Studies in Symbolism and Modern Literature

Readings in modern, and above all modern lyric, poetry (much of it from the U.S., but also from Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Near East) in relation to major Frankfurt-School texts on aesthetics, criticism, and social theory that emphasize the significance of literature (as well as the other arts) and especially poetry. Focused concentration on the writings of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, and on their development of Kantian, Hegelian, and Marxian traditions of aesthetics and critical theory. Sustained attention to how and why poetry turns out to be so crucial to the Frankfurters’ (and, in particular, to Benjamin’s and Adorno’s) overall analyses of modernity, mechanical/technical/ technological reproduction and reproducibility (in both the socioeconomic and artistic-aesthetic spheres), and critical agency. Consideration of how Frankfurt-School concerns and legacies might engage the changed sociopolitical circumstances and artistic-aesthetic tendencies—-and the changed poetry—-of the last three decades; analysis in turn of how later-modernist and contemporary poets’ work may challenge Frankfurt analyses of and assumptions about poetry, aesthetic experience, and critical agency themselves. Tracing of the poetry, aesthetics, critical-theory, and sociopolitical histories leading to Adorno’s controversial statements from the late 1940s through 1969 about “Poetry After Auschwitz” (including the ceaseless, prominent international debates those statements caused and have continued to occasion in the poetry-world, the other arts, criticism, and the cultural sphere more generally). Readings of poetry throughout the course will tend to emphasize formal, stylistic, and philosophical-theoretical matters in order to highlight the question of how–and to what degree–artistic technique, in relation to aesthetic form and aesthetic experience (especially lyric experience), may offer stimulus toward and insight into historical, sociopolitical, and ethical understanding and engagement. Some treatment of Romantic and nineteenth-century poetry, and of 21st-century poetry, but the seminar will focus primarily on twentieth-century, modernist poetry (including modernist poetry written and published during the apparently postmodern period).

As a shared project throughout the semester, the class will read and continue discussing together in a sustained manner two volumes of poetry: a facing-page, French-English volume containing Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal[1857] and Le Spleen de Paris/Petits Poèmes en Prose [1869]; and Michael Palmer’s Sun [1988]), while, for each week’s class, students and/or the instructor also will have distributed ahead of time xeroxed and/or PDF’d texts of work by other poets (whom they have will have chosen to present to, and discuss with, the rest of the class).

Along with the ordered books listed below (which can be purchased at the ASUC Bookstore), xeroxed and/or PDF’d texts will feature critical theory selections from Kant, Marx, the Frankfurters, and others, as well as from many poets, probably including: Vallejo, Duncan, Brecht, Mayakovsky, Ponge, Éluard, Rilke, Neruda, Ginsberg, Zurita, Celan, various Surrealists and Objectivists, WC Williams, Moore, Bishop, Stevens, Paz, Olson, Levertov, Creeley, Ashbery, Guest, O’Hara, Rich, Darwish, Avidan, Morejón, Césaire, Bachmann, Daive, Albiach, Pasolini, and others.

[Note: Texts of critical theory, philosophy, aesthetics, and/or criticism will be presented in English translation, though, with texts not initially written in English, we will frequently consider the German, French, Spanish, etc., originals.  Poetry not originally composed in English will be read and discussed primarily in English translation, though we will almost always also consult a poem’s facing-page (or at-hand-xeroxed) original language–most often German, French, or Spanish (as well as other languages, depending on students’ poetry selections). Knowledge of other languages–especially German, French, and/or Spanish—-is not required, though it will prove very helpful.]