English R1A

Book List

Adams, Stephen: Poetic Designs: An Introduction to Meters, Verse Forms, and Figures of Speech ; Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung: Exilée and Temps Morts: Selected Works; Nakayasu, Sawako: Mouth: Eats Color; Silko, Leslie Marmon: Ceremony

Other Readings and Media

Other texts will be uploaded to bCourses as .pdf files. These will include essays, poems, and possibly some visual art and/or short stories. Depending on the vote of the class, another novel may be added to the syllabus.

Description

This course focuses on poetry written during the twentieth century across the Pacific Ocean, with a large part of the texts emerging from North America, East and Southeast Asia, and Oceania. Though these works emerge from a variety of national contexts, our goal will be to question and analyze the modes of literary dialogue and aesthesis that appear through inter- and trans-national crossings of the oceanic divide, with an eye toward, particularly, questions of literary form and technique.

The aim of this course will be to exercise our skills in reading and writing on literary texts, and to think critically about our analytic methods, as well as how, why, and to what end we might believe that they work. Students will write, peer-review, and rewrite a series of literary-critical essays, with the goal of fostering attentive reading and viewing, imaginative analysis, and bold writing. As this course fulfills the R1B requirement, we will focus on scaling progressively longer essays and incorporating research.