Department of English

Starting with Susan Howe on Anne Hutchinson’s antinomianism, the seminar will focus on the resistance to aesthetic and political authoritarianism and conformity and forms of individual and collective dissensus. Ports of call may include Poe (“The Poetic Principal” and poems), African-American slave songs, Emerson, Dickinson (with special attention to the manuscripts), Whitman, Dunbar, Stein, Williams (Spring and All), Stevens, Reznikoff, Tolson, Zukofsky, Sterling Brown, Olson, Creeley, Mac Low, Burroughs, Baraka, Spicer, Guest, Ashbery, Eigner and contemporaries including Robert Grenier, Lelie Scalapino, Peter Gizzi, Tracie Morris, NourbeSe Phillip, Harryette Mullen, and the new Best American Experimental Writing edited by Morris and me.  All this subject to revision! Syllabus will be posted in summer: http://writing.upenn.edu/bernstein/