelaire’s work, while particular emphasis is given to Baudelaire’s relevance for the 21st century and specifically in contemporary literature and art.

Fall 2021

CWR 201: Creative Writing (Poetry)

Various Times

Michael C. Dickman, Tyehimba Jess, Paul B. Muldoon, Kathleen Ossip, Rowan R. Phillips, Patricia G. Smith, Susan Wheeler, Monica Y. Youn

CWR 301: Advanced Poetry

Various Times

Rowan R. Phillips, Susan Wheeler

ENG 205: Making Poems Your Own

Tuesdays,

Susan A. Stewart

To know a poem well is to make it your own and to learn something about how poems are made. In this class you will learn many great poems well. You will learn about the techniques and history of this art form as we consider significant changes in the history of lyric, dramatic, and narrative poems and think about poets’ uses of voice, diction, image, trope, form, occasion, sequence, and closure. We will be reading poems together and writing about them, making poems and imitations of our own, and learning poems by heart.

ENG 242 / AMS 322: Native American Literature

Mondays & Wednesdays,

Isabel M. Lockhart, Sarah Rivett

An analysis of the written and oral literary traditions developed by Native Americans. American Indian and First Nation authors will be read in the context of the global phenomenon of indigeneity and settler colonialism, and in dialogue with each other. Through readings, discussions, and guest speakers, we will consider linguistic, historical, and cultural approaches. This course offers an occasion to reflect on, critique, and contest settler colonialism, or the dispossession of land and waters and the attempt to eliminate Indigenous people.

ENG 312 / MED 312: Chaucer

Wednesdays, 1:30 pm – 4:20 pm

Andrew Cole

ENG 313 / MED 315: Worlds Made with Words: Old English Poems that Perform

Tuesdays & Thursdays,

Sarah M. Anderson

This course concentrates on constitutive problems in OE literature: the “making” or “makers” of the OE poetry and its performers. How were these roles shaped and learned? How was performance depicted? What powers does a poem assume when it makes an inanimate object speak? When it stages a sensorium of sound and sight? We’ll actively fabricate 21st-century approaches to how words made worlds in this early medieval poetic tradition.

ENG 314 / THR 384: Hope and History: The Poems and Plays of Seamus Heaney

Tuesdays, 1:30 pm – 4:20 pm

Fintan O’Toole

In his speeches and online presidential campaign, Joe Biden made repeated use of Seamus Heaney’s lines about making “hope and history rhyme.” Seamus Heaney, who died in August 2013, was rare among contemporary poets in having both a huge public following and the admiration of his peers: both a Wordsworthian romantic and a Joycean realist; an atheist in search of the miraculous; a cosmopolitan with a little patch of remembered earth; a lover of the archaic who could not escape the urgency of contemporary history. This course follows Heaney’s rich career, placing him in the context both of modern Ireland and world literature

ENG 366 / AAS 359: African American Literature: Harlem Renaissance to Present

Mondays & Wednesdays,

Kinohi Nishikawa

A survey of 20th- and 21st-century African American literature, including the tradition’s key aesthetic manifestos. Special attention to how modern African American literature fits into certain periods and why certain innovations in genre and style emerged when they did. Poetry, essays, novels, popular fiction, a stage production or two, and related visual texts.

ENG 558: American Poetry: American Elegy

Wednesdays,

Diana Fuss

This course examines the literary, social, political, and cultural importance of American mourning poetry. Covering mainly the antebellum period to the present, we explore the expanding role and enduring power of elegy as it evolves across a range of subgenres. Likely topics include deathbed elegies, child elegies, slave elegies, war elegies, lynch elegies, family elegies, eco-elegies, and anti-elegies.

ENG 563: Poetics: Black Aesthetics: Visuality & Visibility in Contemporary Black Poetry

Thursdays,

Evelyn Shockley

This course considers how contemporary Black poets have explored & expanded the concept of Black aesthetics the Black Arts Movement first theorized. We focus on texts that reward an interest in how visibility (concerning what can be seen) & visuality (concerning how we process the world in visual terms) operate to produce & make meaning of Blackness. How do oral & aural culture manifest themselves in these works? What is the status of the (visually troubling) Black body in the line of text? What does Black abstraction make visible? We read Black poetry, criticism, cultural studies, & theory to move from these questions to new ones.

ENG 571 / COM 574: Literary and Cultural Theory: Ecological Poetics of the 19th C. Americas

Tuesdays,

Branka Arsic

This course explores how 19th century (mostly) American authors registered the transformation of natural history into the sciences of life, and how attentiveness to the ecological fashioned their ethics. Most of our authors adopted a vitalist and materialist understanding of life, which led them to understand the boundaries of individual phenomena as porous and environmental. Changing their understanding of what the natural is, they proposed a series of cosmological, poetic and ethical responses to the idea that life is common to all creatures and in fact to all phenomena, and that matter is inherently dynamic and vitalized.

ENG 573 / COM 580 / AAS 573: Problems in Literary Study: Black Modernisms

Tuesdays,

Simon E. Gikandi

A foundational moment in the history of European modernism in the twentieth century was the discovery of the world of Black others and the use of Blackness as a mechanism for maintaining and sustaining a new style of art. At about the same time, Black writers and artists adopted modernism as the aesthetic that would represent Black subjectivity in a world defined by racial violence. This course has two aims: to explore how black writers and artists in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean responded to high modernism’s exoticism and to explore how they adopted and transformed the aesthetic ideology of global modernism.

EAS 533: Readings in Chinese Literature: Poetry of the Northern Song

Tuesdays, 1:30 pm – 4:20 pm

Anna M. Shields

This course surveys Northern Song poetry, focusing on new styles and genres appearing in the 11th century. Genres include: regulated verse; song lyrics; remarks on poetry (shihua); yuefu and other musical texts. Authors include Ouyang Xiu, Mei Yaochen, Su Shi, Huang Tingjian, Yan Shu, Liu Yong, Wang Anshi, Sima Guang. Secondary scholarship in Chinese, Japanese, and English focus on genres and writers. We consider Song poetry in the framework of Chinese literary history, aesthetics of song lyrics, and new poetic styles.

NES 569 / COM 575: Classical Arabic Poetry

Thursdays, 1:30 pm – 4:20 pm

Lara Harb

Introduces students to the major Arabic poets and poems from pre-Islamic times to the Mamluks. Goals: Increase the ease with which students read classical Arabic poetry, learn how to scan Arabic meters, and expand knowledge of styles, genres and development. Students prepare assigned poems and put together brief biographical sketch of poets.

SLA 518: Major Russian Poets and Poetic Movements: Post-Symbolist Poets

Tuesdays, 1:30 pm – 4:20 pm

Olga P. Hasty

This seminar is devoted to major writings of Russian poets during the post-Symbolist period up to the Stalinist era. Close readings of selected poetry and prose of Acmeists Akhmatova and Mandel’shtam, Cubo-Futurists Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov, and the unaligned Tsvetaeva and Pasternak serve as points of departure to discuss hallmarks of Russian modernism and issues relating to emigration, art and politics, gender, and the negotiation of novelty and tradition. The art of self-presentation and the act of reading – how they both shape and are shaped by the texts and their authors – is considered over the course of the entire semester.

Spring 2021

CWR 202: Creative Writing (Poetry)

Various Times

Michael C. Dickman, Paul B. Muldoon, Tracy K. Smith, Susan Wheeler, Monica Y. Youn

CWR 302: Advanced Poetry

Various Times

Rowan R. Phillips, Susan Wheeler

CWR 315: Life Is Short, Art is Really Short

Tuesdays,

James Richardson

All literature is short – compared to our lives, anyway – but we’ll be concentrating on poetry and prose at their very shortest. The reading will include proverbs, aphorisms, greguerias, one-line poems, riddles, jokes, fragments, haiku, epigrams and microlyrics. Imagism, contemporary shortists, prose poems, various longer works assembled from small pieces, and possibly even flash fiction. Students will take away from the thrift and edge of these literary microorganisms a new sense of what can be left out of your work and new ideas about how those nebulae of pre-draft in your notebooks might condense into stars and constellations.

ENG 366 / AAS 359: African American Literature: Harlem Renaissance to Present

Mondays & Wednesdays,

Kinohi Nishikawa

ENG 563: Poetics: Inventing American Lyric in the Nineteenth Century

Wednesday,

Virginia W. Jackson

Nineteenth-century American poetry is rarely invoked in current debates about the theory and history of “the lyric.” The all-White Shelley-to-Stevens, British-Romanticism-to-American-Modernism narrative of the history of Anglophone poetry is still so common that this absence has gone unnoticed. In this seminar, we read current lyric theory against the racialized background of the nineteenth-century American poetics that turned a variety of popular verse genres (ballads and hymns, odes and epistles, elegies and drinking songs) into a lyricized idea of poetry, that replaced the genre of the poem with the genre of the person.

COM 335 / ENG 236 / ECS 336 / HUM 338: Poetries of Resistance

Wednesdays,

Sandra L. Bermann, Michael G. Wood

COM 375 / ENG 265: Writing the World: Nature, Science, and Literature in Early Modern Europe

Tuesdays & Thursdays,

Giulio J. Pertile

The idea that the poet “created a world” was a commonplace of Renaissance literary criticism. In this course we will be thinking about how poetry’s worldmaking powers responded to changing ideas of what makes up the world – from revolutionary visions of the cosmos to new conceptions of the nature of matter and life – as well as to the new technologies which made these discoveries possible. How do the “creative” qualities of literature interact with an emerging scientific emphasis on facts and “things as they are”? We will consider these and similar questions in the different contexts of early modern Italy and England.

COM 394 / AAS 342 / AFS 342: Sisters’ Voices: African Women Writers

Mondays, 1:30 pm – 2:20 pm & 2:30 pm – 4:20 pm

Wendy Laura Belcher

In this class, we study the richness and diversity of poetry, novels, and memoirs written by African women. The course expands students’ understanding of the long history of women’s writing across Africa and a range of languages. It focuses on their achievements while foregrounding questions of aesthetics and style. As an antidote to misconceptions of African women as silent, students analyze African women’s self-representations and how they theorize social relations within and across ethnic groups, generations, classes, and genders. The course increase students’ ability to think, speak, and write critically about gender.

COM 449 / SPA 449 / LAS 449: Violence, Migration, and Literature in the Americas

Wednesdays, 1:30 pm – 4:20 pm

Susana Draper

This course studies literature dealing with contemporary regimes of violence and forced migration in the Americas. Focusing on the passage from the Cold War to the War on Drugs, it analyzes the history of the current “migration crisis” in relation to structural adjustments, regimes of accumulation, border patrolling, and immigrant incarceration. Working with poetry, narrative, essays, and film, it explores the ways in which artistic interventions and cultural imagination have become crucial spaces for creating systems of legibility and resistance that reflect on the migrant experience and the historicity of multiple injustices.

CLA 203 / COM 217 / HLS 201 / TRA 203: What is a Classic?

Tuesdays & Thursdays, 3:00 pm – 4:20 pm

Joshua H. Billings, Barbara Graziosi

“What is a Classic?” asks what goes into the making of a classic text. It focuses on four, monumental poems from the ancient Mediterranean and Near East: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Gilgamesh, which are discussed through comparison across traditions, ranging as far as Chinese poetry. Students will consider possible definitions and constituents of a classic, while also reflecting on the processes of chance, valorization, and exclusion that go into the formation of a canon. Topics will include transmission, commentary, translation, religion, race, colonization, empire, and world literature.

CLA 505: Greek Lyric Poetry

Wednesdays,

Andrew L. Ford

This seminar is a collaborative study of Greek lyric poetry through its reflexes in Athenian tragedy. We read through the parodoi of classical tragedy (reading about a third of the 33 in Greek, the rest in bi-lingual editions). These entry-songs (on some theories, tragedy’s origin) both introduce the formal conventions of tragedy and show opportunities for poetic experimentation, particularly by Euripides. By tracking the variety of song-forms used to perform the same dramaturgical function-getting the chorus onstage-we are in a position to engage exciting recent work on Greek dramatic and ritual chorality.

CLA 526 / HLS 527 / PHI 522: Problems in Greek and Roman Philosophy: Early Greek Poet-Philosophers

Thursdays,

Mirjam E. Kotwick

In this seminar, we examine early Greek philosophers who wrote in verse or used poetic means of expression in prose. Empedocles is a focus of the class, but we also engage with Parmenides, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, and Hesiod. We read these authors as both philosophers and poets, and we reflect on the history and conceptual implications of the distinction between philosophy and poetry.

CLA 534: Roman Lyric and Elegiac Poetry: Horace’s Odes

Mondays,

Denis Feeney

We read The Odes of Horace, including the Carmen Saeculare. We also survey scholarly approaches to the corpus.

EAS 331 / COM 331: Chinese Poetry

Tuesdays,

Martin Kern

In this seminar we closely study ancient and medieval Chinese poetry, with emphasis on the formative stages of the Chinese textual tradition. While all texts will be read in translation, we also explore the ways in which the classical Chinese language shaped this poetry in its unique characteristics and possibilities of expression. In addition, we discuss in depth key texts of Chinese literary thought in their aesthetic, philosophical, social, and historical dimensions. Knowledge of the Chinese language is neither required nor expected.

EAS 531: Chinese Literature: The Verses of Chu (Chuci)

Mondays,

Martin Kern

Through close readings of the original poetry and historical sources, we analyze the anthology of the Verses of Chu (Chuci) in its aesthetic, historical, and hermeneutic dimensions, with particular attention to the formation and the nature of early Chinese textuality. Drawing on a wider range of early historical, literary, and philosophical texts, and using traditional as well as modern commentaries, we contextualize the songs in late Warring States and Han literary and intellectual culture.

FRS 102: Poetry in the Political & Sexual Revolution of the 1960s & 70s

Tuesdays,

Alexander Dimitrov

REL 320: Poetry and Transcendence in some Western Christian Mystical Theologies

Tuesdays, 1:30 pm – 4:20 pm

Denys A. Turner

The “mystical” as understood in the Western Christian traditions refers to experience of the divine pressing on the limits of language, and poetry is often its natural expression. This course examines some poetic expressions of the mystical from the Hebrew Song of Songs through Dante, John of the Cross, George Herbert, to Hopkins, and TS Eliot.

Fall 2020

CWR201: Creative Writing (Poetry)
Various Times
Instructors: James Richardson · Jenny Xie · Michael Dickman · Paul Muldoon · Monica Youn · Rowan Ricardo Phillips · Susan Wheeler · Tracy K. Smith

CWR 218: Writing and Performance

Mondays, 1:30 – 4:20 PM

Instructor: Danez Smith

In this course we will write and interrogate poetry across many avenues. From written work to spoken word to Instagram, traditional lineated verse to poems that see the blank page as more canvas than paper, we ask ourselves how this ancient holder for prayer, confession, and our wild strangeness performs across different manifestations of text and body.

CWR 301: Advanced Poetry

Various Times

Instructors: Michael Dickman · Susan Wheeler

CWR 316 / ASA 316 / AAS 336 / LAO 316: Special Topics in Poetry: Race, Identity and Innovation

Wednesdays, 9:00 – 10:50 AM

Instructor: Monica Youn

This course explores works in which poets of color have treated racial identity as a means to destabilize literary ideals of beauty, mastery and the autonomy of the poetic text while at the same time engaging in groundbreaking poetic practices that subvert externally or internally constructed conceptions of identity or authenticity.

AAS 326 / ENG 286: Topics in African American Culture & Life: Early African American Literature

Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:00 AM – 10:50 AM

Instructor: Autumn M. Womack

This topics course focuses on African American literature and literary production from the mid-18th century to the early 20th. In readings, assignments, and discussions, we will explore the unique cultural contexts, aesthetic debates, and socio-political forces surrounding the production of an early African American literary tradition. Over the course of the semester, we will investigate the poetry of Phillis Wheatley and Paul L. Dunbar, the political oratory of Sojourner Truth and David Walker, slave narratives by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Wilson, and non-fiction writing by W.E.B. DuBois, and fiction by Frances Harper.

AAS 392 / ENG 392 / GSS 341: Topics in African American Literature: Reading Toni Morrison

Thursdays, 01:30 PM – 04:20 PM

Instructor: Autumn M. Womack

This course we will undertake the deceptively simple question: how do we read Toni Morrison? In taking up this task, we will devote our attention to various scenes and sites of reading across Morrison’s oeuvre, asking how Morrison is encouraging us to read history, slavery, violence, geography, time, space, gender, and friendship? We will also engage with Morrison’s own status as a reader by considering her work as an editor and literary critic. Through regular engagement with the Toni Morrison Papers housed at Firestone we will consider what it means to be able to read Morrison in such close proximity to these archival materials.

COM 441/PHI 441/HUM 441/ENG 281: Saying ‘I’: First Person Point of View in Literature and Philosophy

Wednesdays, 01:30 PM – 04:20 PM

Instructor: Maya Kronfeld

What does it mean to say (or think) “I”? What accounts for the unified character of our experience? What disruptions and gaps in experience can be made perceptible through philosophical scrutiny and daring literary experimentation? This interdisciplinary course for undergraduates as well as graduate students explores central problems of point of view and consciousness by focusing on first-person representation. Pairing lyric poetry and first-person prose fiction with key readings in the history of the philosophy of mind, we will follow the intersecting paths of inquiry developed by both disciplines.

ENG 229 / AMS 229: Introduction to Indigenous Literatures

Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:30 – 2:50 PM

Instructor: Sarah Rivett

This course reads Indigenous Literatures to reflect on, critique, and contest settler colonialism, or the dispossession of land and waters and the attempt to eliminate Indigenous people. Students engage in projects that impact Indigenous Studies initiatives at Princeton by building partnerships with Indigenous communities, locally, nationally, and internationally. Community-engaged projects and readings by Native American and Aboriginal Canadian authors will connect Indigenous histories across time and space invite new ways of thinking about the past, present, and future of the America and the World.

ENG 310 / MED 310: The Old English Period

Mondays, 1:30 – 3:20 PM

Instructor: Sarah M. Anderson

What can be imagined and written in the English language as it existed in the British Isles from about 450-1100 CE? In this intensive introduction to the Old English language, we will learn its basic grammar and lexicon in order to read selections that suggest the strange, complex beauties of literature in the Old English period: fantastic adventures, battles won and lost, and the contemplation of the self — exiled or exultant or afraid. We’ll situate this literature in its material culture and try out its voices by reading Old English aloud.

ENG 312 / MED 312: Chaucer

Thursdays, 1:30 – 4:20 PM

Instructor: Andrew Cole

You study Geoffrey Chaucer not because he’s “olde” or “hilaaarious,” nor because he taught Spenser and Shakespeare a thing or two about poetry. You study Chaucer because almost every challenge we face today–so, too, every morsel of our species-being we either loathe or love–was expressed in his works but in forms different enough to help us get out of our heads to think honestly about what beleaguers human societies. Chaucer will teach us about violence, religion, law, class, identity, sex, love, laughter, and language in the fourteenth century, and we will reflect on what his brilliantly crafted works tell us about life today.

ENG 328 / GSS 407: Topics in the Renaissance: Erotic Poetry

Mondays, 7:30 – 10:20 PM

Instructor: Bradin T. Cormack

This class considers short poems of the 16th and 17th centuries that are variously concerned with love, desire, and sexual intimacy. What are the modes of address in the erotic lyric? How do poems make an erotic subject or erotic object? What is the social, political, philosophical or critical work of these poems? Alongside the poems (including at least one contemporary collection), the course will include theoretical readings on languages and eros.

ENG 346: 19th-Century Poetry

Mondays and Wednesdays, 11:00 AM – 12:20 PM

Instructor: Meredith Anne Martin

The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race… will find an ever surer and surer stay,” wrote Matthew Arnold in 1880. But what is worthy in poetry? What does “our race” mean in 1880? In an English department in 2020? We’ll read poems from England and the U.S. that construct or complicate ideas about national, racial, class, and gender identity. We’ll practice close, textual readings of poems alongside historical material that shows how these concepts were codified in the modern disciplines.

ENG 408 / GSS 415 / AMS 418: Queer Literatures: Theory, Narrative, and Aesthetics

Wednesdays, 1:30 – 4:20 PM

Instructors: Christina A. Leon and R.L. Goldberg

This course will read from various trajectories of queer literature and engage “reading queerly” across race, gender, ability, class, and geography. We will consider the etymology of queer and think through its affiliate terms: lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans. How are such narratives encounters with power that are historically situated in relation to the national formations, carceral states, and racial capitalism?

HUM 328 / ENG 270 / ART 396: Language to Be Looked At

Tuesdays, 1:30 – 4:20 PM

Instructors: Joshua Isaac Kotin and Irene Violet Smal

This seminar focuses on the intersection of language and visual art in the 20th century. We examine modernist and avant-garde experiments in word and image, and investigate the global rise of concrete and visual poetry and text-based art after World War II. We compare and combine methods from literary studies and art history, as well as other disciplines, including history and philosophy. Students explore techniques of close looking and reading in relation to a range of topics–medium, representation, abstraction, networks. Students also engage material practices by, e.g., realizing instruction pieces and assembling magazines.

ENG 532: Early 17th Century: Milton: Poetry and a Theory of Revolution

Tuesdays, 9:00 – 11:50 AM

Instructor: Nigel Smith

Milton’s poetry is pivotal in world literature; his prose advanced an integrated theory of radical change: of sexuality, personal and political freedom, theology, poetry, cognition, the universe. Key in England’s only non-monarchical regime, a torchbearer for republicanism after its defeat; the most influential non-dramatic English poet down to the 21st-century; an early global Anglophone poet. We will explore Milton’s writings in the context of their emergence and later works under or against his sway: e.g., Toland, Astell, Phillis Wheatley, Hollis, Blake, both Shelleys, Douglass, Empson, Pullman, Ronald Johnson, Deleuze, Hill, Guillory.

COM 376 / AAS 371 / GSS 381: Crafting Freedom: Women and Liberation in the Americas (1960s to the present)

Wednesdays, 1:30 – 4:20 PM

Instructor: Susana Draper

This course explores questions and practices of liberation in writings by women philosophers and poets whose work helped to create cultural and political movements in the U.S. and Latin America. Starting in the 60s, we will study a poetics and politics of liberation, paying special attention to the role played by language and imagination when ideas translate onto social movements related to social justice, structural violence, education, care, and the commons. Readings include Gloria Anzaldúa, Angela Davis, Silvia Federici, Diamela Eltit, Audre Lorde, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Gayatri Spivak, Zapatistas, among others.

COM 447: Making Sense: Real Poetics, Diderot through Freud

Time TBD

Instructor: Claudia Joan Brodsky

As Hegel, most discursive philosophers, and every poet demonstrate, “sense” is a uniquely complex, necessarily temporal thing, as divorced from organic replication and animal mimicry as curiosity and history from transmissible illness or the concept of violence from violence itself. In this course we study primary modes of signification- from acts of indirection and association Freud called “detours” to “formal” delineations and transpositions of “content”–in which literary, cognitive and aesthetic sense are made. Works by Diderot, Kant, Lessing, Hegel, Wordsworth, Saussure, Freud among those we read. Open to all undergrad and grad students.

SPA 396 / LAS 396: Poetry Matters: Latin American Poets and the Power of Language

Mondays and Wednesdays, 1:30 – 2:50 PM

Instructor: Gabriela Nouzeilles

Latin America is a land of poets who believe in the power of language and the craft of verse. If, according to Vicente Huidobro, the poet is a little god who can create new worlds with words, revolutionary poet Roque Dalton believed that poetry could change history. “La poesía es como el pan; debe ser compartido por todos,” said Neruda. This course offers a brief history of modern Spanish American poetry from modernismo to slam poetry through a stellar row of Latin American poets and Nobel awardees, including César Vallejo, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Alejandra Pizarnik, Jorge Luis Borges, Roque Dalton, and Cecilia Vicuña.

NES 565: Ma’arri’s Epistle of Forgiveness

Thursdays, 1:30 – 4:20 PM

Instructor: Lara Harb

In this course we read Abu-I-Ala al-Ma’arri’s (d. 449 AH/1057 CE) masterpiece, “Risalat al-ghufran,” in its entirety. Often compared to Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” al-Ma’arri’s “Epistle” takes us on a journey to heaven and hell, where we meet, read the poetry of, and have conversations with famous dead Arab poets. Filled with biting irony, “Risalat al-ghufran” not only exposes you to Ma’arri’s wit, genius mastery of language, and his philosophical outlook, but also to the landscape of the Arabic literary heritage in the 5th/11th century. Advanced knowledge of Arabic required.

Spring 2020

CWR202: Creative Writing (Poetry)
Michael C. Dickman, James Richardson, Susan Wheeler, Jenny Xie, Monica Y. Youn
Various Times

CWR302: Advanced Creative Writing (Poetry)
Tracy K. Smith, Monica Y. Youn
Various Times

CWR315: Life Is Short, Art is Really Short
James Richardson
M 1:30 PM – 4:20 PM

FRS:128 Dante’s Inferno
Simone Marchesi
MW 1:30 PM – 2:50 PM

The seminar consists of a collaborative, close reading of the Inferno; short introductory lectures alternate with student-led class discussions, film screenings, and presentations on Dante’s reception in modern poetry and art. We use a bilingual edition, which provides us easy access to the text and opportunities to observe nuances of meaning or style preserved in the original language. Emulating professional Dante scholars, students will be asked to become directly responsible for an informed, meditated, and collaborative interpretation of the poem.

ITA 302: Topics in Medieval Italian Literature and Culture: Petrarch’s Lyric Poetry
Simone Marchesi
TH 1:30 PM – 4:20 PM

Considered by many the greatest scholar of his age, a successful rival to Dante, the revered teacher of Boccaccio, Petrarch bequeathed to posterity the most beautiful sonnets ever written in the Florentine vernacular. In the course, we will study the “Canzoniere”, his collection of lyric poetry, a book which shaped the language of love in the European Renaissance, and a sample from his “Trionfi”. The texts will be analyzed in relation to their historical and cultural context and for the impact they will have on modern European Literature.

SPA 335/LAS 397/GSS 354: Mexico’s Tenth Muse: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Nicole D. Legnani
T 1:30 PM – 4:20 PM

Studies a variety of texts (poetry, comedia, mystery play, letters) written by the most celebrated female Hispanic writer of the seventeenth century, widely considered to be the first feminist of the American hemisphere. Discussions include: rhetoric and feminism; Sor Juana’s literary forbearers; freedom and repression in the convent; correspondence with other writers in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru; performances of gender and sexuality in colonial Mexico. Sessions to view and analyze first editions of Sor Juana’s works of the Legaspi collection will be held at the Rare Books and Special Collections in Firestone.

AAS 359/ENG 366: African American Literature: Harlem Renaissance to Present
Kinohi Nishikawa
MW 11:00 PM – 12:20 PM

HLS 375/CLA 375/COM 399/HUM 375: Myth, History, and Contemporary Experience: Modern Greek Poetry in a Global Context
Katerina Stergiopoulou
M 1:30 PM – 4:20 PM

This is an introduction to Modern Greek poetry in a broad context, with an emphasis on its relation to Anglophone poetry. How is the experience of modernity registered in poetic texts? What traditions do poets draw on, which contemporary experiences do they reflect or critique, and what futures do they envision? How are Greek poets exploring their relation to the ancient Greek past, and also responding to trends and experiments in global modernism as well as to current events? On the flipside, what kind of relationship, if any, to the Greece of the past and of the present do non-Greek poets construct?

HUM 470: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities: When Worlds Collide: Poetry and Computation
Brian W. Kernighan; Efthymia Rentzou
T TH 1:30 PM – 2:50 PM

This interdisciplinary seminar brings together humanities and applied sciences, addressing questions of literacy, media, and modes of knowledge. The course is organized around poetry and digital technology and explores the history of each as systems of relating, organizing, and understanding the real. Media technologies and means of communication for both poetry and computing — from orality to writing, from the alphabet to the printing press, from the scroll to the book, from computers to the internet — structure our discussion.

SLA512: The Evolution of Russian Poetic Form
Michael A. Wachtel
M 1:30 PM – 4:20 PM

The course serves as an introduction to Russian verse forms and genres. Considerable attention is given to translations into Russian (and conceivably out of Russian) to understand the qualities of Russian poetry that distinguish it from other European verse traditions (English, German, French, Italian). To some extent exemplary texts are chosen in conjunction with students’ linguistic competencies and interests.

EAS531: Chinese Literature: The Classic of Poetry (Shijing)
Martin Kern
M 1:30 PM – 4:30 PM

Through close readings of original sources in classical Chinese, we analyze the Classic of Poetry (Shijing) in its aesthetic, historical, and hermeneutic dimensions from pre-imperial manuscripts through modern scholarship. In addition to reading the actual poetry and its classical commentaries, we discuss in detail its origins of composition and its reception as the master text of early Chinese cultural memory and identity, drawing on the relevant scholarship in Chinese, Japanese, English, and other languages.

ENG573: Problems in Literary Study: Stories of Poetic Forms: Ballad, Sonnet, Lyric, Line
Meredith A. Martin
W 1:30 PM – 4:20 PM

What happens to forms across time? Moving beyond the tired juxtaposition of history and theory, this course explored theories of poetic forms in several historical periods and compares these to 20th- and 21st-century ideas. Using the ballad, the sonnet, the lyric, and the idea of the poetic line as grounding, we collect, read, and critique both criticism and poetry. When and how does an example of a poetic form take the place of a story of a poetic form, and how might we detect and collect these examples? Do our methodologies of reading poetry now and in the past rely on a shared understanding of what a form might mean?

Fall 2019

CWR202: Creative Writing (Poetry)
Michael C. Dickman, James Richardson, Susan Wheeler, Jenny Xie, Monica Y. Youn
Various Times

CWR302: Advanced Creative Writing (Poetry)
Rowan R. Phillips, Monica Y. Youn
WTh 1:30pm-4:30pm

ENG 362: Modern Poetry
Meredith A. Martin
W 1:30-4:20pm

This seminar explores modern Anglophone poetry in and as literary history. We’ll read the work of major poets alongside their lesser-known contemporaries and critics, introducing the controversies and communities (formal, aesthetic, social, racial) that defined the literary movements loosely assembled under the term “modernism.” We will query the development of a literary canon that marginalized certain kinds of poets and certain kinds of reading. We’ll ask why British and American poets at the beginning of the twentieth century felt such a strong urge to define themselves in opposition to their predecessors, and to one another.

ENG 405: Topics in Poetry: Poets’ Poets
Susan A. Stewart
T 1:30-4:20pm

This is a course concerned with major twentieth-century books of New World poems and their British antecedents. We will emphasize the relations contemporary poets have with the work of poets of the past, asking a range of questions about literary influences and the “simultaneity” of the history of poetry for these writers.

ENG 241 / COM 421: Lyric Language and Form I: Renaissance to Romantic
Claudia Joan Brodsky
M 1:30-4:20pm

Open to undergraduate and grad. students, this course investigates poetry and prose writings on poetry by major poets writing in 16th-19th cent. English, Spanish, and German, alongside critical texts on poetics. (Foreign language knowledge desired but not required.). Brief practica on the mechanics of poetics (meters, rhyme and stress patterns, and specific poetic forms) will be presented to assist us in our examination of texts. Figuration and representation, lyric syntax and experience, temporality, and materiality, are some of the critical subjects we will address. See prof. for full syllabus.

FRS 121: Poetry in the Political & Sexual Revolution of 1960s & 70s America
Alexander Dimitrov
T 1:30-4:20pm

The American 1960s & 70s were a volatile time for the country both culturally and politically. From Vietnam and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, to the counterculture protests in San Francisco and throughout the country. This seminar examines the cultural production of poets during this climate and the ways in which they helped shape national dialogue. We’ll also engage with film and the music of the times. Special attention will be paid to how art production has the ability to engage with the political landscape in meaningful and real ways.

CLA 514: Problems in Greek Literature: Hesiod: Greek, Near Eastern, and Indo-European Poet
Joshua T. Katz
T 1:30-4:20pm

An intensive reading of the Theogony and Works and Days. Special attention is paid to the Near Eastern and Indo-European background of Hesiodic language and culture and to questions of poetics. That said, students are warmly encouraged to bring their own interests and theoretical approaches to the table as we learn to appreciate “the other poet,” on whose works and their reception there has been an explosion of scholarly concern in the past decade.

SLA 518: Major Russian Poets and Poetic Movements: Post-Symbolist Poets
Olga P. Hasty
W 1:30-4:20pm

Spring 2019

CWR202: Creative Writing (Poetry)
Michael Dickman, Rowan Phillips, James Richardson, Jenny Xie, Monica Youn
MTWThF 1:30pm-4:20pm
or 9am-10:50am

CWR302: Advanced Creative Writing (Poetry)
Simon Armitage, Paul Muldoon
MTWThF 1:30pm-4:30pm
or 9am-10:50am

CWR315: Life Is Short, Art Is Really Short
James Richardson
M 1:30-4:20pm

ENG362: Modern Poetry
Joshua Kotin
T 1:30-4:2-pm

This seminar will introduce students to modern Anglophone poetry, with special emphasis on modern American and British poetry. It aims to balance the study of major poets with an investigation of key movements and poetry communities. The seminar will also attend to controversies that defined modern poetry and modernism, more generally–controversies concerning free verse, aesthetic difficulty, elitism, fascism and communism, gender, race, and the role of poetry in public discourse.

ENG200: Introduction to English Literature- 14th to 18th Century
Russell Leo
MW 2:30-3:20pm
An introduction to the leading figures of earlier English Literature, including Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and Swift; to literary history as a mode of inquiry; and to some of the questions that preoccupy English poetry, prose, and drama across four centuries: art, beauty, romance, desire, the will, the mind, God, sex, and death.

ENG553: Special Studies in the Nineteenth Century- Poetry and the origin of Language
Meredith Martin
W 1:30-4:2-pm

In this course, we read 18th- and 19th-century poetry alongside the development of linguistics. We discuss theories of language origin, Indo-European and Proto-Indo-European language theory, comparative philology, and phonetics as a proto-disciplinary tangle and think through how these movements impact our understanding of English prosody and poetry. Roughly covering the period of Hans Aarsleff’s classic book From Locke to Saussure, we ask where and how historical discourse in poetics and linguistics intersected and where and how, in the present day, they intersect and diverge.

ENG 563: Poetics- The Nature of Nature Poetry
Susan Stewart
T 1:30-4:20pm

Making poems, and receiving them–unlike the plastic arts and the performed or scripted arts–draws upon the unexpected and emergent and involves the physiology of speakers, writers, listeners, and writers in specific ways. We could therefore consider all poetry as “nature poetry” in that poems have a relation, beyond aesthesis alone, to the boundary between the phenomenal and the noumenal. Yet in the West, as in Japan, China, and many other cultures, the “nature poem” is a particular genre. In this seminar, we explore the philosophical and historical development of “the nature poem” in English language traditions.

FRE525: 20th Century French Poetry or Theater: Surrealism
Efthymia Rentzou
W 1:30-4:20pm

This course examines the development of surrealism from its birth in Dada-infused Paris through its years of exile in New York to its decline after the Second World War. Materials considered include literary and theoretical texts, visual works (including film), and magazines. The course treats the topic at a variety of inter-related levels, exploring surrealism as a part of the broad historical phenomenon of the avant-garde, examining its specific ways of (re)conceiving literature and art, and investigating the epistemological ramifications of surrealism’s aesthetic, political, and moral positions. (In English)

SPA LAO URB 365: Rapping in Spanish- Urban Poetry
Germán Labrador Mendéz
W 1:30-4:20pm

This course studies contemporary urban poetry composed in Spanish on both sides of the Atlantic in cities such as New York, Madrid, Los Angeles, Mexico D.F., Barcelona and Buenos Aires. It focuses on lyrical practices that combine sound and language in a wide range of literary expressions. Contemporary hip-hop poetry and rap lyrics are at the center of the course.

CLG108: Homer
Barbara Graziosi
MTWTh 9-9:50am

Introduction to Homeric dialect, oral poetry, and meter; discussion of literary technique, historical background to the epics, and Homer’s role in the development of Greek thought.

LAT108: The Origins of Rome- Livy and Vergil
Caroline Cheung
MTWTh 10-10:50pm

We will read selections from Livy and Vergil, the masters of prose and poetry respectively in the period of Augustus. Our objectives are: to develop the ability to read Latin with greater ease and enjoyment; to improve sight-reading skills; to experience the artistry of Latin prose and poetry; and to examine some of the questions associated with the Romans’ interpretation of their history.

LAT204: Readings in Latin Literature – Vergil’s Afterlife: Transformation and Tradition in Latin Epic
Andrew Feldherr
MW 3-4:20pm

This course is an introduction to the rich tradition of Latin epic after Vergil’s Aeneid and to the study of allusion as a literary technique. We will focus on the motif of the descent to the underworld, from Vergil’s own account of Aeneas’ journey to consult the shade of his father, through the epic of the early empire (Lucan, Statius, Silius) and late antiquity (Claudian), to the renaissance (Petrarch, Vida). The pace is designed to allow students to build skills in reading Latin epic poetry.

POR303: Lyrical Traditions in Portuguese
Nicola Cooney
TTh 1:30-2:50pm

A voyage through the lyrical traditions of Portugal, Brazil, and Portuguese-speaking Africa, this course seeks to trace the evolution of the poetic form and illuminate dynamic and enduring intertextualities. Through close-readings of major works of poetry we will explore the ongoing dialogue between poets and artists of the spoken word across time and space, providing the foundation for a deeper understanding of the diverse Portuguese-language literary and cultural landscape.

SAN303 / TRA307: Advanced Poetry Sanskrit
Nataliya Yanchevskaya
T 1:30-4:20pm

This course builds on the foundation in Classical Sanskrit grammar and vocabulary learned in first and second year Sanskrit, and also builds knowledge of Sanskrit poetry and South Asian culture through reading selections from Sanskrit poetic works and traditional theoretical treatises on poetics. The course is primarily a reading course, focusing on passages from poems by classical poets in combination with other readings. Part of the course is dedicated to the language and style of the Vedic poetry. This course provides students a comprehensive introduction to the Sanskrit poetic literature of different periods.

FALL 2018

“Modern” Poetry and Poetics: Baudelaire to the “Present”

COM 422 / ENG 423 / GER 422 / FRE 422

Claudia Joan Brodsky

W 1:30-4:20pm

Designed for both undergraduates and graduate students, this course will focus on reading major “modern” poets and writings on poetics, in French, German, English and Spanish, with additional readings in theory of modernity, poetry, and the arts written by several of the poets we read. These include: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rilke, Celan, Garcia Lorca, Pax, Borges, Stevens, Bishop and Ashbery. Secondary readings will include essays by major theorists and critics who consider the larger questions of representation, temporality, visuality, and language underlying poetic practice.

Modern Poetry

ENG 362

Joshua Kotin

MW 7:30-8:50pm

This seminar will introduce students to English-language poetry from the first half of the twentieth century. The seminar aims to balance the study of major poets with an investigation of key movements and poetry communities. The seminar will also attend to controversies that defined modern poetry and modernism, more generally–controversies concerning aesthetic difficulty, tradition, fascism and communism, gender, race, and the role of poetry in public discourse.

Topics in Poetry: Poetry and Belief

ENG 405

Jeff Dolven

W 6:00-8:30pm

What does it mean to believe a poem? To believe in a poem? Can a poem itself have, or carry, beliefs–moral, religious, political, scientific? We often take poetry to be a space of ambiguity and play, where certainty is suspended, but it is also a uniquely powerful form of speech, and has long been used for credos, manifestos, prayers. These are the questions of our seminar, questions we will pursue with the help both of poets (Milton, Dickinson, Moten) and philosophers (Popper, Ricoeur, Anscombe). The seminar will move back and forth between poetry of past and present, between the beliefs of others and our own.

Chaucer

ENG 312 MED312

Andrew Cole

Th 1:30-4:20pm

Forms of Literature: Love Poems

ENG 402

T 1:30-4:30pm

Susan Stewart

In this seminar, we will explore the composition and reception of poems to and from lovers and poems “about” love from Ancient Greece to the twentieth-century. Our focus will be upon earlier, paradigm-setting, examples of the form. We will be asking who is talking and who is listening in a love poem, how conventions of love poetry develop and are overturned, and whether or not the concept and expression of love have certain continuities across eras.

Intermediate Latin: Catullus and His Age

LAT 105

Melissa Haynes

MTWTh (various times)

This course aims at increasing facility in reading Latin prose and poetry and introduces students to the literary culture of Republican Rome. We shall read selections from two important authors of the late Roman Republic, Caesar and Catullus.

The Lyric Age of Greece

CLG 308

Barbara Graziosi

MW 11am-12:20pm

Students will read, in the original Greek, the works of the great lyric poets of archaic Greece, with the exception of Pindar and Bacchylides. The main surviving fragments of Alcman, Archilochus, Callinus, Tyrtaeus, Sappho, Alcaeus, Stesichorus, Semonides, Solon, Mimnermus, Theognis, Ibycus, Anacreon, Simonides, and Hipponax will be considered in detail. Special emphasis will be placed on new discoveries, the challenges of accurate and expressive translation, and the broader literary, cultural and historical contexts in which the lyric poets created their works and in which, in turn, those works were received.

Creative Writing Poetry CWR 201

Michael Dickman, Alex Dimitrov, Alicia Ostriker, Patrick Rosal, Erika Sanchez, Susan Wheeler, Monica Youn

Advanced Creative Writing Poetry CWR 301

Susan Wheeler, Michael Dickman

Various Times

Readings in Chinese Literature: Tang Poetry

EAS 534

Anna Shields

M 1:30-4:20pm

Seminar explores the poetry of the Tang dynasty from the early period through the end of the dynasty. We focus on the topics and occasions of Tang poetry and read important works by poets in every major period. Primary text reading is accompanied by secondary scholarship in English, Chinese, Japanese, and French.

Classical Japanese Poetics

EAS 543

M 1:30-4:20pm

Brian Steininger

Reading of poetic works from pre-Meiji Japan together with an introduction to relevant topics including: commentaries and reception, book history and manuscript transmission, historical and social background, and the use of modern reference tools.

Poetics: Intersections: Whitman & Dickinson

ENG 563

Sharon Cameron

Th 9:00-11:50am

An examination of the formal, conceptual, and philosophical innovations in the work of the two major nineteenth-century American poets. We consider such topics as the tropes of body and mind in Whitman’s and Dickinson’s verse; the revision fundamental to each poet’s “development”; and the premises behind Whitman’s poetry of wholes (nothing left out) and Dickinson’s poetry of fragments. How does Whitman reconcile the construction of an abstract, inclusive, universal self with his commitment to substantive particulars? How does Dickinson find a language for the off-the-map quality of private experience?

Major Russian Poets and Poetic Movements – Symbolism

SLA 518

Michael A. Wachtel

T 1:30-4:20pm

A survey of the major Symbolists. While poetry is the primary emphasis, attention is also given to philosophical works (most notably of Vl.Solov’ev), theoretical essays (of Bryusov, Bely, Ivanov) and the novel (Bely, Sologub).

SPRING 2018

COM 335/ ECS 336 /ENG 435/ GER 336 Poetries of Resistance

W 1:30-4:20pm

Michael Wood, Sandra Bermann

COM 542 / GSS 542 / SPO 501 / ENG 542 Women and Liberation: Feminist Poetics and

Politics in the Americas (1960s to the present)

W 1:30-4:30pm

Susana Draper

This course aims to explore different forms that the question of liberation has taken in writings by women philosophers and poets whose work helped to create cultural and political movements in the U.S. and Latin America. Starting in the 1960s, the course touches upon different philosophical concepts and poetic figures that have shaped the language of women’s struggles (intersectionality, black and third world feminism, subalternity and feminist epistemologies, capitalist accumulation and “witch”-hunting, (re)transmission of knowledge).

ENG 325 Milton

TTh 1:30-2:20pm

Russell Leo

We will explore John Milton’s entire career, largely as poet, but also as dramatist, prose writer and thinker: a lifelong effort to unite the aims of intellectual, political and literary experimentation. In doing so Milton made himself the most influential non-dramatic poet in the English language. We will spend much time with Paradise Lost, regarded by many as the greatest non-dramatic poem in English or any modern language, and which has extensive debt to drama. We will encounter Milton’s profound, extensive learning and his startling innovations with words, songs and in ideas of personal, domestic and communal liberty.

ENG 341 The Later Romantics

TTh 11:00am-12:20pm

Susan Wolfson

The flamboyant second generation of British Romantics: Keats, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Byron, Hemans, Austen. Careful attention to texts–ranging from novels, to odes, to romances, and modern epics–in historical and cultural contexts, with primary focus on literary imagination.

ENG 414 Major Author(s): Wallace Stevens

M 1:30-4:20pm

Susan Stewart

This is a seminar for those who would like to get to know the work of the vital Modernist poet Wallace Stevens well. We will read most of Stevens’s Collected Poetry and Prose from the Library of America edition and will draw on other readings from philosophy, the theory of painting, and European modernism and from his American contemporaries, particularly Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams.

ENG 563 Jointed Lyrics: Narrative, Bundle, Canon

Bradin Cormack

T 9:00-11:50am

How do lyrics come to belong to a larger whole, whether through narration or collection or canon formation? The class considers, including from the perspective of narrative theory, some early modern sonnet sequences written in the Petrarchan tradition, as well the material history of lyric collections in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In a third and final section of the class, we consider the impact of earlier poets on some poets working in the twentieth century, as a way of thinking about official and personal canons.

ENG 200 Introduction to English Literature: 14th to 18th Century

TTh 11–11:50am

Russell J. Leo
Donald Vance Smith

An introduction to the leading figures of earlier English Literature, including Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and Swift; to literary history as a mode of inquiry; and to some of the questions that preoccupy English poetry, prose, and drama across four centuries: art, beauty, romance, desire, the will, the mind, God, sex, and death.

ENG 363 Virtual Victorians

MW 11am-12:20pm

Meredith A. Martin

Are you reading this on a screen? Technology changes how we read, but that has always been the case. In the 19th century, print technology changed the way readers experienced texts; today, technology lets us access 19th-century texts in new ways. How do digital projects reimagine literature as data and metadata? How do we decide what to preserve? We’ll explore the print culture of the 19th century, learn techniques of close and distant reading, and think about how people and computers are taught to read poems. No prior experience with digital humanities tools or poetry required.

AAS 510 / REL 515 Race, Religion, and the Harlem Renaissance

W 1:30-4:20pm

Wallace D. Best

The Harlem Renaissance (HR) of the 1920s is most often depicted as “the flowering of African American arts and literature.” It can also be characterized as a period when diverse forms of African American religious expressions, ideologies, and institutions emerged. This course explores the literature of the Harlem Renaissance, particularly the writings of Langston Hughes, to understand the pivotal intersection of race and religion during this time of black “cultural production.”

AAS459/ ENG 366 African American Literature: Harlem Renaissance to Present

MW 1:30-2:50pm

Kinohi Nishikawa

A survey of twentieth- and twenty-first century African American literature, including the tradition’s key aesthetic manifestos. Special attention to how modern African American literature is periodized and why certain innovations in genre and style emerged when they did. Poetry, essays, novels, popular fiction, a stage production or two, and related visual texts.

AAS 242 / ENG 242 / GSS 242 / LAS 242 Other Futures: An Introduction to Modern Caribbean Literature

MW MW 3-4:20pm

Nijah Cunningham

This course introduces students to major theories and debates within the study of Caribbean literature and culture with a particular focus on the idea of catastrophe. Reading novels and poetry that address the historical loss and injustices that have given shape to the modern Caribbean, we will explore questions of race, gender, and sexuality and pay considerable attention to the figure of the black body caught in the crosscurrents of a catastrophic history. We will analyze how writers and artists attempted to construct alternative images of the future from the histories of slavery and colonialism that haunt the Caribbean and its diasporas.

CLA 505 Greek Lyric Poetry

T 9:00-11:50am

Deborah T. Steiner

This seminar acquaints students with the language and poetics of early Greek lyric (iambic, elegiac and ‘lyric’ proper), with a particular focus on the composers of iambics and monodic and choral lyric. Through close readings of individual works, we address questions of genre and performance/re-performance, orality and literacy, poetic polemics and uses and re-workings of the hexameter tradition, and the particular occasions for which the poems were designed. We also contextualize the compositions within their social, political and historical milieus. Visual material is additionally included.

CLG 108 Homer

MTWTH 11-:11:50am

Joshua Billings

Introduction to Homeric dialect, oral poetry, and meter; discussion of literary technique, historical background to the epics, and Homer’s role in the development of Greek thought.

LAT 108 The Origins of Rome: Livy and Vergil

MTWTh 9-9:50am, or 12:30-1:20pm

Daniela E. Mairhofer

CLA 538 Latin Poetry of the Empire – Lucan and Post Virgilian Epic

W 9:00-11:50am

Denis Feeney

We study the epics of Lucan and Statius as successors to and competitors with Virgil’s Aeneid. Main themes include civil war, history and myth, and the contemporary relevance of epic.

CWR 316 / AAS 336 / LAO 316 / ASA 316

Special Topics in Poetry: Race, Identity and Innovation

W 1:30pm-4:20pm

Monica Youn

This workshop explores the link between racial identity and poetic innovation in work by contemporary poets of color. Experimental or avant-garde poetry in the American literary tradition has often defined itself as “impersonal,” “against expression” or “post-identity.” Unfortunately, this mindset has tended to exclude or downplay poems that engage issues of racial identity. This course explores works where poets of color have treated racial identity as a means to destabilize literary ideals of beauty, mastery and the autonomy of the text while at the same time engaging in poetic practices that subvert conceptions of identity or authenticity.

CWR 202 Creative Writing Poetry

Michael Dickman, Terrance Hayes, James Richardson, Susan Wheeler, Monica Youn

CWR 302 Creative Writing Poetry (Advanced)

Mark Doty, Paul Muldoon

CWR 315 Life is Short, Art is Really Short

M 1:30-4:20pm

James Richardson

EAS 371 / COM 375 / HUM 372 Love and Violence through Words: Modern Chinese Literature in the Age of Revolution

W 1:30-4:20pm

Guangchen Chen

This course will introduce you to important works in modern Chinese literature from late 19th century to the present, which have served as tools of propaganda, national defense, cultural revolution, self-fashioning, gender-conscious communication, or complete depoliticization. Therefore, the multiple literary genres of novel, folklore tale, theater and poetry will be analyzed against related forms of film, opera, music-drama and painting. Our reading of the texts will be set in the context of the turbulent twentieth century, through which you will also gain a comprehensive understanding of the critical moments in modern Chinese history.

EAS 232 Introduction to Chinese Literature

TTh 3-4:20pm

Anna Shields

An introduction to some of the most important texts, writers, and topics of Classical Literature from antiquity through the Song dynasty. All readings are in English, and no previous background in Chinese or Asian culture is required. Topics include: nature of the Chinese language; the beginnings of poetry; development of narrative and historical writing; classical Chinese poetics; literature of protest, dissent, and political satire; love poetry; religious and philosophical ideas in Chinese literature.

FRE 525 20^th Century French Poetry or Theater- French Modernist Poetry

W 1:30-4:20pm

Efthymia Rentzou

This course investigates Modernist poetics in France from mid-19th to mid-20th c. and seeks to re-evaluate Modernism in French literary history. Course treats the topic at a variety of interrelated levels by exploring French poetry as part of the broad historical phenomenon of Modernism, while examining the specific ways it materialized in France as formal innovation and as response to modernity. Seminal poets such as Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and Cendrars, are discussed as well as specific movements. Readings and theoretical questions also address the complex relationship between avant-garde and Modernism.

SLA514 Pushkin

T 1:30-4:20pm

Michael A. Wachtel

An analysis of Pushkin’s major works in all genres (lyric poetry, narrative poetry, dramatic works, prose, novel in verse, etc.). Some attention is given to Pushkin scholarship, both Russian (Tomashevsky, Tynyanov, Lotman) and American (Bethea, Sandler, Todd).

Fall 2017

ENG 405 (LA) Graded A-F, P/D/F, Audit

Topics in Poetry – Contemporary Poetry

Joshua I. Kotin

This seminar focuses exclusively on books of poetry published in 2017. We will read work by established and emerging poets, and attend poetry readings in Princeton (and possibly New York and Philadelphia). Poets will also visit the class to discuss their work and/or the work of writers they admire. Students will write reviews, rather than essays, and, in the process, learn about (and contribute to) the institutions that support and promote contemporary writing.

ENG 381 (LA) Graded A-F, P/D/F, Audit

Laughter, Vice and Delusion: Satire and Satirists, 1500-1700

Rhodri Lewis

This seminar considers a part of English literary history that is often overlooked: the surge in satirical writing from 1500 to 1700. In it, we will discuss a range of texts–prose, poetry, and drama–that are funny, clever, angry, culturally omniverous, and often foul mouthed. In addition to enjoying ourselves, we will see that satire involves far more than calling out corruption in high places, or mocking the pretensions of snobs, lovers, bad writers, and those trying to make it big. It is also a provocation to laugh, and sometimes to wince, our way to a better understanding of what life and literature are supposed to be about.

ENG 563 No Pass/D/Fail

Poetics – Poetic Realism: Episodes, 18th Century to the Present

Frances C. Ferguson

The leading ambition is to track a variety of ways in which poetry tries to capture felt and pressing realities. The course starts with Pope at his most sweeping (“Essay on Man,” “Essay on Criticism”), and take up the relationship among psalms, metrical psalms, blank verse, Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s metrical prose, and hymns before proceeding to georgics and conversation poems. It concludes with a discussion of first-person lyric and memoir.

ENG 523 No Pass/D/Fail

Renaissance Drama – Shakespeare’s Language

Jeff Dolven

A survey of Shakespeare’s linguistic resources, from several standpoints: the history of the language, the art of rhetoric, problems of attribution (including the potentials of computational stylometrics), and poetics. Over the course of the semester we study six plays, including Comedy of Errors, Hamlet, and The Winter’s Tale. There are weekly exercises in stylistic description and imitation. Our questions: how does Shakespeare sound like himself? (Does he sound like himself?) How does he sound like others, like his age, like his readers? And his characters – can we ask the same questions of them?

LAT 105 na, npdf

Intermediate Latin: Catullus and His Age

Melissa Haynes

MUS 307 / HUM 307 / ENG 313 (LA) No Pass/D/Fail

The Irish Oral Tradition

Iarla Ó Lionáird

Story, song and the written word share a common and ancient heritage in the Irish Tradition. In this seminar series we will explore the rich tapestry that comprises the written word in Irish Language Literature and Song and examine how oral forms of artistic expression continue to enrich a nation’s literature and music to this very day. The series will explore the shared histories of Irish Language Poetry and the Sean Nós song tradition, how oral culture finds expression in Irish Theatre and how older oralities still find potent representation and viability in a wide span of contemporary Music Culture, from Opera to Traditional Music.

FRE 403 / AFS 403 / LAS 412 (LA) Graded A-F, P/D/F, Audit

Topics in Francophone Literature, Culture, and History – Aimé Césaire

Nick Nesbitt

This course will study a selection of the writings of Aimé Césaire, a towering figure of the 20th century in poetry, theatre, and postcolonial critique and politics. Césaire’s poetry is arguably the most accomplished oeuvre of any anticolonial poet of the century, and a pinnacle of modernist French poetry tout court. Similarly, Césaire’s theatrical works are outstanding moments in the creation of a theatre of decolonization, while his celebrated critical pieces, such as the “Discours sur le colonialisme”, articulate the ethical and political grounds for the struggle to end colonialism.

ITA 303 / MED 303 (LA) Graded A-F, P/D/F, Audit

Dante’s “Inferno”

Simone Marchesi

Intensive study of the “Inferno”, with major attention paid to poetic elements such as structure, allegory, narrative technique, and relation to earlier literature, principally the Latin classics. Course conducted in English with highly interactive classes and preceptorials. An Italian precept will be offered.

LAT 333 (LA) na, npdf

Vergil’s Aeneid

Denis Feeney

This course will develop an understanding of Virgil’s poetic and stylistic techniques (metre, allusion, structure, word order), together with an understanding of Roman history and identity at the end of the Republic.

LCA 213 / AAS 213 / ENG 213 / HUM 213 (LA) Graded A-F, P/D/F, Audit

The Lucid Black and Proud Musicology of Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka

Gregory S. Tate

This class will focus on the career-long writing about jazz, blues, rock and R&B of Amiri Baraka (nee Leroi Jones) and the significant impact it has had on cultural politics, scholarship and esthetics from the early 1960s to the present. Baraka’s work as an activist and his gifts as a poet/novelist/playwright/political essayist allowed him to inject considerable lyricism, eloquence, learning and passion into the previously moribund fields of African American music history and journalism. His music writing also affected the tenor of future public advocacy for jazz via the NEA ‘s Jazz Masters awards and Jazz At Lincoln Center.

EAS 533 Graded A-F, P/D/F, Audit

Readings in Chinese Literature – Prose and Poetry of the Northern Song

Anna M. Shields

This course surveys Northern Song poetry and prose, focusing on new styles and genres appearing in the 11th century. Genres include: regulated verse; song lyrics; remarks on poetry (shihua); essays; travel writing; funerary texts. Authors include Ouyang Xiu, Mei Yaochen, Su Shi, Huang Tingjian, Yan Shu, Liu Yong, Wang Anshi, Sima Guang. Secondary scholarship in Chinese, Japanese, and English will focus on genres and writers. We consider Song literature in the framework of Chinese literary history, the discursive nature of Song poetry, aesthetics of song lyrics, and new prose styles.

EAS 531 Graded A-F, P/D/F, Audit

Chinese Literature – The Verses of Chu (Chuci)

Martin Kern

Through close readings of original sources, we analyze the anthology of the Verses of Chu (Chuci) in its poetic, historical, and hermeneutic dimensions. Drawing on a wider range of early historical, literary, and philosophical texts, we contextualize the songs in late Warring States and early Han literary and intellectual culture. In addition, we trace the anthology’s poetic reception in medieval times as well as its history of scholarship from the Han Dynasty to the present.

COM 310 / MED 308 (LA) No Pass/D/Fail

The Literature of Medieval Europe

Daniel Heller-Roazen

An introduction to medieval literature and the question of performative language in literature, linguistics, philosophy and theology. Works to be read include romance and lyric poetry from the French, German and English traditions, as well as selections from Scholastic philosophy, grammar and theology. We will also study some twentieth-century philosophical and linguistic accounts of speech acts. Topics to be discussed include lies, promises, oaths, baptisms, ritual speech and the structure of sacraments. All texts will be read in translation, though study of the originals will be encouraged whenever possible.

CWR 201 (LA) P/D/F Only

Creative Writing (Poetry)

Michael C. Dickman
James Richardson
Erika L. Sanchez
Susan Wheeler
Monica Y. Youn

ENROLLMENT BY APPLICATION OR INTERVIEW. DEPARTMENTAL PERMISSION REQUIRED.

CWR 301 (LA) P/D/F Only

Advanced Creative Writing (Poetry)

Paul B. Muldoon
Monica Y. Youn

ENROLLMENT BY APPLICATION OR INTERVIEW. DEPARTMENTAL PERMISSION REQUIRED.

CWR 217 / THR 217 (LA) P/D/F Only

Exploding Text: Poetry Performance

Robert Holman

ENROLLMENT BY APPLICATION OR INTERVIEW. DEPARTMENTAL PERMISSION REQUIRED.

Exploding Text is a hands-on exploration of spoken word/performance. Like poetry itself, we begin with the oral tradition – Homer, griots of West Africa, Native American traditions: orality not as pre-writing but an equivalent consciousness. We will consider writing as a score for performance, and performance as a tool for editing. We will learn to use recording as a laboratory for writing and digital media as a means of poetic transmission. Hip hop and slam will be touchstones of our work; collaborations with other arts encouraged. Attendance at poetry readings and a final group performance will be part of the curriculum.

—

PREVIOUSLY OFFERED COURSES:

FALL 2017-2018

SPRING 2017

Radical Poetics, Radical Translation (COM 402/ TRA 402)

Karen R. Emmerich

This course invites students to consider not just what poems mean but how they mean, and how that, how, complicates, challenges, obscures, enlivens, or collides with the task of translation. We will look at forms of poetry that challenge the limits of the translatable, as well as radical translation methods that expand our notion of what translation is. Examples include poems written in made-up languages; unstable texts; homophonic and visual translation; erasure poetics; and multilingual poems. Exploring the places where poetry and translation meet (or diverge), we will put traditional concepts of originality and derivation to the test.

Studies in Forms of Poetry- Poetry, History, and Memory (COM 565 / ENG 544 / FRE 565 / GER 565)

Sandra Bermann, Michael Wood

This seminar explores the intricate relations of poetry to history and memory in the troubled 20th century. Individual poets are closely studied for their intrinsic interest but also for their (known and still to be discovered) connections with each other. The poets are Eugenio Montale, César Vallejo, René Char, Paul Celan, Adrienne Rich and Anne Carson, but other writers are called on from time to time. Questions of war and resistance are important, and above all the course attends to what one might think of as the fate of language under pressure.

Chinese Literature – Prose and Poetry of the Northern Song (EAS531)

Anna M. Shields

This course surveys Northern Song poetry and prose, focusing on new styles and genres appearing in the 11th century. Genres include: regulated verse; song lyrics; remarks on poetry (shihua); essays; travel writing; funerary texts. Authors include Ouyang Xiu, Mei Yaochen, Su Shi, Huang Tingjian, Yan Shu, Liu Yong, Wang Anshi, Sima Guang. Secondary scholarship in Chinese, Japanese, and English focuses on genres and writers. We consider Song literature in the framework of Chinese literary history, the discursive nature of Song poetry, aesthetics of song lyrics, and new prose styles.

Reading Literature: Poetry (ENG 205)

Susan Stewart

An introduction to poetry from the middle ages to the present through close reading of a series of great poems–from medieval songs to Ginsberg’s “Howl”–and their criticism. We will invite living poets to come discuss their favorite poets of the past and we will attend a number of poetry events together.

Chaucer I: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (ENG 512)

Andrew Cole

In this course we carefully study Geoffrey Chaucer’s poetry and prose collected in the Canterbury Tales. We attend to the literary and historical contexts of the poet’s work; learn about the manuscripts that preserved and canonized his writing from the late fourteenth century on; and read a good deal of secondary criticism on both the poet and his times.

American Poetry- American Elegy (ENG 558)

Diana Fuss

This course examines the literary, social, and cultural importance of a body of American mourning poetry that, while immensely popular in its time, remains today largely under-read. Beginning in colonial America and moving through the eras of manifest destiny, world war, and psychoanalysis, we explore a range of personal and public elegies addressing the experiences of dying, loss, and grief, from deathbed to hospital bed, home front to battlefield, bourgeois parlor to rural woods.

20th Century French Poetry or Theater- Surrealism (FRE 525)

Efthymia Rentzou

This course examines the development of surrealism from its birth in Dada-infused Paris through its years of exile in New York to its decline after the Second World War. Materials considered include literary and theoretical texts, visual works (including film), and magazines. The course treats the topic at a variety of inter-related levels, exploring surrealism as part of the broad historical phenomenon of the avant-garde, examining its specific ways of (re)conceiving literature and art, and investigating the epistemological ramifications of surrealism’s aesthetic, political, and moral positions. (In English)

The Origins of Rome: Livy and Vergil (LAT 108)

Denis Feeney

Pushkin and His Time (SLA 413 / RES 413)

Ksana Blank

The course is envisioned as both a language and literature course. Readings and discussion will be in Russian. We will sample writings in many genres (lyric and narrative poetry, short prose, drama).

Major Russian Poets and Poetic Movements – Post-Symbolist Poets (SLA 518)

Olga P. Hasty

Milton (ENG 325)

Nigel Smith

Topics in Renaissance – Erotic Poetry (ENG 328)

Bradin Cormack

This class considers short poems of the 16th and 17th centuries that are variously concerned with love, desire, and sexual intimacy. What are the modes of address in the erotic lyric? How do poems make an erotic subject or erotic object? What is the social or political work of these poems? How might love and rhetoric or love and philosophy be themselves intimates?

The Romantic Period- Coming of Age in the Age of Romanticism (ENG 550)

Susan Wolfson

Lively questions of gender, poetic form, genre, narrative logic, literary imagination, socio-historical contexts and reception focus a study of five brilliant projects in Long Romanticism about growing up in the world: Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792); Wordsworth’s epic poetic autobiography, The Prelude (begun in 1798, pub. 1850), Byron’s Don Juan, published serially from 1819-1824; Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817, her earliest-drafted, posthumously pub. novel), and some of Browning’s autobiographically coded epic poem Aurora Leigh (1856–the decade of The Prelude).

American Literary Traditions – Postwar New York (ENG 555)

Joshua Kotin

This seminar focuses on the literature, art, and culture of postwar New York.

Creative Writing – Poetry (CWR 202)

Michael C. Dickman, James Richardson, Susan Wheeler, Monica Y. Youn

Advanced Creative Writing – Poetry (CWR 302)

Paul B. Muldoon, Claudia Rankine

Life is Short, Art is Really Short (CWR 315)

James Richardson

FALL 2016-2017

Intermediate Latin: Catullus and His Age (LAT 105)

This course aims at increasing facility in reading Latin prose and poetry and introduces students to the literacy culture of Republican Rome. We shall read selections from two important authors of the late Roman Republic, Caesar and Catullus.

Course Details

Creative Writing: Introductory Poetry (CWR 201)

James Richardson, Michael Dickman, Monica Youn, Susan Wheeler, Tracy K. Smith

Course Details

Advanced Creative Writing: Poetry (CWR 301)

Michael Dickman, Susan Wheeler

Course Details

Special Topics in Poetry: Race, Identity, and Innovation (CWR 316/ AAS 336/ AMS 396/ LAO 316)

Monica Youn

Course Details

Tutto Dante (ITA 304/ MED 304)

Simone Marchesi

This course covers the study of the entirety of Dante’s “Commedia” in connection with Dante’s other poetic and prose works in the vernacular. Highly interactive seminar, taught in Italian. (Thursdays 1:30 PM – 4:20 PM)

Course Details

Modern Poetry (ENG 362)

Joshua Kotin and Daniel Braun

Course Details

Early 17th Century: Polyglot Poetics: Transnationalism, Gender and Literature (ENG 532/ COM 531)

Nigel Smith

On the interaction of different vernacular literatures in early modern Europe in times of turbulent state formation, confessional difference and transcontinental imperial expansion. Through the careers of diplomats, exiles, actors, conquistadors and other travelers, we uncover the deep mutual interest of authors in their neighbors’ writings, a story obscured by emphasis upon classical antiquity’s continuing hold on learning. We consider work in all genres and are particularly concerned with the politics of theater; poetics; prosody; experiment; the attractiveness of translated prose fiction; philosophy and political theory therein. (Tuesdays 1:30 PM – 4:20 PM)

Course Details

Special Studies in the 19th Century: Poetry: From Phantasmagoria to Photography (ENG 553)

Isobel Mair Armstrong

This course is about the poetics of the lens and the mirror and their immanent presence in Romantic and Victorian poetry by men and women. The optical culture created by lens-made technologies developed from the late Enlightenment onwards saw the “high” science of the telescope and the microscope migrate to the popular screen images of the phantasmagoria, diorama, panorama, kaleidoscope and a host of optical toys exploiting visual ambiguities. Technologies of the lens and the mirror, from the phantasmagoria to photography, from astronomy to the magic lantern, had repercussions across aesthetics and politics. (Tuesdays 9:00 AM – 11:50 AM)

Course Details

Poetics: Modernist Poetics and its Discontents (ENG 563)

Robert Perelman

The disjunction between the poetics and the poetry of the modernist period is striking. The poetics–as articulated in statements by Pound, Stein, Eliot, Williams, Zukofsky, Olson–are fascinating, but they make equivocal guides to the writing itself. Stein’s lecture on <I>Tender Buttons</I> sheds only anecdotal light on that recalcitrant text; Zukofsky’s terse essays on poetry are of little help in reading the linguistic exuberance of his poetry; etc. We read, via exemplary excerpts, both sides of these improbable equations. (Wednesdays 9:00 AM – 11:50 AM).

Course Details

SPRING 2016

Homer (CLG 108)

Joshua D. Fincher

To learn to read Homer with pleasure. Introduction to Homeric dialect, oral poetry, and meter; discussion of literary technique, historical background to the epics, and Homer’s role in the development of Greek thought.

Creative Writing: Poetry (CWR 202)

Michael Dickman, Meghan O’Rourke, James Richardson, Tracy K. Smith, Monica Youn

Advanced Creative Writing: Poetry (CWR 302)

Marie Howe, Paul Muldoon

Czeslaw Milosz: Poetry, Politics, History (SLA 395/ RES 395)

Irena G. Gross

Polish-American poet Czeslaw Milosz won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1980. In this seminar, which combines textual analyses, history of literature and intellectual history, we will speak on the basis of his major works (and some of his contemporaries – Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott), about World War II, Polish-Russian relations, global dominance of English-language poetry, growth of high culture in the United States, and the decline of exile. (Wednesday 1:30-4:20 PM)

Dante’s Inferno (ITA 303/ MED 303)

Simone Marchesi

Life is Short, Art is Really Short (CWR 315)

James Richardson

Milton (ENG 325)

Russell J. Leo

We will explore John Milton’s entire career, largely as poet, but also as prose writer and thinker: a lifelong effort to unite the aims of intellectual, political and literary experimentation. In doing so Milton made himself the most influential non-dramatic poet in the English language. We will spend much time with Paradise Lost, regarded by many as the greatest non-dramatic poem in English or any modern language; we will encounter Milton’s profound, extensive learning and his startling innovations with words, and in ideas of personal, domestic and communal liberty. (Monday and Wednesday 10:00-10:50 AM).

Vergil’s Aeneid (LAT 333)

Yelena Baraz

This course will concentrate on the role of topography and landscape in the poem. Students will be required to participate in a trip to Italy over Spring Break. (Monday and Wednesday 1:30 PM -2:50 PM)

Verse in Shows: Poetry on Stage, 405 B.C.E- 2015 A.D. (ENG 384/ THR 338)

Stuart J. Sherman

From Attic tragedies to Broadway musicals, verse forms have been central to the way theater works. Playwrights have deployed them to deliver powerful, sometimes subliminal effects to the ears of audiences well-versed in registering them. In plays ranging from Euripides’ Bakkhai through Elizabethan and Restoration theater to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, we’ll look at, and above all listen for, the intricate interactions of verse, prose, and song, trying to work out how they may have operated on their original audiences (whose ears were often in such matters more acute than ours), and how we can make sense of and savor them now. (Tuesday and Thursday 1:30-2:50 PM)

Lyric Language and Form II: The Modern Period (COM 422/ ENG 423/ GER 422/ FRE 422)

Claudia Joan Brodsky

This course is the continuation of a 2-semester sequence for undergraduates and graduate students, but may be taken independently of the fall semester course (COM 421). We will focus on reading major poets of the modern period in English, French, German and Spanish with additional readings in the theoretical reflections on modernity, poetry, and the arts written by several of the poets we read. These include: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rilke, Celan, Garcia Lorca, Pax, Borges, Stevens, Bishop and Ashbery, among others. Secondary readings will include essays by major theorists and critics. (Monday 1:30-4:20 PM)

Classical Arabic Poetry (NES 527/ COM 508)

Lara Harb

This course introduces students to the major Arabic poets and poems from the pre-Islamic period up to and including the Mamluk period. The goal of the course is twofold: to increase the ease with which students are able to read classical Arabic poetry and to expand their knowledge of the various styles, genres and their development. Besides preparing the assigned poems, students are expected each week to put together a brief biographical sketch of the poets we are reading using primary sources exclusively. (This could be done collaboratively) Advanced knowledge of Arabic required. (Wednesday 1:30 – 4:20 PM).

French Modernist Poetry (FRE 525)

Efthymia Rentzou

This course investigates Modernist poetics in France from mid-19th to mid-20th c. and seeks to re-evaluate Modernism in French literary history. Course will treat the topic at a variety of interrelated levels by exploring French poetry as part of the broad historical phenomenon of Modernism, while examining the specific ways it materialized in France as formal innovation and as response to modernity. Seminal poets such as Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and Cendrars, will be discussed as well as specific movements. Readings and theoretical questions will also address the complex relationship between avant-garde and Modernism. (In English) (Wednesday 1:30-4:30 PM)

Modern European Fiction & Poetry (COM 559/ FRE 558)

David M. Bellos

A study of 20th century writing in European languages relying to some degree on the principle of constraint or ‘strict form’. Queneau, Calvino, Mathews, Perec, Roubaud and other members of Oulipo will constitute the central focus, but depending on students’ linguistic competences works by e.g., Harig, Kharms, Nabokov, Cortazar may be included. Attention is focussed on underlying principles as well as on practice and product. (Tuesday 1:30-4:20 PM)

Poetics: 19thC English and American Poetry: New Tools, New Archives (ENG 563)

Meredith Martin and Meredith McGill

Histories of 19th-C poetry are generally keyed to books and anthologies–breakthrough volumes, collected works, and influential collections. Yet a great deal of this poetry was printed in or supported by the circulation of periodicals, creating dynamic poetic cultures that were provisional, collaborative, and transatlantic. In this course we tackle head-on what the new availability of these resources means for the study of British and American poetry. How might the digitization of magazines, newspapers, and print ephemera change canonical literary histories? (Monday 1:30-4:20 PM)

The Evolution of Russian Poetic Form (SLA 512)

Michael A. Wachtel

FALL 2015

20th Century Poetry: Politics, Love, Religion, and Nature (FRS 111)

(Butler College Freshman Seminar)

Neil Rudenstine

This seminar focuses on the work of four major 20th-century poets, placing them in the context of their different eras: W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and Robert Frost. There will be weekly background readings that will suggest some of the ways in which the experience of political divisiveness, or impassioned love, or nature, or religious and spiritual values had a powerful effect on the writers we will be studying.

We will spend three weeks on each of the four writers, reading a rich selection of important poems in order to trace how the work and ideas of each poet developed over time. The seminar will be run as an active participatory discussion group. Writing: one modest-size paper on each poet. (Monday 1:30-4:20 p.m.)

The Lyric, the Long Poem, and the Sequence: 20th-Century British and Irish Poetry (FRS 137)

(Mathey College Freshman Seminar)

Clair Wills

This seminar will focus on close reading and analysis of a range of 20th-century poetic texts from Britain and Ireland. A major concern will be with the relationship between the lyric, on the one hand, and the long poem, sequence, or linked collection, on the other. What strategies have 20th-century poets used for building larger lyric structures, and what lies behind the impulse to do so? We will consider ways in which poets have attempted to respond to moments of historical crisis — the Irish Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, the Northern Irish Troubles, and environmental disaster — by stretching lyric form towards more open-ended and even “journalistic” and documentary structures. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, the Howard G. B. Clark ’21 University Professor in the Humanities and professor of creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts, will join us in December for a session focusing on his work. (Tuesday 1:30-4:20 p.m.)

Creative Writing: Poetry (CWR 201)

Michael C. Dickman, James Richardson, Tracy K. Smith, Susan Wheeler, Monica Y. Youn

Course Details

Advanced Creative Writing: Poetry (CWR 301)

Paul B. Muldoon, Monica Y. Youn

Course Details

Reading Literature: Poetry (ENG 205)

Susan A. Stewart, Tuesday 1:30-4:20

This course will introduce students to the art of poetry written, spoken and sung in English over the course of nearly a millennium. Surveying forms as various as ballads and meditations, and writers from anonymous to the Beats, we will consider poetry as a form of beauty and a way of knowing.

Course Details

Chaucer (ENG 312)

Andrew Cole, Tuesday and Thursday 3:00-4:20

Look up Geoffrey Chaucer in the Urban Dictionary, and you will find an entry describing him as the original urban dictionary, a “medieval poet” whose Canterbury Tales “is a collection of stories filled with plenty of swearing, slang, and fart jokes.” In this course we will read and discuss that Chaucer–the brilliant, hilarious, dirty poet of the Canterbury Tales. We will enjoy this fun, often moving text while learning about the poet’s artistry, both the literary traditions he so deftly works over, and the sexual, political, and religious issues he so astutely figures and, as is so often the case, perverts.

Course Details

Horace (LAT 331)

Denis Feeney, Monday and Wednesday 3:00-4:20

Close reading of selected Odes of Horace, considering his poetic program and techniques, together with the contemporary Augustan context.

Course Details

Beowulf (ENG 421 / MED 421)

Sarah M. Anderson, Wednesday 1:30-4:20

How does Beowulf work as a poem? In this course, we aim to find out, learning Beowulf through close study of its manuscript context and of its literary and historical milieux. Topics emphasized include the poem’s genre; its sources, analogues, and afterlives; its place in theories of oral performance; its aesthetics; and its troubled relationship to the culture(s) that wrote it and to the modern cultural investment in it. Tune up your harp, sharpen your wits, and get set to explore a startling and crucial text.

Course Details

Lyric Language and Form I (COM 421/ ENG 332)

Claudia Joan Brodsky, Monday 1:30-4:20

Lyric poetry has the uncanny capacity to surprise, and so inscribe itself in the mental life of its reader. This course aims at rendering that inscription indelible by uncovering some of the sources of surprise in the language and form of Renaissance through Romantic lyric works. First of a 2-semester sequence. Second semester on Modern Lyric. Either semester may be taken separately.

Course Details

Radical Poetics, Radical Translation (COM402 / TRA402)

Karen R. Emmerich, Wednesday 1:30-4:20

This course invites students to consider not just what poems mean but how they mean and how that complicates, challenges, obscures, enlivens, or collides with the task of translation. We will look at forms of poetry that challenge the limits of the translatable, as well as radical translation methods that expand our notion of what translation is. Examples include poems written in made-up languages; unstable texts; homophonic and visual translation; erasure poetics; and multilingual poems. Exploring the places where poetry and translation meet (or diverge), we will put traditional concepts of originality and derivation to the test.

Course Details

Chinese Poetry- The Classic of Poetry (Shijing) (EAS531)

Martin Kern, Monday 1:30-4:20

Course Details

Poetics: Capital and Poetics (ENG 563)

Keston Sutherland, Wednesday 6:00-8:50 PM

In this course we will read Marx’s Capital closely, chapter by chapter, with the aim of mobilizing some of the figures and latent concepts in the critique of political economy for use in thinking about radical poetry and poetics today. We will investigate how far Capital itself and the whole logic of the capital-relation depends on poetic figuration and whether or not Marx proposes a concept of poetry. Alongside Capital we will read work by contemporary poets in English.

Course Details

Poetry @ Princeton

Current Course Offerings

Past Offerings

Spring 2022

Fall 2021

Spring 2021

Fall 2020

1 Thought.