PS-Surveying English Literatures: Make it New! Modernist Poetry
Stephan Karschay
Kommentar
In 1921, T. S. Eliot famously defended the semantic obscurity of much of his own verse by stating that “poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult”. So difficult, indeed, that the common reader of Eliot’s monumental modernist poem The Waste Land was provided with seven pages of accompanying notes by the author himself. Literary accounts of British poetry in the Modernist period (ca. 1890-1940) emphasise the artistic intricacies of modern verse and select poets like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound as the representative writers of the age. However, recent criticism has demanded a re-evaluation of Modernist poetry, drawing attention to the manifold ways available to writers of producing modern work without necessarily being enigmatic and elitist. This seminar will acquaint students with a broad range of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century poetry, both traditional and experimental, covering poets as diverse as Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, Ernest Dowson, W. B. Yeats, Charlotte Mew, the ‘War Poets’, John Masefield, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, Edith Sitwell, Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden. Furthermore, we will pay close attention to the diverse strands and movements responsible for the shaping of Modern(ist) poetry, most notably Impressionism, Imagism, Vorticism, Symbolism and – less highbrow – Georgian poetry. In this seminar, students will be made familiar with Modern(ist) poetry through both ‘close’ and contextual readings which should ultimately result in an understanding of the comprehensive and salient features of this intriguing genre as well as an appreciation of the particularities of the many writers under consideration. In other words, we will pay equal attention to every poet’s idiosyncracies as well as the undeniable fact that Modern(ist) poetry is deeply steeped in its historical context and significantly shaped by the dynamics of early twentieth-century culture.
Voraussetzungen
Erfolgreiche Absolvierung des Basismoduls 1 (Introduction to Literary Studies).
Regelmäßige und aktive Teilnahme, Lektüre aller im Seminar diskutierten Texte, seminarbegleitende Studienleistungen (wie z.B. response paper, Gruppenpräsentation, Expertengruppe), abschließende Seminararbeit (abhängig von Modulbelegung). Auch die ersten Wochen der Veranstaltung zählen zur regelmäßigen Teilnahme.
Literaturhinweise
Baldick, Chris. “Modern Poetry.” The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. 10: 1910-1940: The Modern Movement. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. 75-113. Print.
Davis, Alex, and Lee M. Jenkins, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print.
Schließen
14 Termine
Regelmäßige Termine der Lehrveranstaltung