English 166 - Spring, 2014

Love & Desire in Contemporary American Poetry

Class Information

Instructor: Brown, Nathan
CRN: 22584
Time: TR 10:30-11:50
Location: 106 Olson

Description

What is the difference between love and desire? How are they entangled? What are their boundaries? And how does their bounded or unbounded entanglement entangle us also in the lives of others not only one by one, but in the social and political life of the collective? The codes of love and desire constrain us, certainly, but what remains of the revolutionary potential of their recoding? Beyond the myriad tragedies to which they give rise, or the bland hijinks of romantic comedy, what kind sort of liberatory power do love and desire still possess?

We will take up these and other questions by thinking through the inscription of love and desire in poetic form. Reading whole volumes rather than discrete poems, we will read some incredible books! These approach the relation between love and desire, through writing, in some unexpected ways, dwelling on fast food and pornography, insurrectionary politics, achingly real sincerity or glib irony, performance and costume, contemporary mythology, the objectifying embodiment of “race,” the queer recombinations of genetic engineering, and the mediation of our image of others by reading.

Grading

Attendance and Participation: 15%
Weekly Discussion Posts: 15%
Essay #1: 20%
Essay #2: 30%
Final Exam: 20%

Texts

Caroline Bergvall, Goan Atom
Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
Dianne DiPrima, Revolutionary Letters
Jean-Marie Gleize, Tarnac, A Preparatory Act
Aaron Kiely, The Best of My Love
Ariana Reines, Coeur de Lion
Juliana Spahr, thisconnectionofeveryonewithlungs
Joe Wenderoth, Letters to Wendy's
Ronaldo V. Wilson, Poems of the Black Object
Allyssa Wolf, Vaudeville