21L.325 Small Wonders

Prereq: none
Units: 2-0-4 Can be repeated for credit

[First Half Term: Ends Oct 18] In this six-unit Samplings subject, we read poems (chiefly lyrics, all in English) written the “first person” and voiced as “I” (and sometimes as “we.”) We start with the Romantic egotistical sublime (chiefly John Clare, William Wordsworth) and wonder how this tradition is grounded in the grand subjective negativity of Satan in Milton’s “Paradise Lost”; then we move through 19th century attempts to broaden or refine their position (emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning),  then modernist assertions that poetry is “impersonal “ anyway (Eliot , Gertrude Stein , Langston Hughes, Ravindranath Tagore, Ezra Pound’s translations of Chinese poems .)We move through the confessional poets (Plath,Sexton), and their reliance on existentialist self-assertion., then conclude with recent work (Elizabeth Bishop, Florence Anthony, Joy Harjo) that joins the personal with social-group identification and collective identities. Along the way, we look at parallel descriptions of “identity” formation from other discourse: Freudian psychology, ego psychology, narrative theory, liberationist ideologies, and questions of situated knowledge. Discussions, several short papers.