Important dates 2012-13 autumn term monday 1 October
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The Development of English Drama 1558-1659 – Dr Teresa GrantThis module will trace the development of the drama of the early modern stage, from the accession of Elizabeth I to the end of the English republic. We will investigate the playing conditions of the time which were affected both by the physical resources of the stage and the political contexts into which these works intervened. We will also take note of early modern literary criticism to discover how playwrights interacted with these ideas in their work. The course seeks to strike a balance between some of the most famous plays of the period, and lesser-known examples which feed into these dramatic traditions. We will develop an understanding of major dramatic trends, and the plays' significance in relation to Shakespeare and to their classical precursors, as well as the ways in which they reflect the political, religious and social concerns of their time. Set Plays: Anon., Gammer Gurton’s Needle (c. 1562)
Anon., The Tragedy of the Famous Roman Orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (1651), James Shirley, Cupid and Death (1653) and William Davenant, The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru (1658) in Janet Clare (ed.) The Drama of the English Republic 1649-60 (Manchester UP, 2002). .
Tutor: Jonathan Skinner Term 2 : Tuesday 10-1
Sound marks the “true north” of ecopoetics—not the only significant dimension of an environmental poetics, but often a reliable way to get oriented—a Compass Point for thinking, writing, speaking to get their bearings in a more-than-human world. An ecopoetics attends first by listening, whatever be its other vectors of engagement. (“Before it is polluted, the river wants to be heard,” writes Cecilia Vicuña.) Listening can be understood as a stance of participatory receptiveness, as much as an aural faculty (we can “listen” with our eyes or “sound” with science): it is difficult to be responsible to an environment, if we have not first listened in, to find out who is present
John Cage, “Music Loversʼ Field Companion,” Empty Words (excerpt) Emily Dickinson, "A route of evanescence" Larry Eigner, What you Hear (selections) Ronald Johnson, “ARK 38, Arielʼs Songs to Prospero Nathaniel Mackey, “Sound and Semblance” Lorine Niedecker, “Paean to Place” Maggie OʼSullivan, “Starlings” R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape (excerpt) First poem(s) and intial statement of poetics due.
Northeast points to conceptual and procedural writing: modes of writing keyed explicitly to the development of modernist poetics in the Western tradition (much more than to any orientation to more recent developments in poetics around the globe). [Something about managing information.] At the same time, conceptual and procedural writing offer tools for a kind of site-specific practice, at the “sites” of various discourses and institutions, like “ecology” itself, that make them absolutely contemporary. Jody Gladding, Translations from Bark Beetle Kenneth Goldsmith, The Weather (selection) Bernadette Mayer, Midwinter Day (excerpt) Stephen Ratcliffe, Real (selections) Ron Silliman, “Jones,” “Skies” (excerpts) Juliana Spahr, things of each possible relation hashing against one another (excerpt) Jonathan Stalling, “Wolf Howls” Poem(s) and poetics response due. Week 4 Documents and research Documentary and research-based practices work directly with history, and/or what has been documented, as their primary material. They orient attention against the movement of solar time, heirs to an Enlightenment quest to know what the day has so far illuminated—and what, as the case may be, official histories have obscured. Many of the poets at work in this vector provide strategies for the longterm incorporation of research into oneʼs poetics. Jack Collom, “Passage” (excerpt) Brenda Coultas, The Bowery Project (selection) Thalia Field; Bird Lovers, Backyard (excerpt) Susan Howe, “Thorow” Phil Metres, Oil (selections) Simon Ortiz, Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the Land (selection) Ed Sanders, Investigative Poetry (excerpt) Eleni Sikelianos, The California Poem (selection) Poem(s) and poetics response due.
Situationist work engages the dérive of research, turning the compass toward unknown outcomes. The unknown can emerge as much from standing oneʼs ground as from pursuing detours, and some of the poetics in this section emerges from an explicitly activist stance, literally placing or displacing poetry into public space and other less evidently poetic contexts, such as governmental hearings, farming, or architecture. Sometimes poetry goes undercover and is reframed as an architectural bureau or an art review. Here is the practice of “poetry by other means,” a reframing that situationist work holds in common with conceptual poetics—the difference being that conceptual practice emphasizes the aesthetic dimension while situationist practice may be tied more explicitly to political outcomes. Wendell Berry, Farming: A Manual (selection) Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand, Landscapes of Dissent (excerpt) Simon Cutts, “After John Clare: Proposal for the first Aeolian Neon, powered by wind turbine,” Allison Hedge Coke, Blood Run (selection) Brenda Hillman, Practical Water (selection) Joan Maloof, “September 11th Memorial Forest” Julie Patton, “Paper Toys,” Concrete Poetries, “Composaytions,” “Floor Plays,” “Recycle Pedias,” and “Vociflors” (photo portfolio) Heidi Lynn Staples and Amy King, eds., Poets for Living Waters (editorsʼ statement) Poem(s) and poetics response due.
As we turn south, we face the border and the boundary work that characterizes ecopoetics, as a practice of the ecotone. Ecopoetics entails working creatively with edges and the exploration of systems (ecosystems, economic systems, political systems, immune systems), from the inside as well as the outside, a doubled stance that poetry is especially adept at assuming. Borders above all entail acts of translation.
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, “Pollen” Robert Duncan, “The Opening of the Field” Lyn Hejinian, “The Quest for Knowledge in the Western Poem” (excerpt) Myung mi Kim, Dura (selection) Jena Osman, The System (selection) Gary Snyder, “Mount Saint Helens: Loowit” and “After Bamiyan” Arthur Sze, “The Redshifting Web” (excerpt) Poem(s) and poetics response due.
As ecopoetics turns west, toward the “future,” boundary work becomes a practice of interstices, of thinking and making between: between writing and drawing, between international modernist and traditional lineages, between North and South, in ways that seek to undo these binaries, or to develop them as complementary rather than opposed. “Mestizo poetics” seek a way forward without the myths of cultural and ecological purity that have been so frequently deployed to resist Western logocentrism. A new form of resistance to the “spell” of alphabetic literacy draws as much on European modernist innovation as on traditional indigenous practice.
Philippe Descola, Par-delà nature et culture / Beyond Nature and Culture (excerpt) Robert Grenier, OWL/ON/BOU/GH (selection) James Thomas Stevens, “A Half-Breedʼs Guide to the Use of Native Plants” (selections) Cecilia Vicuña, “Ten Metaphors in Space” Poem(s) and poetics response due.
A portfolio of 10,000 words (45 CATS), or 8,000 words (36 CATS) 6,000 words (30 CATS) or 5000 words (20 CATS). In all cases, students will submit a portfolio of 50% creative work and 50% essay Feminist Literary Theory – Dr Emma Francis (Term 1) This module considers some of the most important debates and trends in feminist literary theory of the last 3 decades. The field is situated in a trans-national frame and we begin with an examination of the parameters which structured Anglo-American and French feminist literary criticism in the 1980s. However, from the outset our focus will also be on the conflicts and collaborations engaged between ‘western’, ‘multicultural’ and ‘third world’ feminisms. Feminist literary theory has developed itself from a diverse range of knowledges, initially including Marxism, psychoanalysis and liberalism and subsequently gay and lesbian knowledges, queer theory, post-colonial theory and post-modernism. The impact of each on feminist literary theory and the canons it has constructed will be considered. We will look, in particular, at the use and abuse of writing by black women in the formation of feminist literary theory, the way in which white feminist critics have often recuperated black-authored texts and have avoided the interrogation of whiteness. Both literary study and feminism being among the least autonomous of intellectual fields, we will open up the question of feminist literary theory’s relationship with the projects of feminist cultural and social theory. We will think about the historicity of feminism’s engagement with literature - does it make sense to bring concepts generated by ‘feminism’ into dialogue with texts produced either chronologically or politically outside of modernity? Perhaps the most important question we will ask is: what are the accounts of ‘woman’ which feminist theories rest upon? As we will see, the demarcation between ‘literary’ and ‘theoretical’ texts has always been unstable within feminism and the course sets up a dialogue between the two categories. Some key ‘literary’ texts will be used as touchstones for our debates during the course. Mahasweta Devi, ‘Douloti the Bountiful’ from Imaginary Maps (1995) (xerox) Emily Dickinson, selected poems (1862) (xerox) Winifred Holtby, South Riding (1936) Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (c.1400) (the long text) (trans. Elizabeth Spearing, Penguin:2003 - it is essential you use this Penguin edition) Nella Larsen, Passing (1929) Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1928) There is no course reader, but Cora Kaplan’s Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism (Verso: 1986) and Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (ed) Feminist Postcolonial Theory (EUP: 2003) are important collections which will be drawn upon frequently. Jacqueline Rose’s Sexuality in the Field of Vision (Verso: 1986) contains key statements of feminism’s debates with psychoanalysis and cultural theory. Students may wish to read these in preparation. Freud’s Metapsychology: Trauma / Oedipus / Death Drive – Mr John Fletcher (Term 2) The course is designed as an introduction to some of the fundamental theories and concepts of psychoanalysis for literary students with no previous knowledge of the work of Freud or the post-Freudians. Unlike most academic psychology courses, it will take a text-based and historical approach, tracing the development of Freud’s thought through close readings of key essays, clinical case studies, and associated literary works. Concepts will be traced through their evolution, abandonment, retrieval, revision in texts from the 1890s to the 1920s and beyond. The course will start with the origins of psychoanalysis in trauma theories of hysteria, their apparent replacement by developmental models of sexuality and the Oedipus complex and the return of trauma in Freud’s final theory of the repetition-compulsion and the death drive and his associated analysis of the aesthetics of the Uncanny. It will also address the critical and revisionary work of Jean Laplanche with its return to trauma and the theory of seduction. Though the main focus of the course is theoretical, it will look at three literary works that narrate or stage these concerns: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, and two novellas by the early 19th century German Gothic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, Mademoiselle de Scudery and The Sandman. The course is a required foundation course for students taking the Literature and Psychoanalysis pathway, however it is also available to other MA students, and can count towards meeting the Critical Theory requirement of the MA in English Literature. The course starts on Tuesday of week 1, Term 1, so prospective students should prepare by reading the texts set for the first few weeks of term over the summer. Students considering taking the course should read Freud’s Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis, which is an exellent introduction to Freud's ideas and their developments and is available in an early out-of-copyright translation as a free download from http://www.rasch.org/over.htm The first of these lectures covers the question of trauma with which the course begins. An excellent, reader-friendly introduction for beginners is Josh Cohen's How to read Freud, Granta Books, available for only a few pounds on the internet (Amazon etc). For detailed information on set texts and weekly syllabus see course webpage: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/postgraduate/masters/modules/freudtexts INTRODUCTION TO PAN-ROMANTICISMS (note: if no time/day is listed, please check the MA website in late summer for information for 2012-13) Prof. Jackie Labbe (English), Dr. Sotirios Paraschas (French Time/Day: tbc Learning Outcomes: By the end of this module you should be able to
Module Description: This module aims to introduce students to types and styles of writing of the Romantic period both in Britain and abroad; to introduce students to key texts of the period from a transnational perspective; to provide students with a grounding in key tropes, images and contexts of the Romantic period; and to encourage students to see ‘Romanticism’ as a global (ie European) phenomenon. We will read examples of Romantic-period writing from four major locales: England, Germany, France, and Italy. All non-English texts will be available in translation, although students are encouraged to make use of any language skills they may have and read, whenever possible, in the original. Teaching Methods
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