Department of English

The seminar will follow up on the 2005 MLA Convention Presidential Forum and its many related panels. The focus is on the poetics of sound and related issues of poetry and performance, including Jacques Attali's Noise, Reuben Tsur's What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive & his more recent work on cognitive poetics, Andrew Welsh's Roots of Lyric, and essays in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word and Adelaide Morris's Sound States and Dennis Tedlock's The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation. There will be a focus on sound reproduction technologies as they affect poetry. Al Filreis will lead one seminar on Wallace Stevens; Susan Howe will give a lecture on Stevens, Jonathan Edwards and her own work.  Additional sections on sound poetry (from Dada and Schwitters to Chopin, McCaffery, Bok and Bergvall). Full syllabus at http://www.writing.upenn.edu/bernstein/syllabi/795.html