Tom Whalen

 

 

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poetry course
SS 2009

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Sommersemester 2009
Universität Stuttgart, Amerikanistik II
Thursdays 9.45 - 11.15
H7, Room 7.209

 


  G2 Critical Analysis - 19TH AND 20TH CENTURY BRITISH AND AMERICAN POETRY


Close readings of a selection of British and American poems, from the Victorians to the Moderns, with special attention to the poems' formal properties.

April 23
Introduction: Basic Literary Terms
“No Buyers,” “Nobody Comes,” “Snow in the Suburbs” - Thomas Hardy

April 30
Persona poems and Dramatic Monologues (I)
“Ulysses” – Alfred Lord Tennyson
“My Last Duchess” – Robert Browning

May 7
Persona poems and Dramatic Monologues (II)
“Dover Beach” – Matthew Arnold
“Naming of Parts” – Henry Reed
      Writing about Poetry (I): in-class outline

May 14
Sonnets
“Remember,” “In an Artist’s Studio” – Christina Rosetti
“God's Grandeur,” “The Windhover,” “Pied Beauty” – Gerard Manley Hopkins
“Design” – Robert Frost
      Writing about Poetry (II): “Frost’s Design” – Anne Ferry

May 28
Villanelles
“Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” – Dylan Thomas
“The Waking” – Theodore Roethke
“One Art” – Elizabeth Bishop

Emily Dickinson
“Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” (1861 version), “I like a look of Agony,”
“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” “I’m Nobody! Who are you?,” “Much Madness is divinest Sense,”
“I died for Beauty,” “After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died,”
“I dwell in Possibility,” “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant,” “My life closed twice before its close”
      Writing about Poetry (III): short in-class written analysis

June 18
W. B. Yeats
“The Second Coming,” “Among School Children”
      Writing about Poetry (IV): “Yeats’s Great Rooted Blossomer”- Cleanth Brooks

June 25
Modernism
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” – T. S. Eliot
“Musée des Beaux Arts” – W. H. Auden

July 2
Imagism, and Beyond
“In a Station of the Metro” – Ezra Pound
“The Red Wheelbarrow” – William Carlos Williams
“Sea Rose” – H. D.
“Where Knock Is Open Wide” – Theodore Roethke

July 9
Wallace Stevens
“The Snow Man,” “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm”
      Writing about Poetry (V); “'Alone in an Immense Valley': A Note on Stevens's 'Valley Candle'“ – Tom Whalen

July 16
Philip Larkin
“Wants,” “Reasons for Attendance,” “Churchgoing,” “Toads Revisited,” “Dockery and Son,”
“High Windows,” “Winter Palace”


July 23

EXAM on terms and poems, with a short critical analysis


Course requirements: regular attendance (no more than three absences allowed).
Course grades will be based on class participation (20%), presentation/oral exam (30%) and written exam (50%).