Eclipses and Ellipses

Things are moving so quickly now. My visa application's ongoing, I've registered online for 3 classes already, and I've started the grand task of sifting through my accumulated junk, choosing which to store, which to give away, and which to bring with me.

Nakaka-overwhelm ang mga courses, ang dami ko kasing gustong kunin. But aside from my Bibliography class and the writing workhops, I'm only allowed 4 electives. Here are my top 4 choices:

5003HF "The Strong Music of Hard Times": Poetry in the 1930s

The political and economic climate of the 1930s had profound effects on the supposedly insular world of poetry. Increasing interest in communism in Europe and North America, the rise of fascism, the Spanish Civil War, and the extremes of wealth and poverty pressured poets to treat “unpoetic” subjects and to align their work with clearly marked margins on the left or right. In this course, we shall consider how a number of major poets responded to this situation, sometimes by adopting the prescribed alignments, but also by questioning the parameters of political choice, unravelling differences, arguing for more nuanced political and literary responses to the situation, and seeking to shape and reshape the cultural discourse rather than being shaped by it. Authors studied will include Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, Louis Zukofsky, Marianne Moore, Muriel Rukeyser, and others.

5493HS The Limits of Attention: Pound/Ginsberg, Ashbery/Stein

A course arranged as two diptychs, each with one Modern and one Postmodern writer, and concerned with the commanding theme of attention. How do these writers exploit the reader’s attention and remark upon it, its contemporary limits especially? Encyclopedists all by inclination, the quartet we will read include and hide so much in their writing (and write so much) that the reader’s attention is strained. What is of value and what are the problems with this encyclopaedic impulse? How do these writers differ from each other, and what is their relationship to likeminded writers of the past? Does their work tell us much about how we pay attention when we read? Does it tell us much about how we have attended, and do attend, to ourselves in the world? We will read the writers in the order in which they are listed in the title of the course. In doing so we will cover a significant range of avant-garde American writing of the twentieth century.

5483HF Lillian Hellman and Tennessee Williams: Ethics, Authorship, and the Right to Privacy

This course focuses on ethical, legal, and political aspects of fiction making in the works of Lillian Hellman and Tennessee Williams, two American authors and celebrities, most famous as playwrights but accomplished in diverse genres. Hellman and Williams, in their works and lives, raise issues about lying and truth-telling that can be situated within broader cultural concerns about authenticity and private life. We will historicize and question the validity of the “author function” and reassess the value of the author’s intentions as a meaningful tool of literary criticism. We will study their plays, memoirs, letters, and films, as well as relevant legal documents and recorded conversations that raise questions about public morality and free speech in an age of mass media, economic upheaval and war.

5523HS The Avant-Garde: Theory and Practice
Taken literally, the term “avant-garde” seems simple enough, describing those artists and writers who are “ahead of their time.” Yet its origin as a military term, and its associations with political as well as stylistic radicalism, suggests that the avant-garde has always been as much a social as an aesthetic phenomenon, one peculiar to the twentieth century. We will read theoretical accounts of the avant-garde, from Renato Poggioli to Peter B?rger, which attempt to explain the avant-garde’s origin, social function, and (perhaps) its endpoint. We will take a historical view of two early twentieth-century avant-gardes, Dada and the Harlem Renaissance, to see how they formed a template for later avant-gardes. Finally, we will turn to recent American art and writing, from the New York School to Language poetry, to ask whether a contemporary avant-garde is possible and what it might look like. Authors include Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, John Ashbery, Peter B?rger, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Langston Hughes, Steve McCaffery, Frank O’Hara, Marjorie Perloff, Renato Poggioli, Hans Richter, and Gertrude Stein.