Genre: Lyric Poetry

Genre: Lyric Poetry

Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (tentative title and description)
Course Number: 
202B
Course Catalog Number: 
25708
Course Type or Level: 
Instructor: 
Anne-Lise Francois
Days: 
Th
Time: 
2-5
Semester: 
Location: 
4104 Dwinelle

This comparative seminar in lyric poetry borrows its title from Susan Stewart’s Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (University of Chicago Press, 2002), to ask about the relation between poetry and sensory deprivation (and/or plenitude) and prosthesis.  It’s been said that poetry is what is untranslatable, yet one poem often translates another, and many of us only read one another’s languages in translation. As a catch-all concept for whatever “out there” can’t quite be captured in human terms, “Nature” can also be thought of as a language only ever encountered in translation. We will explore the complex relationships between these three shape-shifting terms–“poetry,” “nature,” “translation”–as we read together poems and essays from various linguistic traditions, including creative or partially illiterate translations from and into Chinese, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Latin and Spanish.

From the emergence of “haiku” out of haikai no renga (comic linked verse) to modernism’s fascination with isolated images, the course will give some attention to the“lyricization” of poetry—the privileging of isolated, individual, brief forms abstracted from once collective practices–as well as to the changing roles—messianic, consolatory, critical, representative—assigned the figure of the “solitary” poet and “autonomous” work of art in the context of industrial print capitalism, the rationalization of time and space, and European colonialism. We will also ask about “the fate of the senses” in relation to contemporary ecological crisis and, in particular, to the paradox of simultaneous sensory impoverishment and perpetual stimulation.

Most crucially, however, we will want to ask what happens when we read poetry as a series of substitutions (touch for sight, and sound for touch, as well as one language for another) and read together poets who, pushing the limits of language as an expressive medium, interrogate the relations of the verbal to the visual and musical arts, of visionary to sensory experience, of memory to imagination, and of language to the natural world and/or phenomenal experience.   Tracing the meeting of stone and flesh, of the carnal and the transcendent, the transient and eternal, we will compare recurring figures of poetry as the only remaining sign of otherwise irrecoverable, lost, fugitive experiences.

Poems by Sappho (Carson, Barnard translations), Wang Wei, Virgil, Ovid, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Bashō, Buson, Wordsworth, Keats, Baudelaire, Dickinson, Machado, Pound, Rilke, Valéry, Niedecker, M. NourbeSe Philip; primary readings will also be determined by special interests of students. Secondary readings by Adorno, Benjamin, Culler, Glissant, Jackson, Johnson, Lessing, Krieger, Prins, Saussy, Stewart, among others.