English 190

Research Seminar: Slow Seeing / Slow Reading

Book List

Altieri, Charles: Reckoning with the Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Literary Experience; Clark, T.J.: The Sight of Death

Other Readings and Media

A course reader, available from Copy Central on Bancroft Ave.

Description

This is a seminar in the poetics of reading poems and seeing paintings. Over the course of the semester, students will undertake prolonged, exploratory, multi-contextual readings of a selection of recent and contemporary “difficult” poems. Each student will also undertake a similar engagement with a 20^th/21^st century painting of his or her choice from the permanent collection of the Berkeley Art Museum. Poems by W. B. Yeats, Claude McKay, Rae Armantrout, Elizabeth Bishop, Ed Roberson, Marianne Moore, Juliana Spahr, and Susan Howe are among the poems that will be considered. Paintings by Philip Guston, Hans Hoffman, Willem de Kooning, and Helen Frankenthaler are among the paintings that will be available for repeated viewing. The individual poems and paintings will be read/seen against the backdrop of their historical moment and contextual purport and in conjunction with assigned critical texts, but students will be expected to conduct their own research, using primary and secondary sources in the process of coming to relevant, meaningful readings/seeings of the works. Students will be asked to maintain a reading/seeing journal and to write two critical papers.

“English 190: Slow Seeing / Slow Reading” is an experiment, and is offered as a collaboration between Lyn Hejinian, of the English Department, and Apsara DiQuinzio, of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Among the outcomes of the course will be an exhibition at BAMPFA that will be part of a new exhibition series at the museum titled Cal Conversations; the materials for the “Slow Seeing / Slow Reading” exhibition will be determined by the seminar’s students and include some of their course writings.

Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.

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