Senior Seminar in Comparative Literature

"Modern art--and maybe modern poetry especially--is DIFFICULT"

That's not the only judgment out there, but it's a familiar one. It often dovetails with the sense that poetry itself is inherently difficult; indeed, too difficult. Why should it be so hard to figure out what a poem feels like, means, gives us, asks of us: what a poem is or does?
There's plenty of poetry, and other kinds of modern art, that doesn't emphasize difficulty or complexity. But this senior seminar will focus on prominent currents in modern poetic art that generally do assume that complexities of form and content (and both our pleasures and challenges in engaging them) are of decisive importance. Though the poets we'll read don't share any single aesthetic or political stance, their mostly common point of departure involves a view that modern art--and modern lyric poetry in its intense focus on the experience of how kinds of musicality in language can regenerate our sense of capacity for expanded comprehension, meaning-making, and critical agency--has among its central reasons for being the effort to help us ""get"" not only the specific, substantive difficulties of modern sociopolitical and ethical life, but also to get why our FORMAL experiences of modernity itself (our very ability to process, reflect on, and address it) can be so fraught.
Most of the poetry we'll read emerges from (or locates itself in subsequent, ongoing dialogues with) artistic modernism: essentially, experimentalism in the arts from the early twentieth century onward. We'll spend approximately the first half of the semester considering the unprecedented body of poetry—radically innovative in form and content, and with great international resonance--by Paul Celan, often deemed the most groundbreaking and challenging European poet since 1945. He happens also to be the poet whose work is most crucial to the “after Auschwitz” debates that shadow countless other artists, critics, and philosophers. While reading Celan's poetry and materials contextualizing it, we'll look at other European poets in dialogue with him (e.g., Ingeborg Bachmann, Bertolt Brecht, Jean Daive).

We'll then turn the focus around by way of the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, looking at some key moments of his poetry on its own terms and also in its urgent conversations with Celan. This will likewise become a turn in hemispheres: some of the Darwish translations (into English) that we'll be reading from will be by the Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah, whose own poetry and criticism we'll likewise delve into. That relay into the Western Hemisphere will then bring us round to the poetry of the great Martinican poet, critic, and activist Aimé Césaire, whose work has often been brought together with Celan's (not least, for what's frequently seen as the two poets' shared propensity for a challenging artistic experimentalism that proves both irresistible and devastating).

Time permitting, we'll then try to read from as many as possible among a group of poets (and some other artists) across the Americas who've located their work--at least in part--in related matrices (including Hansberry, Vallejo, D.S. Marriott, PIzarnik, Glissant, Monchoachi, Palmer, Brossard, Levertov, Duncan, Rankine, Tejada, Zurita, Whitney, Salcedo).

Besides reading criticism by (and interviews with) the poets themselves, we'll also read a bit of philosophy and critical theory (most likely including Du Bois, Benjamin, Adorno, Arendt, and Rogers).

The seminar's poetry--as well the philosophy, criticism, and related materials presented--will have a deserved reputation for being, in a word, difficult; and, simultaneously, for being powerful, captivating, crucial.

[NOTE: We'll be reading lots of poetry not originally written in English. In all such cases, our shared language will be the English translations of the poetry (from German, French, Arabic, Spanish, etc.); but we'll also always have at hand the poem's original text, and we'll be undertaking at least some effort to encounter the poem as it reads/sounds in its original language. In short, while knowledge of other languages will of course be helpful to students enrolled in the course who wish to read, appreciate, and/or write about original versions of a poem (or about its translations into other languages), nonetheless, knowledge of any language besides English is NOT a course requirement. Students wishing to work only with the English translations of poems that were originally written in other languages (and/or, of course, to work with poems originally written in English) will be at no disadvantage].