Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011 or 2011.

2200 | MW 9:05-9:55 |Werner, Marta 

This course explores the first, vivid period of the colonial settlement of North America as it is recorded in the narrative, poetic, and mythic forms both indigenous and imported to the continent. Beginning with Native American myths that predate European arrival, and concluding with a work of fiction composed on the verge of the “flowering” of American prose and poetry in the nineteenth century, we will work our way—largely chronologically—through a multiethnic mix of historical, religious, autobiographical, and "literary" texts and voices to explore how those who lived here before us perceived and presented North America, how they saw themselves and others in this larger community and contact zone, and how their work continues to inflect our own complex national sense of identity and emplacement. Over the course of our work together, we will become familiar with the historical and cultural contexts surrounding the production of a given piece of literature and take time to identify and analyze the components, styles, and unique contents of these works that have simultaneously shaped and challenged our definitions of American expression.

Assignments

Your assignments will consist of a thoughtful Reading Journal (40 points), four brief Class Presentations (20 points), and a Mid-Term (20 points) and Final Exam (20 points).

Protocol

Lecture / discussion. I conceive of this class as a community where we gather as readers and writers to explore, discuss, and sometimes debate issues raised by the works we'll be reading. In order for the class to unfold successfully, everyone must keep up with the readings and be prepared to ask questions and comment on what you have read.

• General Education Requirement:
  • Content Area One (Arts & Humanities - Literature)
• English Major Requirements:
  • 2008-2016 Plans: Section B.1 (Survey and period courses before 1800) or F (Elective courses) and Distribution Requirement 1
  • 2017-2020 Plans: Section B.2 (American Literature) or F (Elective courses) and Distribution Requirement
  • 2021-2023 Plans: Core Category: Early Literary, Cultural, and Linguistic History or one of Four Additional Courses
    • Meets one requirement for the Literary Histories and Legacies Track

Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011 or 2011.

2401 | MW 11:15-12:30 |Werner, Marta 

The editors of the Academy of American Poets website remark, “Poetry is a human fundamental, like music. It predates literacy and precedes prose in all literatures. There has probably never been a culture without it, yet no one knows precisely what it is.” Over the centuries, poets themselves have offered a dizzying array of descriptions of their art. The baroque Jesuit poet Tomasso Ceva called poetry “a dream dreamed in the presence of reason.” The English Romantic poet Samuel Coleridge held that poetry equals “the best words in the best order.” Coleridge’s best friend William Wordsworth called poetry “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings . . . recollected in tranquility.” The American Modernist poet Wallace Stevens regarded poetry as “a revelation of words by means of the words.” Joseph Brodsky defined poetry as simply “accelerated thinking,” and Seamus Heaney called it “language in orbit.” Our focus this term will be on poets and poems that make us especially attentive to the prevailing set of conditions—that is to say, to the climate, the weather—of the planet and to our difficult, beautiful, entangled relationship to our earthly house. While our core readings will be of poetry written in English in the 20th and 21st centuries, we will also explore poems from the deeper past that cast light on our current questions. Throughout, we will approach poetry as itself a wild thing—looking at the ways poems “make strange” with language in order to give us access to ideas and experiences that elude ordinary modes of expression, and to defamiliarize the familiar world so that we may see and sense it again and anew.

Format: Lecture/discussion. The primary purposes of the course are to familiarize you with various ways to read and interpret poetry and to encourage you to study language in a careful, patient, and devoted manner. Rather than asking of poetry, “What does it mean?” our task this semester will be to ask instead, “How does this event in language make meaning?” and, further, “How does poetry use language to conjure what a shared reality might feel and look and sound like?” Toward these ends, you will read widely and wildly, take part in engaged class discussion, wander far afield in a reader’s notebook of annotations and exercises, and compose two exams (one at mid-term, one at the end of the course) demonstrating your knowledge of poetic forms and features and foregrounding your skills and creativity as a close reader of poetry.