English 166 - Summer Sessions II, 2018

Love & Desire in Contemporary American Poetry

Class Information

Instructor: Ronda, Margaret
CRN: 71508
Time: MTW 2:10-3:50
Location: 1130 Bainer

Description

This course will examine the “lover’s discourse” of late twentieth- and twenty-first- century American poetry. We will consider how poems represent the various states and stages of eros through different genres, tropes, and figures. We will also explore the necessarily political and cultural valences of love, from queer intimacies to ecological interrelation to revolutionary desire. And we’ll think, as well, about how various poems portray the ends of love, what Roland Barthes calls its “last words.”

Texts

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, Ross Gay
this connection of everyone with lungs, Juliana Spahr
Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Vol 2, Jahan Ramazani
Bluets, Maggie Nelson