Chad Bennett

E f371K  l  Modern and Contemporary Poetry

Instructor:  Bennett, C

Unique #:  79765

Semester:  Summer 2020, first session

Cross-lists:  n/a

Prerequisites:  Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description:  Why, given longstanding declarations of poetry’s apparent cultural marginality or even demise, does poetry—and our need for it—persist?  What does poetry do for us? Is it an art of social awareness and engagement? (“When power corrupts, poetry cleanses,” declared President John F. Kennedy in a 1963 speech.)  Does poetry map the wild terrain of our inner lives? (“Poetry,” writes the poet Adrienne Rich, “can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.”)  How do we account for the vital role poetry has played in twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture?  How have contemporary poets responded to and helped to shape the cultural and aesthetic questions of their times?

This course, a study of poetry written in English from 1945 to the present, explores such questions through a sampling of poems from significant contemporary poetic communities and movements as well as the in-depth consideration of some of the most influential books of poetry published in the last seventy years.  These innovative and sometimes controversial books evince the often-lively part poetry has played in contemporary culture.  In our efforts to understand this part, our readings of these books of poetry will attend to both the poetic traditions and practices they represent and the cultural contexts out of which they emerge and to which they speak.

Class readings, discussion, and writing will be motivated by three main goals.  First, we will seek to develop and fine-tune our skills in analyzing poetry, placing particular emphasis on understanding specific poems, and the workings and effects of poetic language, structures, and devices.  Second, we will pursue a deep understanding of the individual books we consider, paying special attention to how each book’s poetics and reception are differently inflected by issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation.  Finally, we will more broadly map the richness and variety of the movements, innovations, and impasses in poetry from 1945 to the present.

Texts:  Our primary reading will consist of poems written from 1945 to the present, including work by poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Lyn Hejinian, Frank O’Hara, Sylvia Plath, Claudia Rankine, Adrienne Rich, Juliana Spahr, and/or others.

Secondary reading will include reviews, scholarly essays, and other materials providing cultural and literary historical context.

Requirements & Grading:  Final grades will be based on class participation (20%), weekly discussion board posts (15%), the final exam (30%), and a six-page essay and optional revision (35%). Please note that excessive absences, tardiness, and/or missed deadlines will negatively affect your final grade.

CRW 340P l  Poetry Workshop

Instructor:  Bennett, C

Unique #: 34770

Semester:  Spring 2020

Cross-lists:  n/a

Prerequisites: CRW 325F (or E 325F), or 325M.

Description: In this workshop you will develop a distinctive writing practice within a community of fellow poets.  Our work will include weekly exercises in poetic craft, class workshops of student poems, and a wide range of readings in poetry and poetics.  Our goal will be to better understand both howdifferent poems achieve their effects and whypoets—including yourself—might seek those effects.

Texts: Course reading will consist equally of 1) original student poems and 2) published poems and essays on poetry and poetics that will provide models for considering and enacting your own poetic practice.

Requirements & Grading: Over the course of the semester regular assignments will include original poems to be workshopped, creative exercises, a memorization of a poem, and reading and responding to peer poems and other course texts.  Final grades will be based on the successful completion of these weekly assignments (40%); your thoughtful and generous participation in class discussions, activities, and workshops (30%); and a final portfolio of original poems and revisions (30%).  Attendance is mandatory.

E 379R l 14-Twenty-first-Century Poetry

Instructor: Bennett, C

Unique #: 35700

Semester: Spring 2020

Cross-lists: n/a

Prerequisite:  Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description:  What is the poetry of the present moment?  In this course, we will explore some of the most exciting poets writing today, their poems, their audiences, and the dynamic relationship among them. Our aim will be to map the varieties and the vitality of twenty-first century poetry written in English, including the post-language lyric; innovative feminist, queer, and minority poetries; ecopoetics; documentary poetry; procedural and conceptual poetries; mixed-genre writing that melds poetry with essay, memoir, or theory; and poetries that move beyond the page into other media, into modes of performance, and into spaces of lived experience.  Our readings will emphasize the poetic traditions and practices that these new poetries challenge, extend, and invent, as well as the cultural contexts out of which they emerge and to which they speak.

Students can expect to come away from the course with increased confidence in their ability to read, think with, enjoy, and otherwise engage very recent poetry.  To this end, we will primarily be concerned throughout the semester with specific poems and the workings, effects and implications of their language, structures, and devices.

Readings:  Our reading will consist of exemplary poems from the past decade and select critical accounts of twenty-first century poetry and poetics.  Poets to be studied may include: Rosa Alcalá, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Anne Boyer, CAConrad, Eduardo C. Corral, Natalie Diaz, Timothy Donnelly, Ross Gay, Terrance Hayes, Douglas Kearney, Aaron Kunin, Dorothea Lasky, Robin Coste Lewis, Hoa Nguyen, Morgan Parker, Claudia Rankine, Evie Shockley, Layli Long Soldier, Danez Smith, Juliana Spahr, Susan Wheeler, and others.

Requirements & Grading: Final grades will be based on participation (both in class discussions and in weekly, critical and/or creative exercises) (30%); one 4-6-page paper (30%); and one ten-page independent research project, developed in stages, with brief written assignments due along the way (40%).  Attendance is mandatory; excessive absences, tardiness, and/or missed deadlines will negatively affect your final grade.

This seminar will survey the varying theoretical approaches associated with what has been called “weak theory,” including reparative reading, post-critique, distant reading, surface reading, thin description, and new formalism. Our effort will be to track affinities among this array of methods while remaining alert to the different motivations and stakes at work in their interests in the provisional and the probable rather than the strong or totalizing. Reading will include work by Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Rita Felski, Sianne Ngai, Sharon Marcus, Stephen Best, Heather Love, Paul K. Saint-Amour, and others, as well as skeptical or oppositional responses to this work. In what ways does weak theory speak to, challenge, or baffle strong theories? To what extent does weak theory actually depend upon and perhaps quietly replicate strong theories? How can weak theory help us to reimagine power and to consider the limits and affordances of forms of suspended agency? How might weak theory promote a more expansive sense of canon, objects of study, and aesthetic categories? As we pose such questions of foundational and recent texts associated with weak theory, our aim will be to test the potential of weak theories for our own scholarly projects.

E f344L  l  Hollywood Babylon

Instructor:  Bennett, C

Unique #:  80624

Semester:  Summer 2019, first session

Cross-lists:  n/a

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: Dream factory or nightmare?  Promised land or wasteland?  In this course we will examine Hollywood’s symbolic role in American culture, considering the many complex and often contradictory ways the film capital has been constructed and understood.  What can these competing representations of Hollywood tell us about twentieth-century America and its ideals, practices, and concerns?  What do we find if we approach Hollywood as a vibrant cultural site to which America has repeatedly turned to work out its most conflicted ideas about art and commerce, class, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, ethics, politics, style?  Posing these questions of numerous representations of Hollywood—primarily in films and novels, but also in stories, essays, poems, paintings, photographs, songs, and fan magazines—we will trace America’s fraught relationship to Hollywood as it develops over the twentieth century, and explore the formal genre of the Hollywood story.

Texts: In addition to Kenneth Anger’s gossipy Hollywood counter-history, Hollywood Babylon, texts may include novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Love of the Last Tycoon), Nathanael West (The Day of the Locust),and Gore Vidal (Myra Breckinridge);the films A Star is Born (dir. George Cukor), Barton Fink (by Joel and Ethan Coen), L.A. Confidential (dir. Curtis Hanson), Sunset Blvd.(dir. Billy Wilder), and Mulholland Dr.(dir. David Lynch); and artwork by Joseph Cornell, Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, and Cindy Sherman (The Complete Untitled Film Stills).The course packet will include several additional readings, including critical and theoretical essays.

Requirements & Grading: Final grades will be based on participation (both in class and in weekly discussion board posts) (20%), two exams (25% each), and a six-page essay and optional revision (30%).  Attendance is mandatory; more than three absences may result in a reduction of the final grade.

Instructor:  Bennett, C

Unique #:  35670

Semester:  Spring 2019

Cross-lists:  n/a

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction: No

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description:Why, given longstanding declarations of poetry’s apparent cultural marginality or even demise, does poetry—and our need for it—persist? What does poetry do for us? Is it an art of social awareness and engagement? (“When power corrupts, poetry cleanses,” declared President John F. Kennedy in a 1963 speech.) Does poetry map the wild terrain of our inner lives? (“Poetry,” writes the poet Adrienne Rich, “can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.”) How do we account for the vital role poetry has played in twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture?How have contemporary poets responded to and helped to shape the cultural and aesthetic questions of their times?

This course, a study of poetry written in English from 1945 to the present, explores such questions through a sampling of poems from significant contemporary poetic communities and movements as well as the in-depth consideration of some of the most influential books of poetry published in the last seventy years.  These innovative and sometimes controversial books evince the often-lively part poetry has played in contemporary culture.  In our efforts to understand this part, our readings of these books of poetry will attend to both the poetic traditions and practices they represent and the cultural contexts out of which they emerge and to which they speak.

Class readings, discussion, and writing will be motivated by three main goals.  First, we will seek to develop and fine-tune our skills in analyzing poetry, placing particular emphasis on understanding specific poems, and the workings and effects of poetic language, structures, and devices.  Second, we will pursue a deep understanding of the individual books we consider, paying special attention to how each book’s poetics and reception are differently inflected by issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation.  Finally, we will more broadly map the richness and variety of the movements, innovations, and impasses in poetry from 1945 to the present.

Texts: Our primary reading will consist of poems written from 1945 to the present, including work by poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Lyn Hejinian, Frank O’Hara, Sylvia Plath, Claudia Rankine, Adrienne Rich, Juliana Spahr, and/or others.

Secondary reading will include reviews, scholarly essays, and other materials providing cultural and literary historical context.

Requirements & Grading: Final grades will be based on two exams (25% each), a six-page essay and optional revision (35%), and participation in class discussion and in informal written exercises (15%).  Attendance is mandatory; more than three absences may result in a reduction of the final grade.

Instructor: Bennett, C

Unique #: 35745

Semester: Spring 2019

Cross-lists: n/a

Restrictions: n/a

Computer Instruction: No

Prerequisite:  Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description:  What is the poetry of the present moment?  In this course, we will explore some of the most exciting poets writing today, their poems, their audiences, and the dynamic relationship among them. Our aim will be to map the varieties and the vitality of twenty-first century poetry written in English, including the post-language lyric; innovative feminist, queer, and minority poetries; ecopoetics; documentary poetry; procedural and conceptual poetries; mixed-genre writing that melds poetry with essay, memoir, or theory; and poetries that move beyond the page into other media, into modes of performance, and into spaces of lived experience.  Our readings will emphasize the poetic traditions and practices that these new poetries challenge, extend, and invent, as well as the cultural contexts out of which they emerge and to which they speak.

Students can expect to come away from the course with increased confidence in their ability to read, think with, enjoy, and otherwise engage very recent poetry.  To this end, we will be primarily concerned throughout the semester with specific poems and the workings, effects and implications of their language, structures, and devices.

Readings:  Our reading will consist of exemplary poems from the past decade and select critical accounts of twenty-first century poetry and poetics.  Poets to be studied may include: Rosa Alcalá, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Anne Boyer, CAConrad, Eduardo C. Corral, Natalie Diaz, Ross Gay, Terrance Hayes, Douglas Kearney, Aaron Kunin, Dorothea Lasky, Robin Coste Lewis, Fred Moten, Hoa Nguyen, Morgan Parker, Claudia Rankine, Evie Shockley, Layli Long Soldier, Danez Smith, Juliana Spahr, Susan Wheeler, and others.

Requirements & Grading: Final grades will be based on participation (both in class discussions and in weekly, critical and/or creative exercises) (30%); one 4-6-page paper (30%); and one ten-page independent research project, developed in stages, with brief written assignments due along the way (40%).  Attendance is mandatory; excessive absences, tardiness, and/or missed deadlines will negatively affect your final grade.

This seminar will consider poetry as a practice of the self that pursues alternative ways of apprehending, arranging, and being in the world. Taking as our focus the poetic and life practices of a range of contemporary (post-45) poets, we will explore the significant so-called “personal” poetries of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s and how their poetics are being reconsidered and reanimated in our present moment. Our readings will center on the joint consideration of non-poetic or mixed genre works—memoirs, Künstlerromans, lyric essays, novels, poem-films, journals, letters, interviews, defenses of poetry, manifestos, and so on—that imagine or enact poetry as a way of being in the world and the poems that way of being has produced. Our reading may include work by Gwendolyn Brooks, CA Conrad, Claudia Rankine, James Schuyler, Ben Lerner, Eileen Myles, Juliana Spahr, Maggie Nelson, Fred Moten, Audre Lorde, Eve Sedgwick, Bernadette Mayer, John Keene, or others. (Specific readings are yet to be determined; this illustrative list is tentative and in no particular order.) Our readings will also include literary criticism and theory concerned with topics such as askesis, aesthetics, poetics, genre, form, the personal, and the everyday.

Instructor:  Bennett, C

Unique #:  35130

Semester:  Spring 2018

Cross-lists:  n/a

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites:  Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: “Poetry is Dead.  Does Anybody Really Care?” asked a Newsweek opinion piece in 2003, one of several turn-of-the-century declarations of poetry’s apparent demise.  Hardly new, such obituaries recur throughout the twentieth century, forming a long cultural tradition that alternately celebrates poetry’s marginality as a strength or bemoans the irrelevance of contemporary verse.  Is poetry, as has so often been announced, dead?  How do we account, then, for the role poetry does play in twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture?  How have contemporary poets responded to and helped to shape the cultural and aesthetic questions of their times?

This course, a study of poetry written in English from 1945 to the present, explores such questions through a sampling of poems from significant contemporary poetic communities and movements as well as the in-depth consideration of some of the most influential books of poetry published in the last seventy years.  These innovative and sometimes controversial books evince how a seemingly moribund poetry has in fact often played a lively part in contemporary culture.  In our efforts to understand this part, our readings of these books of poetry will attend to both the poetic traditions and practices they represent and the cultural contexts out of which they emerge and to which they speak.

Class readings, discussion, and writing will be motivated by three main goals.  First, we will seek to develop and fine-tune our skills in analyzing poetry, placing particular emphasis on understanding specific poems, and the workings and effects of poetic language, structures, and devices.  Second, we will pursue a deep understanding of the individual books we consider, paying special attention to how each book’s poetics and reception are differently inflected by issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation.  Finally, we will more broadly map the richness and variety of the movements, innovations, and impasses in poetry from 1945 to the present.

Texts:  Our primary reading will consist of poems written from 1945 to the present, including work by poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, M. NourbeSe Philip, Sylvia Plath, Claudia Rankine, Adrienne Rich, Juliana Spahr, and/or others.

Secondary reading will include reviews, scholarly essays, and other materials providing cultural and literary historical context.

Requirements & Grading:  Final grades will be based on two exams (25% each), a six-page essay and optional revision (35%), and participation in class discussion and in informal written exercises (15%).  Attendance is mandatory; more than three absences may result in a reduction of the final grade.

Instructor:  Bennett, C

Unique #:  35205

Semester:  Spring 2018

Cross-lists:  n/a

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisite:  Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description:  What is the poetry of the present moment?  In this course, we will explore some of the most exciting poets writing today, their poems, their audiences, and the dynamic relationship among them.  Our aim will be to map the varieties and the vitality of twenty-first century poetry written in English, including the post-language lyric; innovative feminist, queer, and minority poetries; ecopoetics; documentary poetry; procedural and conceptual poetries; mixed-genre writing that melds poetry with essay, memoir, novel, or theory; and poetries that move beyond the page into other media, into modes of performance, and into spaces of lived experience.  Our readings will emphasize the poetic traditions and practices that these new poetries challenge, extend, and invent, as well as the cultural contexts out of which they emerge and to which they speak.

Students can expect to come away from the course with increased confidence in their ability to read, think with, enjoy, and otherwise engage very recent poetry.  To this end, we will be primarily concerned throughout the semester with specific poems and the workings, effects and implications of their language, structures, and devices.

Readings:  Our reading will consist of exemplary individual poems from the past decade, significant individual volumes of poetry from this period, and select critical accounts of twenty-first century poetry and poetics.  Poets to be studied may include: Brian Blanchfield, Anne Carson, CA Conrad, Natalie Diaz, Cathy Park Hong, Ross Gay, Peter Gizzi, Terrance Hayes, Douglas Kearney, Ada Limón, Fred Moten, Harryette Mullen, Maggie Nelson, Mark Nowak, Morgan Parker, Tommy Pico, Claudia Rankine, Ariana Reines, Evie Shockley, Danez Smith, Juliana Spahr, Susan Wheeler, Kevin Young, and others.

Requirements & Grading:  Final grades will be based on participation (both in class discussions and in weekly, informal critical and/or creative exercises) (20%); one book review (15%); one journal review (15%); one essay reflecting on a poetry event (15%); and one ten-page independent research project, developed in stages, with brief written assignments due along the way (35%).  Attendance is mandatory; excessive absences, tardiness, and/or missed deadlines will negatively affect your final grade.

Instructor:  Bennett, C & M Kevorkian

Unique #:  35680

Semester:  Fall 2017

Cross-lists:  n/a

Restrictions:  English Honors

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites:  Enrollment in or completion of at least one honors section of an English course, admission to the English Honors Program, and consent of the honors adviser.

Description:  According to the Honors Thesis Manual, a thesis is “a sustained examination of a central idea or question, developed in a professional and mature manner under the guidance of a faculty supervisor and a second reader.”  That sounds easy enough, but how does one get there from here?  This course offers a roadmap.  Over the course of the term we will examine literary criticism from the “inside out” and hone skills essential to a successful honors thesis.  Much of the activity of the course will be driven by the interests that you bring to the table, as we iterate on your ideas to develop your research question; we will also make collective use of a limited number of “common texts” to read together in conjunction with models of scholarly inquiry.

Along the way, we will address a number of questions, both practical—How do I use the MLA Bibliography? What’s the difference between a footnote and an endnote?—and theoretical—What does it mean to make an argument about literature? Who has authority in an act of interpretation?  This course will:  first and foremost prepare students to write an honors thesis; interrogate methods of literary and cultural interpretation; consider what it means to make literary arguments and conduct literary research; help students to improve their research, critical thinking, reading, and writing skills.

Texts:  Wayne Booth, et al, The Craft of Research (Third Edition) (University of Chicago Press, 2008), ISBN #978-0226065663; Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (Norton, 2005), #978-0393924091; Selected “common texts,” TBD.

Requirements & Grading: (assignment logistics, rationales, and approaches will be discussed at length during class)

Final Thesis Prospectus (4-6 pp.) & Annotated Bibliography (20-25+ items): 40%; Writing Sample (15-20 pp. section or sections of your actual thesis): 30%; In-Class Performance (quality & consistency of discussion, preparation, engagement, informal writing, writing-process & bibliography tasks, peer feedback, Symposium): 30%; On-time Attendance (note: every absence beginning with #4 will reduce grade; NC at #9): Required; On-time Completion of Reading, Writing-Process, Research, & Peer Feedback Assignments: Required.

Plus/minus grades will be assigned for the final grade of the course.  The university does not recognize the grade of A+.  Evaluation percentages approximate & subject to minor change.

Instructor:  Bennett, C

Unique #:  35415

Semester:  Spring 2017

Cross-lists:  n/a

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description:  Dream factory or nightmare?  Promised land or wasteland?  In this course we will examine Hollywood’s symbolic role in American culture, considering the many complex and often contradictory ways the film capital has been constructed and understood.  What can these competing representations of Hollywood tell us about twentieth-century America and its ideals, practices, and concerns?  What do we find if we approach Hollywood as a vibrant cultural site to which America has repeatedly turned to work out its most conflicted ideas about art and commerce, class, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, ethics, politics, style?  Posing these questions of numerous representations of Hollywood—primarily in films and novels, but also in stories, essays, poems, paintings, photographs, songs, and fan magazines—we will trace America’s fraught relationship to Hollywood as it develops over the twentieth century, and explore the formal genre of the Hollywood story.

Texts:  In addition to Kenneth Anger’s gossipy Hollywood counter-history, Hollywood Babylon, texts may include novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Love of the Last Tycoon), Nathanael West (The Day of the Locust), and Gore Vidal (Myra Breckinridge); the films A Star is Born (dir. George Cukor), Barton Fink (by Joel and Ethan Coen), L.A. Confidential (dir. Curtis Hanson), Sunset Blvd. (dir. Billy Wilder), and Mulholland Dr. (dir. David Lynch); and artwork by Joseph Cornell, Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, and Cindy Sherman (The Complete Untitled Film Stills). The course packet will include several additional readings, including critical and theoretical essays.

Requirements & Grading:  Final grades will be based on participation (both in class and in weekly discussion board posts) (20%), two exams (25% each), and a six-page essay and optional revision (30%). Attendance is mandatory; more than three absences may result in a reduction of the final grade.

Instructor:  Bennett, C

Unique #:  35580

Semester:  Spring 2017

Cross-lists:  n/a

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: “Poetry is Dead.  Does Anybody Really Care?” asked a Newsweek opinion piece in 2003, one of several turn- of-the-century declarations of poetry’s apparent demise.  Hardly new, such obituaries recur throughout the twentieth century, forming a long cultural tradition that alternately celebrates poetry’s marginality as a strength or bemoans the irrelevance of contemporary verse.  Is poetry, as has so often been announced, dead?  How do we account, then, for the role poetry does play in twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture?  How have contemporary poets responded to and helped to shape the cultural and aesthetic questions of their times?

This course, a study of poetry written in English from 1945 to the present, explores such questions through a sampling of poems from significant contemporary poetic communities and movements as well as the in-depth consideration of some of the most influential books of poetry published in the last seventy years.  These innovative and sometimes controversial books evince how a seemingly moribund poetry has in fact often played a lively part in contemporary culture.  In our efforts to understand this part, our readings of these books of poetry will attend to both the poetic traditions and practices they represent and the cultural contexts out of which they emerge and to which they speak.

Class readings, discussion, and writing will be motivated by three main goals.  First, we will seek to develop and fine-tune our skills in analyzing poetry, placing particular emphasis on understanding specific poems, and the workings and effects of poetic language, structures, and devices.  Second, we will pursue a deep understanding of the individual books we consider, paying special attention to how each book’s poetics and reception are differently inflected by issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation.  Finally, we will more broadly map the richness and variety of the movements, innovations, and impasses in poetry from 1945 to the present.

Texts: Our primary reading will consist of poems written from 1945 to the present, including work by poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, M. NourbeSe Philip, Sylvia Plath, Claudia Rankine, Adrienne Rich, Juliana Spahr, and/or others.

Secondary reading will include reviews, scholarly essays, and other materials providing cultural and literary historical context.

Requirements & Grading: Final grades will be based on two exams (25% each), a six-page essay and optional revision (35%), and participation in class discussion and in informal written exercises (15%).  Attendance is mandatory; more than three absences may result in a reduction of the final grade.

This course provides an introduction to the field of poetic theory. Through wide-ranging readings in criticism and poetry we will develop a sense of the history and current state of ongoing debates in the theory and practice of English-language poetry. What is poetry? What are its dominant features, techniques, and purposes? How do we distinguish it from other genres and types of discourse?  How do we understand it in relation to its cultural and historical contexts? We will pursue such broad questions by entering into conversations around specific topics, such as voice and the lyric “I,” poetic address and apostrophe, emotion and expression, the poetic line, meter and meaning, metaphor and metonymy, temporality, poetry and the social, and “lyric reading.”  

Description:
W. H. Auden says, “All art is based on gossip.” Oscar Wilde claims, “History is merely gossip.” Research in the social sciences suggests that the cohesion of social groups depends on the intimacies of shared gossip. Even the unprecedented transfer of information across global, online communities has been mobilized by computer networking protocols known as “gossip networks,” whose design mimics the exchange of gossip. From the talk of the town to the modern gossip column, from the telephone to Twitter, Western culture has been marked by an extraordinary and increasing ability—and desire—to spread gossip rapidly and widely. Yet despite the pervasive presence of gossip in everyday life, there is little consensus as to its value or effects. Is gossip driven by the malice of damaging information or by the intimacy of private talk? Is it a means of emphasizing and punishing social transgressions, thus consolidating social norms? Or is it a liberating discourse of the subordinated, one that has been maligned precisely because of the threat it poses to the status quo? What counts as gossip, and why has it been stereotypically associated with marginalized social identities—particularly women, gay men, and the working class? Is gossip frivolous, idle talk, of little import, or is it significantly reshaping our conceptions of private and public, self and community, and talk and technology? Is “[a]ll art based on gossip”?

In this course, we will pursue such questions by focusing on gossip’s role in American literature and culture, examining fictional, poetic, dramatic, and cinematic engagements with gossip alongside research on gossip in the social sciences and the humanities, legal accounts of gossip, and instances of local and celebrity gossip itself. As we read, talk, and write about gossip, we will be concerned especially with the impact of historical conceptions and literary uses of gossip on the art of gossip in our own cultural moment, marked more by Tweets and chat rooms than bons mots and salons. While providing new perspectives on the relationship between literary language and everyday talk, the course will also engage key figures in American literature through topics including “girl talk,” “the talk of the town,” “queer talk,” “naming names,” and “digital gossip.”

Texts/Readings:
In addition to select readings in gossip theory from Ovid to Heidegger to Patricia Meyer Spacks and on, texts will include an eclectic array of fiction (William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers, Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides, Andy Warhol’s a, A Novel, Eudora Welty’s “Petrified Man” and “Asphodel”), poetry (by John Ashbery, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Frank O’Hara, Gertrude Stein, and others), drama (Clare Boothe Luce’s The Women, John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt)

and film (The Children’s Hour).

Assignments:

Participation (both in class discussions and in weekly written responses) (20%)

Oral presentation (20%)

6-page paper and revision (25%)

12-page paper and revision (35%)

About the Professor:
Chad Bennett earned his Ph.D. from Cornell University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His critical work has appeared in ELH, Modern Drama, and Cinema Journal, and his poetry has appeared in journals such as Fence, jubilat, Denver Quarterly, Verse Daily, New Orleans Review, and others. His research focuses on contemporary American literature and culture, with emphases on poetry and poetics and queer studies. He is currently at work on a study of American poetry and the art of gossip.

E 344L  l  Hollywood Babylon-HONORS

Instructor:  Bennett, C

Unique #:  34580

Semester:  Spring 2016

Cross-lists:  LAH 350

Restrictions:  English Honors; Liberal Arts Honors

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: Dream factory or nightmare? Promised land or wasteland? In this course we will examine Hollywood’s symbolic role in American culture, considering the many complex and often contradictory ways the film capital has been constructed and understood. What can these competing representations of Hollywood tell us about twentieth-century America and its ideals, practices, and concerns? What do we find if we approach Hollywood as a vibrant cultural site to which America has repeatedly turned to work out its most conflicted ideas about art and commerce, class, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, ethics, politics, style? Posing these questions of numerous representations of Hollywood—primarily in films and novels, but also in stories, essays, poems, paintings, photographs, songs, and fan magazines—we will trace America’s fraught relationship to Hollywood as it develops over the twentieth century, and explore the formal genre of the Hollywood story.

In addition to the requirements listed below, this honors version of the topic will require students to engage regularly, in class and in writing, with critical, historical, and theoretical materials that will contextualize our readings of the primary texts; and to take formal responsibility for introducing, framing, and guiding the seminar’s discussion of a particular text and/or topic.

Texts: In addition to Kenneth Anger’s gossipy Hollywood counter-history, Hollywood Babylon, texts may include novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Love of the Last Tycoon), Nathanael West (The Day of the Locust), and Gore Vidal (Myra Breckinridge); the films A Star is Born (dir. George Cukor), Barton Fink (by Joel and Ethan Coen), L.A. Confidential (dir. Curtis Hanson), Sunset Blvd. (dir. Billy Wilder), and Mulholland Dr. (dir. David Lynch); and artwork by Joseph Cornell, Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, and Cindy Sherman (The Complete Untitled Film Stills). The course packet will include several additional readings, including critical and theoretical essays.

Requirements & Grading: Final grades will be based on participation (both in class, in formal class presentations, and in weekly discussion board posts) (30%), one five-page essay (30%), and one eight- to ten-page essay (40%). Attendance is mandatory; more than three absences may result in a reduction of the final grade.

E 379R  l  Gossip and Twentieth-Century Poetry

Instructor:  Bennett, C

Unique #:  34820

Semester:  Spring 2016

Cross-lists:  WGS 335

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisite: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: “Gossip exalts in poetry,” declares Robert Frost. This might seem a strange claim, since gossip’s ostensibly frivolous talk about others appears at odds with common conceptions of poetry as serious, solitary expression. Yet from the talk of the town to the modern gossip column, and from loose lips sink ships to don’t ask, don’t tell, American poets have persistently engaged gossip as a rhetorical model and a source of inspiration, turning to the strategies of idle talk in part to address shifting ideas of privacy and publicity, and self and community, and in part to reinvigorate poetic practice.

Starting with the assumption that poetic gossip thus provides a rich vantage from which to consider twentieth-century American poetry and culture, this seminar proposes two main lines of inquiry. First: in a digital era marked by an extraordinary and increasing ability—and desire—to spread gossip rapidly and widely, what can a rich tradition of poetic gossip tell us about the pleasures, uses, and risks of idle talk? And second: how can the history and style of gossip—especially insofar as it has been associated with marginalized identities (particularly women, gay men, and the working class), linked to mass culture and celebrity, and bound up with technologies from the telephone to Twitter—help us to better understand the forms and social practices of modern and contemporary poetry?

We will explore these questions by studying poems that represent gossip, poems that enact gossip, and poems that adopt aspects of gossip’s style. We will further consider gossip about poets and their poems, and how it might shape the reception of their work. We will also, by way of comparison with gossip, pay attention to forms of everyday and intimate talk more often associated with poetry, such as conversation and confession. Finally, we will think more broadly about gossip’s value as a metaphor for different kinds of collaborative and multi-voiced poetics, and for various strategies of unofficial meaning-making at work in twentieth-century poetry and beyond.

Texts: We will read and discuss poems by David Antin, John Ashbery, Gwendolyn Brooks, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, Edgar Lee Masters, Harryette Mullen, Frank O’Hara, Ezra Pound, D. A. Powell, James Schuyler, Juliana Spahr, Gertrude Stein, and others.

Secondary reading will include essays on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, scholarship on gossip in the social sciences and the humanities, legal accounts of gossip, and (in the form of reviews, interviews, letters, journals, memoirs, and biographical excerpts) juicy instances of poetry-world gossip.

Requirements & Grading: Final grades will be based on participation (both in class discussions and in short, weekly, written responses) (25%), a six-page essay and revision (25%), and a ten-page research essay (50%). Attendance is mandatory; more than three absences may result in a reduction of the final grade.

CRW 325P  l  Poetry Writing

Instructor:  Bennett, C

Unique #:  33902

Semester:  Spring 2015

Cross-lists:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Flags:  Writing

Prerequisites: One of the following: C L 315, E 603B, 316L (or 316K), 316M (or 316K), 316N (or 316K), 316P (or 316K), or T C 603B.

Description: This course provides an introduction to the practice of poetry writing. Through regular creative exercises, class workshops of student poems, and readings in and analysis of contemporary and traditional poetry, we will explore fundamental aspects of poetic craft. Topics will include imagery and metaphor; diction, line, and stanza; sonic effects; and voice and tone. We will also learn about poetic forms ranging from the sonnet, sestina, and villanelle to open forms and the prose poem. Our goal will be to develop our own distinctive poetic practices. To this end, in written work and class discussions we will attempt to understand both how different poems achieve their effects and why poets might seek those effects.

Texts: Readings, to be distributed in class, will consist of student work and contemporary poems representing a wide range of poetic traditions and practices.

Requirements & Grading: Grades will be based on a final portfolio of original poems and revisions (40%); weekly creative and/or critical exercises (30%); and class participation (30%).  Attendance is mandatory; more than three absences may result in a reduction of the final grade.

E 379R  l  New York School Poets and Artists

Instructor:  Bennett, C

Unique #:  34995

Semester:  Spring 2015

Cross-lists:  n/a

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Flags:  Independent Inquiry; Writing

Prerequisite: Six semester hours of upper-division coursework in English.

Description: In New York in the 1950s, Frank O’Hara and his fellow poets “divided our time between the literary bar, the San Remo, and the artists’ bar, the Cedar Tavern. In the San Remo we argued and gossiped: in the Cedar we often wrote poems while listening to the painters argue and gossip.” This heady mix of poetry, art, and gossip helped to define the so-called “New York School” of poets, one of many groups that challenged the literary establishment during the postwar years. The label New York School is sometimes taken to refer to a poetic style (marked by a playful, ironic, urban sensibility) and sometimes to a specific social scene (the New York art world in the fifties and sixties, and often the queer contours of that world). In fact blurring the line between literary styles and social networks, art and friendship, New York School poets variously sought to revitalize the connection between poems and contemporary life, and in so doing helped to reshape the forms, content, and politics of American poetry.

In this seminar we will explore the poetry of the New York School’s central figures (John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler) and the influence their work had on later poets affiliated with the style and community of the New York School. Throughout the course, we will be alert to how the history of New York School poetry illuminates the innovations and impasses of postwar American poetry more generally.

Although our emphasis will be on poetry, we will read the poems within their broader aesthetic and social contexts, particularly the context of the New York art world. We will consider poetry in relation to painting, theater, dance, music, and film, studying numerous cross-genre collaborations and the rich interrelationship between these artistic mediums.

Texts: Our primary reading will be drawn from the work of first-generation New York School poets John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler. We will also read widely among poets differently associated with the New York School, including Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Bernadette Mayer, Eileen Myles, Alice Notley, and others. Some of the many New York artists we will consider in relation to these poets include Willem de Kooning, Jane Freilicher, Michael Goldberg, Grace Hartigan, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, and Larry Rivers.

Requirements & Grading: Final grades will be based on participation (both in class discussions and in weekly written exercises) (25%); one six-page essay (25%); and one ten-page research essay, developed in stages, with brief written assignments due along the way (50%). Attendance is mandatory; excessive absences, tardiness, and/or missed deadlines will negatively affect your final grade.

Instructor:  Bennett, C

Unique #:  35940

Semester:  Fall 2014

Cross-lists:  n/a

Flags:  Writing

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: “Poetry is Dead. Does Anybody Really Care?” asked a Newsweek opinion piece in 2003, one of several turn- of-the-century declarations of poetry’s apparent demise. Hardly new, such obituaries recur throughout the twentieth century, forming a long cultural tradition that alternately celebrates poetry’s marginality as a strength or bemoans the irrelevance of contemporary verse. Is poetry, as has so often been announced, dead? How do we account, then, for the role poetry does play in twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture? How have contemporary poets responded to and helped to shape the cultural and aesthetic questions of their times?

This course, a study of poetry written in English from 1945 to the present, explores such questions through both a sampling of poems from significant contemporary poetic communities and movements, as well as the in-depth consideration of some of the most influential books of poetry published in the last seventy years. These innovative and sometimes controversial books evince how a seemingly moribund poetry has in fact often played a lively part in contemporary culture. In our efforts to understand this part, our readings of these books of poetry will attend to both the poetic traditions and practices they represent and the cultural contexts out of which they emerge and to which they speak.

Class readings, discussion, and writing will be motivated by three main goals. First, we will seek to develop and fine-tune our skills in analyzing poetry, placing particular emphasis on understanding specific poems, and the workings and effects of poetic language, structures, and devices. Second, we will pursue a deep understanding of the individual books we consider, paying special attention to how each book’s poetics and reception are differently inflected by issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation. Finally, we will more broadly map the richness and variety of the movements, innovations, and impasses in poetry from 1945 to the present.

Texts: Our primary reading will consist of poems written from 1945 to the present: a course reader with brief selections from the work of a number and variety of poets will complement individual books of poetry by poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, Kamau Brathwaite, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, Harryette Mullen, Frank O’Hara, Sylvia Plath, and/or others.

Secondary reading will include reviews, scholarly essays, and other materials providing cultural and literary historical context.

Requirements & Grading: Final grades will be based on two exams (25% each), a six-page essay and optional revision (35%), and participation in class discussion and in informal written exercises (15%). Attendance is mandatory; more than three absences may result in a reduction of the final grade.

DESCRIPTION. In this course we will attempt to map the varieties and the vitality of twenty-first century poetry written in English, including the post-language lyric; new media poetry; documentary poetry; procedural poetry, conceptualism, and Flarf; hybrid modes such as the lyric essay; ecopoetics; and innovative feminist, queer, and multi-cultural poetries. Our readings in this rich but unsettled body of work will emphasize the poetic traditions and practices that these new poetries challenge, extend, and invent, as well as the cultural contexts out of which they emerge and to which they speak. 

To this end, we will ask how poets have responded to aspects of twenty-first century life such as the increased connectivity and barrage of information enabled by the internet, mobile phones, and related technologies; shifting notions of intellectual property; September 11 and the so-called war on terror; the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and a climate of ambient war; late capitalism and the financial crisis in 2007; the election of the United States’ first black president and fraught assertions of a post-racial society; and a heightened awareness of ecological degradation. Although our focus will be mostly on American poetry of the last few decades, as we pursue these questions we will be alert to the ways in which poets and critics, in a time of increasing globalization, press against and beyond the concept of nation.   

Concomitant with our exploration of the relationship between recent poetry and its cultural contexts will be an attention to how twenty-first century poetries engage with significant traditions in contemporary poetry and poetics, including the putatively mainstream, voice-based lyric; language-based experimentation; and identity-based, socially engaged poetic practices. We will consider how poets of this century borrow liberally from and rewrite the forms and ideologies of each of these modes, disrupting settled senses of the traditional and experimental in the process.  

Throughout the course, we will be concerned with understanding specific poems and the workings, effects and implications of their language, structures, and devices.

READINGS. Our reading will consist of representative, individual books of poetry from 2001 to the present alongside select poems and critical accounts of twenty-first century poetry and poetics.  

REQUIREMENTS. Students will be evaluated based on participation; brief written responses to each week’s course readings; a presentation; and a 15-20 page seminar paper (MFA students will have the option to complete a creative project).

Instructor:  Bennett, C

Unique #:  35925

Semester:  Spring 2014

Cross-lists:  n/a

E 325 (Topic 2: Creative Writing: Poetry) and 325P may not both be counted.

Prerequisites: C L 315, E 603B, 316K, or T C 603B.

Description: This course provides an introduction to the practice of poetry writing. Through regular creative exercises, class workshops of student poems, and readings in and analysis of contemporary and traditional poetry, we will explore fundamental aspects of poetic craft. Topics will include imagery and metaphor; diction, line, and stanza; sonic effects; and voice and tone. We will also learn about poetic forms ranging from the sonnet, sestina, and villanelle to open forms and the prose poem. Our goal will be to develop our own distinctive poetic practices. To this end, in written work and class discussions we will attempt to understand both how different poems achieve their effects and why poets might seek those effects.

Texts:  Readings, to be distributed in class, will consist of student work and contemporary poems representing a wide range of poetic traditions and practices.

Requirements & Grading: Grades will be based on a final portfolio of original poems and revisions (40%); weekly creative and/or critical exercises (30%); and class participation (30%).  Attendance is mandatory; more than three absences may result in a reduction of the final grade.

DESCRIPTION. This course provides an introduction to the field of poetic theory. Through readings in criticism and poetry from antiquity to the present, we will develop a sense of the history and current state of ongoing debates in the theory and practice of English-language poetry. What is poetry? What are its dominant features, techniques, and purposes? How do we distinguish it from other genres and types of discourse? How do we understand it in relation to its cultural and historical contexts? We will pursue such broad questions by entering into conversations around specific topics such as poetic address, figures of speech, sound and prosody, syntax and the line, diction and lexis, verse forms, voice and the lyric “I,” affect, temporality, context and occasion, and “lyric reading.”

TEXTS. In addition to poems by poets from Sappho to Juliana Spahr, we will consider work by critics and theorists including Theodor Adorno, Giorgio Agamben, Charles Altieri, Aristotle, Derek Attridge, Harold Bloom, Cleanth Brooks, Jonathan Culler, Paul de Man, Northrop Frye, Allen Grossman, G. W. F. Hegel, Virginia Jackson, Barbara Johnson, John Stuart Mill, Sianne Ngai, Winifred Nowottny, Marjorie Perloff, Plato, Rei Tarada, Helen Vendler, Michael Warner, and others.

REQUIREMENTS. Students will be evaluated based on participation, weekly critical and/or creative exercises in response to course readings, a presentation, and a longer writing assignment.

Instructor:  Bennett, C.            Areas:  IV / U

Unique #:  35380            Flags:  Writing

Semester:  Spring 2013            Restrictions:  n/a

Cross-lists:  n/a            Computer Instruction:  No

E 325 (Topic 2: Creative Writing: Poetry) and 325P may not both be counted.

Prerequisites: C L 315, E 603B, 316K, or T C 603B.

Description: This course provides an introduction to the practice of poetry writing.  Through regular creative exercises, class workshops of original student work, and readings in and analysis of contemporary poetry, we will explore fundamental aspects of poetic craft. Topics will include imagery and metaphor; diction, line, and stanza; sonic effects; and voice and tone.  We will also learn about poetic forms ranging from the sonnet, sestina, and villanelle to open forms and the prose poem.  Our goal will be to develop our own distinctive poetic practices. To this end, in written work and class discussions we will attempt to understand both how different poems achieve their effects and why poets might seek those effects.     

Texts:  Readings, to be distributed in class, will consist of student work and contemporary poems representing a wide range of poetic traditions and practices.

Requirements & Grading: Grades will be based on a final portfolio of original poems and revisions (40%); weekly creative and/or critical exercises (30%); and class participation (30%).  Attendance is mandatory; more than three absences may result in a reduction of the final grade.

Instructor:  Bennett, C            Areas:  III / U

Unique #:  35625            Flags:  n/a

Semester:  Fall 2012            Restrictions:  n/a

Cross-lists:  n/a            Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: “Poetry is Dead.  Does Anybody Really Care?” asked a Newsweek opinion piece in 2003, one of several turn-of-the-century declarations of poetry’s apparent demise. Hardly new, such obituaries recur throughout the twentieth century, forming a long cultural tradition that alternately celebrates poetry’s marginality as a strength or bemoans the irrelevance of contemporary verse. Is poetry, as has so often been announced, dead? How do we account, then, for the role poetry does play in twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture? How have contemporary poets responded to and helped to shape the cultural and aesthetic questions of their times?

            This course, a study of poetry written in English from 1945 to the present, explores such questions through the in-depth consideration of some of the most influential books of poetry published in the last sixty years. These innovative and sometimes controversial books evince how a seemingly moribund poetry has in fact often played a lively part in contemporary culture. In our efforts to understand this part, our readings of these books of poetry will attend to both the poetic traditions and practices they represent and the cultural contexts out of which they emerge and to which they speak.

            Class readings, discussion, and writing will be motivated by three main goals. First, we will seek to develop and fine-tune our skills in analyzing poetry, placing particular emphasis on understanding specific poems, and the workings and effects of poetic language, structures, and devices. Second, we will pursue a deep understanding of the individual books we consider, paying special attention to how each book’s poetics and reception are differently inflected by issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation. Finally, we will more broadly map the richness and variety of the movements, innovations, and impasses in poetry from 1945 to the present.

Texts: Our primary reading will consist of eight to ten individual volumes of poetry from 1945 to the present. Poets whose works we may study include Elizabeth Bishop, Kamau Brathwaite, Gwendolyn Brooks, Anne Carson, Allen Ginsberg, Thom Gunn, Langston Hughes, Robert Lowell, Harryette Mullen, Frank O’Hara, Sylvia Plath, and others.

            Secondary reading will include reviews, scholarly essays, and other materials (including additional poems) providing cultural and literary historical context.

Requirements & Grading: Final grades will be based on two exams (25% each), a six-page essay and optional revision (30%), and participation in class discussion and in informal written exercises (20%). Attendance is mandatory; more than three absences may result in a reduction of the final grade.

Instructor:  Bennett, C            Areas:  VI

Unique #:  35730            Flags:  Writing; Independent Inquiry

Semester:  Fall 2012            Restrictions:  n/a

Cross-lists:  n/a            Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites: Six semester hours of upper-division coursework in English.

Description: “Gossip exalts in poetry,” declares Robert Frost. This might seem a strange claim, since gossip’s ostensibly frivolous talk about others appears at odds with common conceptions of poetry as serious, solitary expression. Yet from the talk of the town to the modern gossip column, and from loose lips sink ships to don’t ask, don’t tell, American poets have persistently engaged gossip as a rhetorical model and a source of inspiration, turning to the strategies of idle talk in part to address shifting ideas of privacy and publicity, and self and community, and in part to reinvigorate poetic practice.

Starting with the assumption that poetic gossip thus provides a rich vantage from which to consider twentieth-century American poetry and culture, this seminar proposes two main lines of inquiry. First: in a digital era marked by an extraordinary and increasing ability—and desire—to spread gossip rapidly and widely, what can a rich tradition of poetic gossip tell us about the pleasures, uses, and risks of idle talk? And second: how can the history and style of gossip—especially insofar as it has been associated with marginalized identities (particularly women, gay men, and the working class), linked to mass culture and celebrity, and bound up with technologies from the telephone to Twitter—help us to better understand the forms and social practices of modern and contemporary poetry?

We will explore these questions by studying poems that represent gossip, poems that enact gossip, and poems that adopt aspects of gossip’s style. We will further consider gossip about poets and their poems, and how it might shape the reception of their work. We will also, by way of comparison with gossip, pay attention to forms of everyday and intimate talk more often associated with poetry, such as conversation and confession. Finally, we will think more broadly about gossip’s value as a metaphor for different kinds of collaborative and multi-voiced poetics, and for various strategies of unofficial meaning-making at work in twentieth-century poetry and beyond.

Texts: We will read and discuss poems by David Antin, John Ashbery, Gwendolyn Brooks, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Goldsmith, Langston Hughes, Edgar Lee Masters, Harryette Mullen, Frank O’Hara, Ezra Pound, D. A. Powell, James Schuyler, Juliana Spahr, Gertrude Stein, and others.

Secondary reading will include essays on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, scholarship on gossip in the social sciences and the humanities, legal accounts of gossip, and (in the form of reviews, interviews, letters, journals, memoirs, and biographical excerpts) juicy instances of poetry-world gossip.

Requirements & Grading: Final grades will be based on participation (both in class discussions and in short, weekly, written responses) (25%), a six-page essay and revision (25%), and a ten-page essay (50%). Attendance is mandatory; more than three absences may result in a reduction of the final grade.

Instructor:  Bennett, C            Areas:  VI / I

Unique #:  35555            Flags:  Writing; Independent Inquiry

Semester:  Spring 2012            Restrictions:  n/a

Cross-lists:  n/a            Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Course Description: In New York in the 1950s, Frank O’Hara and his fellow poets “divided our time between the literary bar, the San Remo, and the artists’ bar, the Cedar Tavern. In the San Remo we argued and gossiped: in the Cedar we often wrote poems while listening to the painters argue and gossip.” This heady mix of poetry, art, and gossip helped to define the so-called “New York School” of poets, one of many groups that challenged the literary establishment during the postwar years. The label New York School is sometimes taken to refer to a poetic style (marked by a playful, ironic, urban sensibility) and sometimes to a specific social scene (the New York art world in the fifties and sixties, and often the queer contours of that world). In fact blurring the line between literary styles and social networks, art and friendship, New York School poets variously sought to revitalize the connection between poems and contemporary life, and in so doing helped to reshape the forms, content, and politics of contemporary American poetry.

In this seminar we will explore the poetry of the New York School’s central figures (John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler) and the influence their work had on later poets affiliated with the style and community of the New York School. Throughout the course, we will be alert to how the history of New York School poetry illuminates the innovations and impasses of postwar American poetry more generally. 

Although our emphasis will be on poetry, we will read the poems within their broader aesthetic and social contexts, particularly the context of the New York art world. We will consider poetry in relation to painting, theater, dance, music, and film, studying numerous cross-genre collaborations and the rich interrelationship between these artistic mediums.

Texts: Our primary reading will be drawn from the work of first-generation New York School poets John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler. We will also read widely among poets differently associated with the New York School, including Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Joseph Ceravolo, Bernadette Mayer, Eileen Myles, Alice Notley, Ron Padgett, and others. Some of the many New York artists we will consider in relation to these poets include Willem de Kooning, Jane Freilicher, Michael Goldberg, Grace Hartigan, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Larry Rivers, and Mark Rothko.

Requirements & Grading: Final grades will be based on participation (both in class discussions and in weekly written exercises) (25%); one six-page essay (25%); and one ten-page research essay, developed in stages, with brief written assignments due along the way (50%). Attendance is mandatory; excessive absences, tardiness, and/or missed deadlines will negatively affect your final grade.

Prerequisites: C L 315, E 603B, 316K, or T C 603B.

Description: Dream factory or nightmare? Promised land or wasteland? In this course we will examine Hollywood’s symbolic role in American culture, considering the many complex and often contradictory ways the film capital has been constructed and understood. What can these competing representations of Hollywood tell us about twentieth-century America and its ideals, practices, and concerns? What do we find if we approach Hollywood as a vibrant cultural site to which America has repeatedly turned to work out its most conflicted ideas about art and commerce, class, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, ethics, politics, style? Posing these questions of numerous representations of Hollywood—primarily in films and novels, but also in stories, essays, poems, paintings, photographs, and fan magazines—we will trace America’s fraught relationship to Hollywood as it develops over the twentieth century, and explore the formal genre of the Hollywood story. 

Texts: In addition to Kenneth Anger’s gossipy Hollywood counter-history, Hollywood Babylon, texts will include novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Love of the Last Tycoon), Nathanael West (The Day of the Locust), and Gore Vidal (Myra Breckinridge); the films A Star is Born (dir. George Cukor), Barton Fink (by Joel and Ethan Coen), L.A. Confidential (dir. Curtis Hanson), Sunset Blvd. (dir. Billy Wilder), and Mulholland Dr. (dir. David Lynch); and artwork by Joseph Cornell, Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, and Cindy Sherman (The Complete Untitled Film Stills). The course packet will include brief additional readings, including critical essays.

Requirements & Grading: Final grades will be based on participation (both in class and in short, weekly written exercises) (20%), two five-page essays (25% each), and one eight-page essay (30%). Attendance is mandatory; more than three absences may result in a reduction of the final grade.

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: “Gossip exalts in poetry,” declares Robert Frost.  This might seem a strange claim, since gossip’s ostensibly frivolous talk about others appears at odds with common conceptions of poetry as serious, solitary expression.  Yet from the talk of the town to the modern gossip column, and from loose lips sink ships to don’t ask, don’t tell, poets have persistently engaged gossip as a rhetorical model and a source of inspiration, turning to the strategies of idle talk in part to address shifting ideas of privacy and publicity, and self and community, and in part to reinvigorate poetic practice.

Starting with the assumption that poetic gossip thus provides a rich vantage from which to consider twentieth-century poetry and culture, this seminar proposes two main lines of inquiry.  First: in a digital era marked by an extraordinary and increasing ability—and desire—to spread gossip rapidly and widely, what can a rich tradition of poetic gossip tell us about the pleasures, uses, and risks of idle talk?  And second: how can the history of gossip—especially insofar as it has been associated with marginalized identities (particularly women, gay men, and the working class), linked to mass culture and celebrity, and bound up with technologies from the telephone to Twitter—help us to better understand the forms and social practices of modern and contemporary poetry?

We will explore these questions by studying poems that represent gossip, poems that enact gossip, and poems that adopt aspects of gossip’s style.  We will further consider gossip about poets and their poems, and how it might shape the reception of their work.  We will also, by way of comparison with gossip, pay attention to forms of everyday and intimate talk more often associated with poetry, such as conversation and confession.  Finally, we will think more broadly about gossip’s value as a metaphor for different kinds of collaborative and multi-voiced poetics, and for various strategies of unofficial meaning-making at work in twentieth-century poetry.

Texts: Our primary reading will consist of select poems by a wide range of poets, with particular emphasis on the work of W. H. Auden, Langston Hughes, James Merrill, Harryette Mullen, Frank O’Hara, Sylvia Plath, D. A. Powell, Juliana Spahr, Gertrude Stein, and others.

Secondary reading will include critical essays on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, scholarship on gossip in the social sciences and the humanities, legal accounts of gossip, and (in the form of reviews, interviews, letters, journals, memoirs, and biographical excerpts) juicy instances of poetry-world gossip.

Requirements & Grading: Final grades will be based on participation (both in class and in short, weekly blog posts) (25%), two four-page essays (20% each), and one ten-page essay (35%).  Attendance is mandatory; more than three absences may result in a reduction of the final grade.

Course Description: Dream factory or nightmare? Promised land or wasteland? In this course we will examine Hollywood’s symbolic role in American culture, considering the many complex and often contradictory ways the film capital has been constructed and understood. What can these competing representations of Hollywood tell us about twentieth-century America and its ideals, practices, and concerns? What do we find if we approach Hollywood as a vibrant cultural site to which America has repeatedly turned to work out its most conflicted ideas about art and commerce, class, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, ethics, politics, style? Posing these questions of numerous representations of Hollywood—primarily in films and novels, but also in stories, essays, poems, paintings, photographs, and fan magazines—we will trace America’s fraught relationship to Hollywood as it develops over the twentieth century, and explore the formal genre of the Hollywood story.

Texts: In addition to Kenneth Anger’s gossipy Hollywood counter-history, Hollywood Babylon, texts will include novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Love of the Last Tycoon), Nathanael West (The Day of the Locust), and Gore Vidal (Myra Breckinridge); the films A Star is Born (dir. George Cukor), Barton Fink (by Joel and Ethan Coen), L.A. Confidential (dir. Curtis Hanson), Sunset Blvd. (dir. Billy Wilder), and Mulholland Dr. (dir. David Lynch); and artwork by Joseph Cornell, Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, and Cindy Sherman (The Complete Untitled Film Stills). The course packet will include brief additional readings, including critical essays.

Grading: Final grades will be based on participation (both in class and in short, weekly blog posts) (20%), two five-page essays (25% each), and one eight-page essay (30%). Attendance is mandatory; more than three absences may result in a reduction of the final grade.

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.