Reading & Composition

Democracy—a term used almost daily by the press, governments, law, social movements, and many poets—is not a new word but has a long history and multiple meanings. In particular, poets writing in different languages and epochs have been moved by the possibilities of the word and concept from ancient Athens to contemporary social movements. One of the central theses of the class is that poetry offers a critical reading about the politics of truth at play in everyday life. During a time of national crisis in 1870, for example, Walt Whitman writes about the “spirit” of democracy in a long poem entitled “Democratic Vistas.” The work appears as congressional debates on the rights of enslaved populations to vote and count as citizens emerge in the public sphere. In many respects, poetry puts forth the question about who has a voice and who counts as a citizen within nation-states. In this class, we will interpret mostly poetry but also some dramatic texts, novels, critical essays, songs, multi-media and protests using lyrics in order to ask: what is the relation between verse and democracy? How is the depiction of democracy in poetic verse distinct from the legal or governmental definitions? In order to analyze these questions in depth, we will not just focus on poetry written in English and in the United States but look at the lyric across cultures. Drawing from critical approaches to literary studies in a comparative versus a purely nationalist frame, we will then also consider what it means to read poems in translation. Does translation—a mode of moving a literary text from its original location to another—offer a distinct notion of understanding between differently positioned speakers that is crucial for democracy to flourish? Our class will concentrate on the specific form of the lyric and also musical forms closely linked poetic verse (the ballad, corrido, ghazal, and Rabindra Sangeet) in order to engage with the important question of how democracy is contradictory, difficult, ironic, mythological, satirical, and tragic, but also imagined and possible. The primary reading for the class will be a course reader including the writings of Mahmoud Darwish, Charlotte Delbo, Robert Haas, Emily Dickinson, Jose Marti, Gabriela Mistral, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Pablo Neruda, Percy Shelley, Rabindranath Tagore, W.B. Yeats, and Walt Whitman. We will also read some short excerpts and critical essays by Aristotle, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, C.L.R. James, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Sophocles.

Longer Texts

• Aeschylus, Ortesia
• Herman Melville, Billy Budd
• Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of This World (El reino de esto mundo)