English 262 - Winter, 2011

American Literature after 1914

Class Information

Instructor: Brown, Nathan
CRN: 43943
Time: R 12:10-3:00
Location: 248 Voorhies
Breadth: Later American
Focus: Genre, Interdiscipline

Description

This course will involve an intensive study of the work of Charles Olson, with particular attention to three questions crucial to understanding its contextual and contemporary significance: How did Olson’s poetics respond to the formal and conceptual challenges suggested by twentieth century science (especially the results of post-classical physics,contemporary biology, the development of cybernetics and information theory)? How was “Black Mountain Poetry” situated within the larger field of artistic practice at Black Mountain College (especially painting, music, dance, architecture/design)? How did problems of aesthetic form addressed in postwar poetics correspond to transformations of political economy (the transition to global capitalism, the rise of neo-liberalism, the society of the spectacle)? Throughout our engagement with these questions, we will be persistently concerned with the relationship between two concepts at the core of Olson’s poetic practice: “object” and “field.”

The course will begin with a close reading of Olson’s first volume of poetry, _In Cold Hell, in Thicket_, in conjunction with his major statements on poetics, attending in particular to their scientific and philosophical sources. We will then consider the relationship of Olson’s work to that of other artists at Black Mountain College (including Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Ed Dorn, Merce Cunningham, John Cage) as well as his correspondence with Creeley, Frances Boldereff, and Cid Corman. The final four weeks of the course will be devoted to Olson’s major work, the _Maximus Poems_, with an emphasis on how its poetics of place responds to the relationship between aesthetic form and political economy.

Texts marked with an asterisk will be made available in a course reader, but, in most cases, used copies are also widely available.

Texts marked with two asterisks are recommended, not required, reading.

Texts

Charles Olson, Letters for Origin*
Charles Olson, Mayan Letters*
Charles Olson, Collected Prose
Charles Olson, Maximus Poems
Charles Olson, In Cold Hell, In Thicket*
Charles Olson , The Special View of History*
George Butterick, A Guide to the Maximus Poems
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World
Vincent Katz, Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art*
Norbert Wiener , The Human Use of Human Beings**
Robert Creeley, Collected Poems: 1945-1975**
Robert Duncan, The Opening of the Field**
Denise Levertov, Collected Earlier Poems: 1940-1960**
Ed Dorn, Collected Poems**