8:240 Readings in American Literary Genres
Poetries of the American Left

Professor Dee Morris
Office: EPB 460
Office hours: W 2:00-3:00, F 11:30-12:30, & by appointment
dee-morris@uiowa.edu

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

One of the most enduring legacies of the Cold War has been the distortion of Left cultural politics and aesthetic ideologies that expanded the range of possibilities for poetry and redrew the relationship of poets to their publics. In the academy, lingering commitments to New Criticism have constructed a poetic canon that emphasizes writings from the twenties, forties, sixties, and eighties. This course will examine an oppositional tradition that responded to and attempted to intervene in moments of cultural and political crisis in the thirties, fifties, seventies, and nineties.

The aim of the course is not to reduce the poetries of the American left to a study of the merits and/or failures of communism, new left politics, and/or cultural liberation movements but to consider how these poetries open an expanded field of effect and inquiry. Research by scholars such as Alan Wald, Cary Nelson, Paula Rabinowitz, Alan Filreis, Michael Thurston, Walter Kaladjian, Michael Davidson, and Michael Denning provides the foundations for this inquiry; new editions of the collected poems of such writers as Langston Hughes, George Oppen, Edwin Rolfe, and Muriel Rukeyser provide access to crucial cultural documents; and recent pedagogical compilations such as Paul Lauter's Heath Anthology of American Literature and Cary Nelson's Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry open new possibilities for introductory and advanced teaching.

This course returns to the poetries of these decades by focusing on three bodies of writing: the writings of three poets whose political and aesthetic commitments developed in the thirties and fifties (Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, and Adrienne Rich); the poetry of writers from the Dynamo Group, the Objectivists, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, and contemporary situationists who are currently refashioning left traditions for digital media; and, finally, writings that surround the political events in which these writers wished to intervene, including The Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War, the McCarthy Inquisition, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the sixties liberation movements, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq Wars of the Bush administrations.

Assignments for the course are intended to meet three large goals:

• extensive reading in twentieth-century American poetry, with particular attention to its relationship to the cultural discourses of its time;
• development of critical strategies by which to situate poems as more than aesthetic exercises, on the one hand, and, on the other, more than a odd or difficult delivery systems for cultural content;
• practice in critical writing useful in graduate study, including bibliographic annotations, scholarly reviews, teaching presentations, and short conference papers
  
  

ASSIGNMENTS:

Class presentations:

1. Poems: In the course of the semester, each student will be responsible for initiating discussion of one poem or a cluster of poems on the syllabus. You may select any poem(s) assigned for the day of your presentation, but please check your choice with me. To prepare for your presentation, you should read a number of critical discussions of your chosen poem and, if possible, pertinent historical or cultural documents about its occasion. Your aim will be to develop a considered reading of the poem, introduce the interpretive challenges it presents, and generate a class discussion. You may want to summarize competing ways of reading the poem; highlight a critical crux; suggest the multiple meanings of a key or crypt word; or raise questions about the poem's rhetorical or formal elements and/or political effect. Although you should be prepared to give your own reading of the poem, your presentation should focus on eliciting inquiry, provoking thought, and opening the poem for analysis, not giving explanations.

2. Critical responses: Working with one other member of the class, each student will prepare a brief response to a pair of critical readings assigned for the week of your presentation. Since all class members will also have read these essays, your job will not be to summarize or explain their arguments but rather to identify issues for discussion. You might locate differences in the way your two essays approach a poet or interpret a poem; mount a critique of their critical methodologies; suggest ways that the two essays reinforce or contest each other; or examine the validity of each essay's argument. Use this assignment to engage the class in an evaluation of the theoretical assumptions and critical arguments of your essays.

 

Writing projects:

1. Project on a poet of the American left of your own choosing. Early in the semester, you should select a 20th-century left poet whose work may appear but is not featured on our syllabus. Everyone in the class will work with a different poet. After extensive reading in the poetry of your chosen author, you will prepare a handout that introduces your poet to the class. You may be as inventive as you wish in designing your materials, but be sure to include the following elements: a brief biographical sketch, an annotated bibliography of criticism about your poet that you found particularly helpful, a few representative poems, and a short description of some distinctive aspect of your poet's work. The goal of this assignment is pedagogical: how effectively can you introduce your poet to your classmates?.

Due: March 6

2. Exercise in primary research or in poetic practices. You may satisfy this requirement in one of the following ways:

a. historical/bibliographical research: The aim of this assignment is to send you back to the artifacts of the period, which may include historical documents from congressional hearings or law cases, journal issues, newspapers, or archival materials such as first editions, broadsides, photographs, or films. Feel free to investigate anything you think might illuminate the poetry we will be studying. Include in your presentation of your findings: 1) a bibliography of primary sources you have examined, including a brief description of each noting, for example, its purpose, rhetorical stance, apparent audience, central argument, and / or distinguishing features; 2) a brief description of the most interesting discoveries you have made and the ways in which they resonate with your readings of left poetries. You might, for instance, identify a particularly evocative cluster of metaphors in political essays or speeches, describe a particular event such as the Scottsboro case or the McCarthy hearings, or present evidence of publishing practices that illuminate particular aspects of left poetries.

b. examination of poetic practices: The mainstream poem--epiphanic, confessional, or mythological free verse--is often not an effective vehicle for political thinking. The aim of this assignment is to send you looking for poetic strategies that were effective for political ends. Possibilities might include documentary poems, prose poems, serial poems, musical forms such as the blues, free jazz, or ambient poems, chance operations, Situationist detournements, improvised theatrical events, and many others. Include in your presentation: 1) an annotated bibliography of critical sources on this practice; 2) an anthology of examples; and 3) a meditation of the advantages and limits of this strategy.

Due: April 10

3. Conference paper. Focusing on any aspect of your reading in this course, write a paper of approximately 8 pages that would be suitable for a panel presentation at a conference on twentieth-century American literature and culture.

Due: May 3

ATTENDANCE & PARTICIPATION:

The model for this class is not agonistic--our material supplies plenty of that--but cooperative. Each student comes to the class with interests, skills, and commitments that offer particular access to the materials we will be reading; each will do individual research that opens new angles into this material. If the course is successful, it will be because we have together created an experience that is more than a sum of individual achievements. As a research workshop, the class will function as a gift economy: i.e., honor comes not through hoarding but through distributing knowledge.

All students are expected to complete the reading assignments, make frequent posts on the listserv, ask questions, share bibliographies, and build ideas with other members of the class. To accomplish this, it is important, in every sense, to be in class. More than 4 absences will significantly affect your grade for the semester; more than 6 absences will result in an F.