English 190

Other Readings and Media

Dickinson, E.: The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition; Emily Dickinson: Selected Letters

Description

This is an intensive seminar in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. We will learn how to read (to describe and interpret) Dickinson's poems, with pleasure and confidence, deeply and also broadly throughout her career. Topics will include early poetry & biography; rhythms and rhymes; women writers & women's poetry; letters and biography; love and (non)marriage; definition, riddle, and figure; death & dying; religion and the afterlife; science (e.g., evolution); nature as topic and as figure; emotion (e.g., despair, fear, loneliness); gender and sexuality; the Civil War and Abolition; self-definition and self-reliance; manuscript poem packets; contemporary poetry (e.g., Emerson, Longfellow, the Brownings, Lydia Sigourney, Helen Hunt Jackson); late poetry & letters. We will learn to research Dickinson by learning how to use variorum editions, concordances & indices, how to locate and incorporate relevant criticism, both of individual poems and of larger issues. There will be an exercise in scansion, a shorter paper on a single poem, and a longer paper on a group of poems.

English 190 replaced English 100 and 150 as of Fall '09. English majors may fulfill the seminar requirement for the major by taking one section of English 190 (or by having taken either English 100 or English 150 before Fall '09). Please read the paragraph on page 2 of this Accouncement of Classes for more details about enrolling in, or wait-listing for, this course.