ENH4030

Poetics

Not offered in 1999

K Hart

12 points - 2 hours per week - Second semester - Clayton

Objectives On the successful completion of this subject students should have gained a detailed knowledge of the works of four major American poets (Stevens, Moore, Bishop, Ashbery); a clear awareness of the differences between hermeneutics and poetics; an understanding of what the field of poetics constitutes both historically and conceptually; a knowledge of the basic questions and answers in the field of poetics; a demonstrated ability to relate questions of poetics to individual poems; and a demonstrated ability to write coherently, concisely and logically on a range of poems from the point of view of poetics.

Synopsis Poetics is the theory of poetic discourse. In this seminar we will look closely at the work of four twentieth-century American poets: Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery. Part of our interest will inevitably be hermeneutical: the question 'What is being said?' has to be posed and answered. This is preliminary, though, to the guiding question of poetics: 'How is it being said?' In order to answer that question we have to know about genres, poetic forms, metre and rhetoric; and we will find this out from the usual classical sources. But we also need to know about discourse theory and narratology, not to mention modern theorisations of genre, poetic form and rhetoric: so we will also look at some essays by contemporary critics, including Harold Bloom, John Hollander and Paul de Man. Not surprisingly some of the most penetrating remarks about poetics are made by poets. We will therefore also learn from observations made by the four poets whose writings we will read as well as from others: Yves Bonnefoy, Osip Mandelstam and Paul Valéry, among others.

Assessment Two essays (4500 words each, 50% each): 100%

Prescribed texts

Ashbery J Selected poems Penguin
Bishop E The complete poems Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Moore M Complete poems Faber
Stevens W The palm at the end of the mind Vintage Books

Preliminary reading

Dorsch T S (tr.) Classical literary criticism Penguin

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