Studies in Symbolist and Modern Literatures

Why NOT put those two schools together: Frankfurt, New York? Especially since a very significant portion of the Frankfurt School's exile from Germany, during the National Socialist regime, was spent in New York (where, though independent, it established a relationship with Columbia University)?  Not to mention that the New York School poets and their poet interlocutors/addressees whom this seminar will pay most attention to--John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Frank O'Hara, Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Octavio Paz,  Aimé Césaire--unsurprisingly shared the Frankfurters' sense of how important experimental French, German, Anglo-American, and Hispanophone poetry were in the development of modern Left critical aesthetic and sociopolitical thought. In any case,this seminar won't attempt any sustained investigations of the case for deep structural affinity--nor, on the other hand, for the irreconcilability--of Frankfurt School critical aesthetics and New York School later-modernist and postmodernist poetics.  Instead, we'll consider the value of putting New York School (and related) poetries, and Frankfurt critical theory, into mutual dialogue and cross-critique.  In addition to considering poetic texts of the experimental and avant-gardist traditions that both Schools had internalized (starting with the signal case of Baudelaire, and continuing until early 1950s poetry and poetics), bringing the New York School into the discussion will allow us to consider an extremely influential formation within early postmodern art, as we ask if, and how well--or not!--the assumptions, values, and modes of modernist-identified Frankfurt Critical Theory can illuminate postmodern (and, today, post-postmodern!) art and sociopolitical history.

That said, the seminar will feature extensive additional 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 noted above, there'll be more sustained attention to Baudelaire and to the New York School poets than to any other body of poetic work.  For most of our class sessions, students and/or the instructor will have distributed ahead of time xeroxed and/or PDF’d texts of work by Baudelaire,New York School, or other poets (which they have will have chosen to present to, and discuss with, the rest of the class).

[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 helpful.]