English 262-2 - Winter, 2013

American Literature After 1914

Topic: Poetry In Crisis: North American Poetics 1973-2008

Class Information

Instructor: Clover, Joshua
CRN: 73751
Time: W 3:10-6:00
Location: 120 Voorhies
Breadth: Later American
Focus: Genre

Description

ENL 262: Poetry In Crisis: North American Poetics 1973-2008

This course will read US (and Canadian) poetry from the sixties onward in the context of a double crisis: poetry in the situation of crisis, and the crisis of poetry as cultural form.

The first is largely that of economic/hegemonic crisis centered in the United States, in the period spanned by the two late modern crises c. 1973 and 2008: how poetry fashioned itself in relation to the situation of crisis (and here I include ecological crisis as part of the same nexus); how the category of crisis helps us think poetry, and how the poetry and poetics of the era helps us think crisis.

The second sense of the course’s title is inseparable from the first: the sense that poetry itself, especially the lyric, as a cultural form (much less a privileged one) is itself marked as being in a state of crisis in this period, its audience denuded, its character and purpose uncertain.

In this period, often identified with the fragmenting or dissolution of the modern lyric tradition, poetry increasingly takes up not just the question of crisis in general but of its relation to empire and economy — inquiring after and modeling the changes in the lifeworld of late capitalism from globalized interconnection to immaterial labor, from the obdurate quality of the built world to the vast accelerations of finance. It is awesome and terrible.

Readings will follow three strands.

1) Signal books of poetry from this period.
2) Studies of poetry (or literature more broadly) in the context of crisis.
3) Crisis theory as such.
[many of the listings below will be read only in selection]

Grading

In addition to regular attendance, completion of all readings, and extensive participation in seminar (including leading one discussion), students will submit a final seminar paper reading a significant text from this period in the context of crisis. This text will be off-syllabus and chosen by the student, subject to instructor's approval.

Texts

Three Poems, John Ashbery
My Vocabulary Did This To Me, Jack Spicer
Zong!, M. NourbeSe Philip
R's Boat, Lisa Robertson
This Connection of Everybody With Lungs, Juliana Spahr
Golden Age of Paraphernalia, Kevin Davies
The Long 20th Century, Giovanni Arrighi
Aesthetics and Politics , various
The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, Kristin Ross
The Matter of Capital, Christopher Nealon
The New Spirit of Capitalism, Boltanski & Chiapello
Capital Vol. 1, Karl Marx