Arts and Literature

Modern and Postmodern Poetry
56:606:610:H6
Cross Listed: 56:350:593:01/50:350:393:01
M/T- 6-8:30 pm

Instructor: Professor BarbareseAn in-depth study of poetic development in English and American poetry from Yeates to the present, the course begins with an overview of the backgrounds of Modernism in Whitman and Tennyson and the Romantics, then confronts the poetry of the High Modernists (Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Auden, Lawrence, Hart Crane), and continues past mid-century into Post-Modernism, with readings in the Beats, especially Ginsberg, The Confessional School (Plath, Sexton, Berryman and Lowell), the New York School (Ashbery and O’hara), the polemical poets of the Sixties and beyond (Brooks, Baraka [“Somebody Blew up America”]), Clifton. We will place emphasis on the philosophical and political contexts of the writers. A particular interest of the course, informed by the candidacy examination reading lists, is in the long poem-from The Waste Land, “Sunday writers Morning,” portions of The Cantons, and The Bridge up to and including Ginsberg’s “Howl”, Ashbery’s “The Skaters” and Ammons’ Tape for the Turn of the Year. We will also attempt to produce a synthetic view of the Romantic and Modernist periods reflected in criticism of the past two decades. Two brief papers and a presentation.

Literary and Cultural Constructions of Childhood
56:352:580:D6
Cross listed with Liberal Studies 56:606:611:D6
M/T 6-9:40 pm
Instructor: Professor Singley

A study of changing representations of childhood in literary and cultural texts, including the impact of childhood on imagination and intellectual and aesthetic traditions. Assignments include two short essays, an oral presentation, and a final paper.

Capstone Research
56:606:689:H1
By permission of the instructor
7/6/2015-8/12/2015