English 262 - Spring, 2017

American Literature after 1914

Class Information

Instructor: Clover, Joshua
CRN: 91283
Time: T 12:10-3:00
Location: 120 Voorhies
Breadth: Later American
Focus: Genre

Description

POETRY AND THE POLITICAL RETURN

This course reads Anglophone/mainly US poetry from the late sixties to the present in the context first of the political turn in poetries associated with New Social Movements, often set in opposition with a formalist avant-garde; and then the political return with a difference of that dynamic in the present, as various kinds of militant poetics (from ultraleft to #BlackLivesMatter to revolutionary feminist) are posed against contemporary avant-gardes such as conceptual poetry. The poetry will be read against the century’s debates regarding aesthetic and politics, “autonomous” and “committed” poetry, and so on. 

MOST reading will mostly be poems and essays that will br provided digitally and/or can be found autonomously, and will not be listed under TEXTS below (where only full books are listed). They include

Poetry: Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, Sonia Sanchez, Diane Di Prima, Jayne Cortez, Ron Silliman, Robert Perelman, Lyn Hejinian, Morgan Parker, Nourbese Philip, Juliana Spahr, Jasper Bernes, Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place

Critical: Aesthetics and Politics (various authors); Tom Clark, “Stalin as Linguist”;  Ron Silliman, “Poetry and the Politics of the Subject”; Watten, “The Turn to Language”; Moten, from In The Break;  Adrienne Rich, “Conditions for Work: The Common World of Women”;  Jan Clausen, from A Movement of Poets: Thoughts on Poetry and Feminism

Periodizing frameworks: Arrighi, from The Long Twentieth Century; Brenner, from The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945-2005.

Grading

A mix of final paper (conference length, developed over the term), contribution to seminar discussion, and general decency.

Texts

Aesthetics and Politics, Adorno et al