LIT 3314 Studies in Poetry T and Th, 2:30 to 3:45, Fall 2016, SLC 1.202 Dr. Sean Cotter sean.cotter@utdallas.edu Office: JO 5.106 Office Hours: s 11:00 12:00, and by appointment Continental Modernist Poetry: New Souls, New Words This course surveys the poetry of the European continent during a time of great change: the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. The pulse of this poetry is intimately connected with the wide variety of transformations in this period. Political change (World War One, the Russian Revolution, and the fall of three empires), social change (the expansion of industrialization, colonialism, and urban centers), and technological change (the telephone, the airplane, even the matchstick) all produce a dissatisfaction with earlier modes of poetry, earlier vocabularies, forms, and attitudes. The result is an exciting period of experiment and creativity in which poets investigate the nature of their art. At the center of their probing is a simple question: in this new world, who are we? Does the coming of a new world mean a new soul, a new language, to create a new poetry? The list of poets will include: Charles Baudelaire, Anna Akhmatova, Rainer Maria Rilke, Edith Sodergran, Lucian Blaga, Federico García Lorca, and others. We will also read some short plays, a hybrid prose work, and manifestoes from movements such as Dada and Surrealism. Participation Policies Classes begin and end at the same time for all involved. You should arrive before class-time and stay for the entire session. Attendance will be recorded with a roll-sheet. You must sign in to be recorded present. I understand that occasionally circumstances arise (e. g. car trouble, childcare complications, illness) which cause you to miss class. For this reason, you are allowed to miss three meetings over the course of the term. You do not need to explain these absences. Absences beyond this limit will result in a significant reduction of your final grade, up to three letter grades. It is your responsibility to make your presence and interest in the class known to your instructor. Ways to demonstrate engagement include: participation in classroom discussion, visits to office hours, use of the writing lab, or discussions over email. I use email filters to make sure class messages are not lost. For this reason, please include LIT 3314 in your subject line. Please use the address at the top of the syllabus.
Assignments You will be responsible for mastering all the material on the syllabus, participating in class discussions, and completing all assignments. I may adjust your mathematical average grade up or down to reflect your participation. Your average will have four parts, weighted roughly as follows: reading journal 20%, essay 30%, midterm 20%, final exam 30%. The reading journal is due on elearning before each class. These are graded out of ten. The overall grade for the journal is the sum of the top ten entries. Comment on a particular, brief passage from that week or the previous week s readings. Retype it (unless we are discussing films) and spend an additional 250 to 300 words discussing why this passage is important to understanding the work, author, or movement as a whole. You might consider these questions, to get started: what ideas seem important to the author? Why is the author using this particular form? How is the text supposed to work? What does it feel like to read it? Your essay is due November 10th. I will provide topics. It is possible, though not advisable, to extend the deadline, provided there is good reason. To ask for an extension, write me an email before 5 pm, November 8th, giving a reason for the extension and the date you will turn the assignment in. The maximum extension is one week past the original date. Extensions cannot be extended. Your papers will be graded and returned roughly in the order they arrive. An essay not turned in either on time or by the extended deadline is late; late assignments receive zero credit. It is better to turn something in than to turn nothing in. The midterm and final exams will ask for a combination of factual knowledge of the readings, interpretative knowledge of individual works, and synthetic knowledge of the connections between works and the broad ideas of the class. The final is comprehensive. Paper-Writing Guidelines, in Brief A five-page paper ends on the sixth page. Use one to one and one-quarter inch margins (no more, no less). Print your paper on one side of the page, double-spaced, in a twelve-point font. Use black ink on white paper. Use a font similar to that used for this page; no sans-serif fonts. Do not use a cover sheet, binder, or slipcover. In the upper left corner of the first page, type your name, the course title and section number, the date the paper is turned in, and my name. The paper s title (a helpful title, not The Different Translations of Kafka ) follows, centered, on the next line. The title should not be in underlined or bolded. Starting with page two, each page has your last name and the page number in the upper right corner. Do not justify your paragraphs. Indent paragraphs one-half inch, block quotes one inch. Block quotes are double-spaced and not centered. Please note that underlining and italics are used for exactly the same purposes. I prefer that you use italics. Do not use footnotes. Cite all quotations, direct and indirect, using Modern Language Association format. Any paper suspected of plagiarism will be sent to the Dean of Students. The MLA format uses parenthetical citations at the end of the sentence: as he later writes, time and again the only meaning of correct is traditional
(Kenner 216). The author s name and the page number (or line number) of the quote are included just before the final punctuation for in-sentence quotes, just after the punctuation for block quotes. The author s name refers to a Works Cited listing, which you should include as an appendix to your paper. This list includes the author s name, the book s title, it s translator, the city of publication, the publishing house, and the year published: St. Augustine. Confessions. Trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin. London: Penguin, 1961. Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. If you are comparing two translations, and it would be confusing to refer to them both by the original author, use the translator s name in the citation Ciardi s version of the same passage is deceptively simple, Midway in our life s journey, I went astray (Ciardi 28). and on the Works Cited page: Ciardi, John, trans. The Inferno. By Dante. NY: Mentor, 1982. Your paper will be graded in part by the above guidelines, but primarily I will be looking for a paper that is strongly and simply written. The argument should show serious and creative engagement with the text. The introduction should have a clear thesis and forecast the organization of your paper. The body paragraphs should be focused and build from one to the next. You should explain your position using examples from the text, but only quote as much as you use. Transitions should be smooth. The conclusion should gather together the pieces of the argument to show what the reader has gained by reading the essay. Neither the introduction nor the conclusion should contain general statements about history, time, humankind, poetry, or literature. Proofread carefully. Trade papers with a classmate; you learn a great deal by proofreading and commenting on another essay. Lastly, your paper will be much improved if you write a complete draft, let it sit two days or so, and then re-write it. Texts Readings All books required for this class may be purchased at both the on-campus and off-campus bookstores. Below, an asterisk marks those readings available on elearning. Baudelaire, Charles. Paris Spleen. Trans. Louise Varèse. New Directions, 1970. 0811200078 Breton, André. Nadja. Trans. Richard Howard. Grove Press, 1994. 0802150268 Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey. Norton, 2010. 0393304515 Lorca, Federico García. Selected Verse. Revised ed. Farrar, 2004. 0374528551 Rilke, Rainer Maria. Selected Poems. Trans. Stephen Mitchell. Vintage, 1989. 0679722017
Schedule The authors are listed with their birth and death dates, as well as their work s original language. Please keep in mind that the language is frequently not the same as the author s ethnicity or nationality. Introductions August 23 August 25 Charles Baudelaire (1821 1867), French 1 30. August 30 September 1 Baudelaire, 31 108. *Walter Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, trans. Harry Zohn, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arent (Schocken, 1969) 155 200. September 6 *Stéphane Mallarmé (1842 1898), French Music and Letters, trans. Barbara Johnson, Divagations (Belknap Press, 2007) 173 198. - - -, The Book as Spiritual Instrument, Johnson, 226 230. - - -, A Throw of the Dice, Collected Poems, trans. Henry Weinfield (U California P, 1994) 121 146. September 8 *Anna Akhmatova (1889 1966), Russian The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, expanded edition, trans. Judith Hemschemeyer (Boston: Zephyr Press, 1997) 81 112, 373 395. September 13 *Antonio Machado (1875 1939), Spanish Selected Poems, trans. Alan S. Trueblood (Harvard, 1982) 109 205.
September 15 September 20 Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 1926), German 25 69 Rilke, 151 211, 227 255 September 22 September 27 *Stephen Kern, Speed, The Culture of Time and Space, 2nd ed. (Harvard, 2003) 109-130. *Fillipo Tommaso Marinetti (1876 1944), French and Italian Futurism, an Anthology, ed. and trans. Lawrence Rainey et. al. (Yale UP, 2009) 49 53, 84 104, 119 129, 175 180, 264 269, 283 298, 425 427, 431 436. September 29 October 4 *Guillaume Apollinaire (1880 1918), French Poems for the Millenium, vol. one, ed. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris (U California P, 1995) 119 131. *Tristan Tzara (1896 1963), French Seven Dada Manifestoes, The Dada Painters and Poets, ed. Robert Motherwell, 2 nd ed. (Harvard UP, 1951) 75-98. - - -, Chanson Dada, trans. Lee Harwood (Boston: Black Widow Press, 2005), 16 43, 78 83 Hugo Ball (1886 1927), German Flight out of Time, trans. Ann Raimes (U California P, 1974) 64 106. - - -, The Complete Sound-Poems of Hugo Ball, Poems for the Millenium, vol. one, ed. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris (U California P, 1995) 294 297. Kurt Schwitters (1887 1948), German Ur Sonata, PPPPPP, ed. and trans. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris (Temple UP, 1993) 52 80. October 6 Mid-term exam
October 11 *Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 1900), German The Birth of Tragedy, trans. William Hausmann, ed. O. B. Hardison, Jr., Modern Continental Literary Criticism (NY: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962) 228 238. *Georg Kaiser (1878 1945), German From Morning to Midnight, trans. J. M. Ritchie, German Expressionist Plays, ed. Ernst Schürer (Continuum, 2005) 146 197 October 13 *Gottfried Benn (1886 1957), German Primal Vision, ed. E. B. Ashton (New Directions, 1971) 213 237. *Georg Trakl (1887 1914), German Poems, trans. Stephen Tapscott (Oberlin College Press, 2011) 3 25. *Else Lasker-Schüler (1869 1945), German Poems for the Millenium, vol. one, ed. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris (U California P, 1995) 268 271. October 18 *Ernst Toller (1893 1939), German Masses and Man, trans. Vera Mendel, Schürer 198 243. *Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Literature and Art [selections], ed. O. B. Hardison, Jr., Modern Continental Literary Criticism (NY: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962) 112 120. October 20 *Lucian Blaga (1898 1961), Romanian At the Court of Yearning, trans. Andrei Codrescu (Ohio State UP, 1989), 3 10, 37 47, 81 104, 133 143, 162 63 October 25 Sigmund Freud (1856 1939), German All. October 27 Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, dir.s, Un chien andalou, 1929. (https://youtu.be/bikyf07y4ka) - - -. L age d or, 1930
(https://youtu.be/ac5j_-a3hyw) November 1 Andre Breton (1896 1966), French * Manifesto of Surrealism, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen Lane (U of Michigan P, 1972) ix 47. * Surrealism [selections], Poems for the Millenium, vol. one, ed. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris (U California P, 1995) 470 505. November 3 November 8 Breton, Nadia 11 60. Breton, Nadia 63 160. November 10 *Aime Cesaire (1913 2008), French Poems for the Millenium, vol. one, ed. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris (U California P, 1995) 561 565, 575 582. *Leopold Senghor (1906 2001), French Poems from Black Africa, ed. Langston Hughes, (Indiana UP, 1967) 137 143. Essay due November 15 *C. P. Cavafy, 1863 1933, Greek Collected Poems, trans. Edmund Keely and Philip Sherrard, rev. ed. (Princeton UP, 1992). 3 48, 82 119, 145 154. November 17 *Edith Södergran, 1892 1923, Swedish Love & Solitude: Selected Poems, trans. Stina Katchadourian (Berkeley: Fjord Press, 1981).
November 22-24 Fall Break November 29 Federico García Lorca (1898 1936), Spanish 31 63, 203 284. December 1 December 6 Lorca 285 337. Conclusions TBA Final exam Bring two blue books The information contained in the following link constitutes the University s policies and procedures segment of the course syllabus. Please go to http://go.utdallas.edu/syllabus-policies for these policies. The descriptions and timelines contained in this syllabus are subject to change at the discretion of the Professor.