English 262 - Fall, 2013

American Literature after 1914

Class Information

Instructor: Brown, Nathan
CRN: 53755
Time: W 3:10-6:00
Location: 120 Voorhies

Description

MODERNITY IN CONTRADICTION: MODERNIST POETRY AND POETICS

We will study major works of modernist poetry and poetics as a means of exploring the historical and theoretical ramifications of a simple thesis: that “modernism” is a reflexive inscription of the contradictory historical dynamics of modernity.

This will involve three primary threads of inquiry:

1) Close readings of volumes of poetry by Ezra Pound, H.D., Mina Loy, Jean Toomer, William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, and Lorine Niedecker, along with relevant periodicals and statements on poetics.

2) An analysis of the Marxist category of “real subsumption” as it bears upon the social relations and processes of modernity (especially “urbanization”), upon the dialectical relation between capital accumulation and technological innovation, and upon the conditions and concerns of literary production.

3) A comparative study of major conceptual and historical problems in modernist painting.

Along with volumes of poetry, we will read critical and theoretical texts by Karl Marx, Michel Aglietta, Thierry De Duve, T.J. Clark, Hugh Kenner, Douglas Mao, Michael North, and others.

Texts

Personae, Ezra Pound
Sea Garden, H.D.
The Lost Lunar Baedecker, Mina Loy
Cane, Jean Toomer
Discrete Series; Of Being Numerous, George Oppen
North Central, Lorine Niedecker
Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity, Ed. Jed Rasula and Tim Conley
Course Reader
Spring and All, William Carlos Williams