Undergraduate Course: Modern Poetry: 1922-1927 (ENLI10405)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 4 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course examines key publications from the golden age of High Modernist poetry. Each week we will look at an individual collection by key British and American poets of the time. Though scanning only five years, from 1922 to 1927, the course includes some of the most renowned and influential poets and poetry books of the twentieth century. In the shadow of the catastrophic First World War, all the poets were seeking an apt response to the combustible context of modernity, and the course will conduct an ongoing examination of the differing ways in which the poets challenged conventional ideas of poetry as part of an attempt to meet the changes of the modern world. We will look closely at the differing formal and stylistic innovations of each work, examining how they represented intimations of chaos on the one hand, but also ideas of order and tradition on the other. We will explore key poetic debates of the time: the nature of the poetic image; free verse; authorial "impersonality" and the poem's relationship with the reader; themes of gender and sexuality; of history and temporality; and of the convulsive politics of the time. We will focus on close readings and individual poems, but also discuss the idea of the poetry collection as an artwork, considering the design and structure of each book. |
| Course description |
Students will be expected to devote considerable individual preparation time to the close reading and re-reading of set poems each week, while also considering each week's set text as a whole. In addition, they will be expected to consult a range of supplementary and secondary material, including extracts from the poets' own critical writings. A further aim of the course is to familiarise students with the key interpretive debates inspired by modern poetry, which also provide a valuable overview of the history of twentieth-century and contemporary poetry criticism. Students will be guided towards a range of secondary material that best represents these critical debates.
The structure of reading and analysis on the course is broadly comparative: students will be asked to explore the similarities and differences between the key poems and set texts, and examine the various types of analysis made possible by the critical modes of reading to which they are introduced. The guided examination of the similarities and differences between the range of texts and approaches studied will help students to develop the analytical skills and knowledge that will be assessed in their essays.
The course is assessed by two essays, one to be completed by Week 9 of the course and one to be written during the exam period, and an assessment of students' participation in class and their autonomous learning groups. Detailed written feedback will be provided on each element of assessment.
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Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2020/21, Not available to visiting students (SS1)
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Quota: 12 |
| Course Start |
Semester 1 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 20,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
176 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
One Coursework Essay of 2,500 words: 30%
One time-limited Final Essay of 3000 words: 60%
Class Participation Assessment: 10% |
| Feedback |
Detailed written feedback will be provided on each element of assessment, and further oral follow up feedback from the tutor will be available from anybody who would like it. |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- By the end of the course students should be able to demonstrate a detailed knowledge of key texts of modern poetry.
- Students should also be able to demonstrate understanding of the major critical debates produced by modern poetry.
- Students should be able to demonstrate understanding of the cultural context of modern poetry.
- Students should be able to undertake independent critical analysis of modern poetry.
- Students should be able to orally present the results of research undertaken individually and as part of a small group, respond judiciously to such research undertaken by others, and critically evaluate the importance of such material for an understanding of the chief themes of the course.
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Reading List
Primary
[All texts are available online via LITERATURE ONLINE, except Mina Loy's Lunar Baedeker]
Doolittle, Hilda [H.D.]. Collected Poems 1912-1944. Ed. Louis Martz. New York: New Directions, 1983.
Eliot, T. S. Selected Poems. London: Faber, 1948.
Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel. New York: Vintage, 1994.
Moore, Marianne. Observations. Ed. Linda Leavell. New York: Farrrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.
Lawrence, D. H. Selected Poems. Ed. James Fenton. London: Penguin, 2008.
Loy, Mina. Lost Lunar Baedeker. Ed. Roger Conover. Manchester: Carcanet, 1997.
Pound, Ezra. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1993.
Stevens, Wallace. Selected Poems. Ed. John Serio. New York: Knopf, 2011.
Williams, Carlos William. Collected Poems Vol 1: 1909-1939. Ed. A Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan. New ed. Manchester: Carcanet, 2018.
Secondary
Ayers, David. Modernism: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
Bell, Michael. Literature, Modernism and Myth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Bornstein, George. Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Bradbury, Malcolm, and J. McFarlane (eds.). Modernism 1890-1930 (2nd ed.). London: Penguin, 1991.
Bradshaw, David and Kevin J. H. Dettmar (eds.). A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.
Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1987.
Chinitz, David E. and Gail McDonald (eds.). A Companion to Modernist Poetry. Oxford: Blackwell, 2014.
Cook, Jon (ed.). Poetry in Theory: An Anthology 1900-2000. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
Craig, Cairns. Yeats, Eliot, Pound and the Politics of Poetry. London: Croom Helm, 1982.
Davis, Alex, and Lee M. Jenkins (eds.). The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Davis, Alex, and Lee M. Jenkins (eds.). A History of Modernist Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Emig, Rainer. Modernism in Poetry: Motivations, Structures and Limits. London: Longman, 1995.
Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity. Harvard UP, 1996.
Goldman, Jane. Modernism, 1910-1945: Image to Apocalypse. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Howarth, Peter. The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. London: Faber, 1972.
Kermode, Frank. Romantic Image. Oxford: Routledge & Paul, 1957.
Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918. Harvard University Press, 1983.
Kolocotroni, Vassiliki, Jane Goldman and Olga Taxidou (eds.). Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998.
Krieger, Murray. The New Apologists for Poetry. University of Minnesota Press, 1956.
Levenson, Michael. A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1880-1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Levenson, Michael (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Longenbach, James. Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism. Oxford: OUP, 1988.
Miller, J. Hillis. Poets of Reality: Six 20th Century Writers. Harvard University Press, 1966.
Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms: A Literary Guide. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995.
Perkins, David. A History of Modern Poetry, Vol 1: From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1976.
Perloff, Marjorie. The Poetics of Indeterminancy: Rimbaud to Cage. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.
Rainey, Lawrence. Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture. Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1998.
Rainey, Lawrence (ed.). Modernism: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.
Ramazani, Jahan (ed.). The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Vol 1: Modern Poetry. 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2003.
Scott, Bonnie Kime and Mary Lynn Broe (eds.) The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
Stead, C. K. Pound, Yeats, Eliot and the Modernist Movement. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986.
[Further reading specific to each week's poet and text available on LEARN] |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
As an outcome of having studied this course, students will benefit from having developed a range of personal and professional skills commensurate with the range of SCQF Level 10 characteristics:
Knowledge and understanding: students will have had the opportunity to demonstrate their critical understanding of a range of the principal theories and concepts of literary analysis in relation to their reading and discussion of the course material;
Applied Knowledge, Skills and Understanding: in their work for class discussion, presentations and formal assessment tasks, students will have been able to practice the application of these theories and concepts in their construction of arguments about the course material;
Generic Cognitive Skills: in completing assessed essays and class presentations, students will have practiced identifying, defining, conceptualising and analysing complex problems and issues germane to the discipline;
Communication: through participating in these tasks students will also have demonstrated the ability to communicate ideas and information about specialised topics in the discipline to an informed audience of their peers and subject specialists;
Autonomy and Working with Others: students will also have shown the capacity to work autonomously and in small groups on designated tasks, develop new thinking with their peers, and take responsibility for the reporting, analysis and defence of these ideas to a larger group. |
| Keywords | Poetry,Modernism,Modern Poetics |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Alan Gillis
Tel: (0131 6)50 3050
Email: Alan.Gillis@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Kara McCormack
Tel: (0131 6)50 3030
Email: Kara.McCormack@ed.ac.uk |
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