Taking as a model Claudia Rankine’s Citizen—a call to action and at the same time an artful gathering of poems and images—this class will study collections whose principles of design call attention to themselves and to the roles of citizens in a complex society. Along with Rankine we will look at Walt Whitman’s “Live Oak With Moss” group and Emily Dickinson’s Fascicle 24, two collections of poems written in the context of sectional strife and civil war in the U.S. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Representative Men and Jorge Luis Borges’s A Universal History of Infamy present imaginative biographies that raise questions about what it means to be a hero—or a criminal. Two short-story collections, Herman Melville’s Piazza Tales and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, offer narratives of catastrophic displacement and unsettlement across a global span. What do collections say about humans as citizens? How can they offer new routes for imagination, inquiry, and activism?
