Modern American Poetry
Al Filreis profile
TR 1:30-3
This is an intensive, rigorous seminar in which we will read and discuss a great range emporary United States poets--
from Pound to Perelman. Aside from providing a survey and chronology of twentieth-century poetry, this course will offer one--I think, helpful--way of understanding the transition from modernism to postmodernism. In other words, some students may wish to enroll as much to gain an understanding of the modernism-postmodernism problem through a study of recent poetry as to gain access to the work of these many poets. Thus, students need not have taken English 88, the intermediate-level version of this course, in order to take this one; indeed, students need not have prior knowledge of poetry or poetics, although a familiarity with writers and issues covered in English 201 works of fiction, autobiography, poetry, criticism and theory by black women writers that focus on slavery. We will also familiarize ourselves with the oral narratives of slaves, the legal cases and subsequent newspaper articles concerning slave women upon which some authors draw for their fiction. Artists include Harriet Jacobs, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Octavia Butler, Sherley Anne Williams, Dolores Kendricks, Marilyn Waniek, Toni Morrison, Michelle Cliff, Angela Davis, and Julie Dash.
updated 2006-10-12
