Approaches to Genre: Lyric Poetry

[Note: “American” will here mean primarily “U.S.”; but the course will also pay significant attention to Canadian and Latin American poetry and criticism.]

What are some of the ways, in our recent past and contemporary moment, that a groundbreaking poetry–radically innovative in form and content, with extraordinary international resonance, perceived on all sides to have gone for broke–may find its poetics taken up by artists of different languages, cultures, and sociopolitical situations?  This course will seek to reconstruct and reconsider a telling case in the history of this inherently comparatist question: American poetry and criticism’s receptions of and responses to Paul Celan (1920-1970) (often deemed one of Europe’s greatest poets–perhaps its greatest, and its most influentially experimental–since 1945).  We’ll begin by spending five or six weeks reading Celan’s poetry, primarily in English (and sometimes in Spanish, French, or Portuguese) translation, but always with the German original before us; ability to read in German (and, later in the course, in Spanish, French, and/or Portuguese) will prove highly beneficial, but is not a prerequisite. Among the questions to be considered will be the various, increasingly “difficult,” “hermetic,” “elliptical,” “obscure” ways that Celan’s work demands that his own experiments in poetic form and lyric genre (or modality), with all their informing prior history, grapple with and “present” (among other things) the meanings of the Nazi genocide and the dilemmas of experience itself in the Holocaust’s aftermath.  Along the way we’ll do some reading in cultural, historical, and biographical materials–and we’ll possibly consider some works of cinema, music, and painting–but the course’s main focus will be on close readings of poetry, very often in relation to philosophical or theoretical writings that Celan (and other poets whom we’ll read) had artistically engaged, along with the informing presence of earlier poetry. (Major figures whose work we’ll consider include those explicitly at issue for Celan and for much poetry and criticism in his wake: Shakespeare, Heine, Hölderlin, Dickinson, Éluard, Aragon, Sachs, Bachmann, Benjamin, Adorno, Heidegger, Brecht, Resnais, et al.)  We’ll also ask what sorts of questions arise concerning lyric musicality, intellectual rigor, engagement, and critical-reflective agency when poets of the Americas explore how Celanian poetics, aesthetics, and ethics might–or might not–aid them in their own work and their inevitably distinct historical and sociopolitical dispensations.