The seminar will interweave some key texts on ideology and culture with contemporary poetry and poetics, including a section on the persistence of “official verse culture.” Several guests will meet with the seminar: Rosmarie Waldrop (whose Reproduction of Profile will be considered in relation to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations), Jerome Rothenberg (ethnopoetics and the avant-garde), and Al Filreis (we’ll read his new Counter-Revolution of the Word). Sociological, and political works (sometimes just excerpts) will be chosen from a group that includes Althusser’s “Ideological State Apparatus,” Habermas’s Knowledge and Human Interest, Jameson’s The Political Unconscious and Prison House of Language, Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Foucault’s Power/Knowledge, Goffman’s Frame Analysis, and Anderson’s Concerning Western Marxism. Poetics will start with Blake and Swinburne’s Blake, and move on to Poe’s “Poetic Principle,” Hawthorne’s “Minister’s Black Veil,” Whitman’s “Respondez,” Dickinson, and Emerson, Wilde's "Critic as Artist," and go on to Wittgenstein, Weil, Stein, Duchamp, Russian and Italian Futurist and Surrealist manifestos, Irigeray, McGann’s Romantic Ideology, George Lakoff, Susan Stewart, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Erica unt, Clark Coolidge, Nathaniel Mackey, Nicole Brossard, Amiri Baraka, Susan Howe, Robert Grenier, Flarf/Conceptual poetry.
Undergraduates are not permitted to take 700-level courses.