Modern Poetry

Calendar

Session 4

I’ll lecture for some of this week’s class. If I lecture I’ll probably repeat what I’ve been thinking and publishing on the subject. To give you a sense of my current thinking on these issues, I append a recent essay (by me) on Ezra Pound and how modernism uses translation. You might as well read it as to have me repeat it to you-we can use the time more efficiently in this way and can open more comfortably into conversation. See the study materials section for the referenced essay.

Session 7

I’ll lecture for some of this week’s class. If I lecture I’ll probably repeat what I’ve been thinking and publishing on the subject. To give you a sense of my current thinking on these issues, I append a recent essay (by me) on Charlie Chaplin and how modernism poetry uses image-techniques derived from film. The point is not only that the poems allude to Chaplin, but that they often derive their own sense of literary aesthetics, paradoxically, from film aesthetics. You might as well read the argument as to have me repeat it to you. I should mention that this essay is a bit self-reflexive-it deals with the dynamic of teaching MIT students-and that it’s strictly a draft. I’ll be interested to hear if its account of MIT classroom dynamics reflects your own sense of those dynamics. See the study materials section for the referenced essay.

SES #	TOPICS
1	Introductions Origins of Modernism I Symbolist Textuality, Aestheticism, Relation to Image the Flaneur and the City
2	Origins of Modernism II The End of Victorianism Ethics and Aesthetics Oratory and the Performative Darwin and Social Change
3	Origins of Modernism: III World War I The End of the Discourse of Rationalism The Empire Break Down
4	Modernism and Orientalism The Ideogram Gender and Translation (‘Feminizing’ Asia) The War at Home F.S. Flint
5	The Modern Image and Sculpture Early Wittgenstein and the Status of the Image
6	Montage and Film-history Radio Aesthetics The Photographic Image and the Liteary Image The Image as Repository of Desire
7	Chaplin as Everyman, Chaplin as Subversive Modern Irony and Chaplin’s Sentimentalilty ‘Machine’ Aesthetics
8	The Psychology of Self-revelation Time, Change, and the Image in ‘Prufrock’ The Image as Repoistory of Meaning
9	The “Mythic Method” and History The Working Papers to “The Waste Land”, and Ezra Pound’s Editing Anthropology, Distance, and Irony: “The Golden Bough”
10	The Status of Allusion Speech, Speechlessness, and the Buddha
11	Williams: “Waste Land” as the “Great Catastrophe” Free Verse and the American Idiom “‘Medical’ Aesthetics: Why a ‘Contagious Hospital’?”
12	Words as Things Constructionism and Objectivism The Gendered ‘Gaze’ Class Distinctions in High Modernism
13-14	Harlem Renaissance Jazz, Race, and Gender
15	Woolf Mr. Ramsay and the Limits of Reason: Lines Mrs. Ramsay and the Expansion of Consciousness: Circles
16	Woolf (cont.) Lily’s Androgynous Vision
17	Yeats Pound Stevens Doolittle Auden Conquest Ashbery Art, Disillusionment, and Modernist Form Aestheticism as Ritual, as Religion
18	Yeats (cont.) “Sailing to Byzantium”: What’s the Problem? [Stanzas 1 and 2]
19	Yeats (cont.) “Sailing to Byzantium”: Where to Look for a Resolution? [Stanzas 3 and 4]
20	Yeats (cont.) Stevens Stevens, Repetition, and Language: Emerson meets Heidegger
21	Stevens (cont.) Displaced Spirituality and Modernrist Compensaion [“Sunday Morning” - Stanzas 1 and 2]
22	Stevens (cont.) Versions of “Sunday Morning” Transcendenence and the Image Keats and Stevens: The Last Stanza of “Sunday Morning”
23-25	Student Presentations