Course details

Name: ENGL - 501

Title: SEMINAR IN AMERICAN LITERATURE: EMILY DICKINSON AND WALT WHITMAN

Section: 01

Semester: Spring - 2023

Credits: 3

Description:
This course will read intensely key works of the two most original and influential American poets of the 19th century, central to the movement known as the “American Renaissance”. We will read them both individually as innovative and unique voices and also in juxtaposition with one another as orphic and critical explorers of the practices and potential of the American democratic experiment, of public vs. private spheres of identity construction (and disguise) including sexual self-identity, of the uses of the emerging sciences and their impact on the possibilities for spiritual self-definition and religious belief--of the fraught legacy of Calvinism in Dickinson's case and the proclamation of a new gospel of poetry in Whitman's--of the function and applications and limits of poetry in a time of cataclysmic civil war.
We will study the innovations of poetic form they each introduced and the subsequent influence of those forms. Since strong biographies of both poets are available, the relevance of biography to textual analysis will be a sub-theme of the course. Since the nearly full manuscript collection of Dickinson’s poetic texts of the Franklin edition is now accessible online--https://www.edickinson.org/--we will examine her process of composition and revision in some of those texts:
WORK ASSIGNMENTS:
Readings as assigned
One discussion paper/report to the class based on an assigned reading 20%
One final term paper 60%
Class participation 20%

Last updated on 2022-10-28 By Gingerich Willard (gingerichw)

Schedule: Monday From 5:30 pm To 8:00 pm

Graduation requirements:

• Any Literature (1e)
• Genre Study (Poetry)
• Pre-1900 American (TE 1c)
• Other American (TE 1d)
• Pre-1900 (1c)
• Graduate (BA/MA)

Teaching Faculty: Gingerich Willard (gingerichw)

Is course canceled: No