ENGL3771: Thinking with Poems

• ENGL 2011 Theory and Practice of Literary Criticism

• None

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• To explore the theoretical and formal intersections between poetry and critical theory, and to think about the ways in which certain poems might be said to accomplish /aid /stunt /destroy the work of thinking.
• To investigate and encourage the ongoing dialogue between theory and poetry across a range of contemporary theoretical turns (affect theory, distant reading, decolonialism, neo-/post-Marxisms, post-/non-humanisms, and the World Systems Theory), and poetic genres (American Romanticism, Modernism, Harlem, Proletarian poetry, Imagism, Objectivism, Beat, BAM, Black Mountain, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Cambridge School, New Formalism, Commune Editions).
• To introduce students to key methods and concepts for the critical analysis of both critical theory and poetry, and to encourage students to think with poems, whether that constitutes the elaboration of a particular political or philosophical stance, or the illumination of a particular intellectual or historical context.

• Includes a diverse range of works including experimental, anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist poetry (Claudia Rankine, Wole Soyinka, Audre Lorde, Keston Sutherland, Wendy Trevino, and Juliana Spahr) alongside, and often in contrast to, more familiar voices (Whitman, Dickinson, Hughes, Stein).
• Draws on key works by a range of ground breaking critical theorists such as Sianne Ngai, Christina Sharpe, Sophie Lewis, Lee Edelman, Donna Haraway, Jane Bennet and Mark Fisher.
• Combines the close (& distant) scrutiny of specific poems with attention to relevant theoretical, methodological, and political contexts. Seminars will roughly divided into two sections: the first parses a particular idea, and the second thinks about how this conceptual vocabulary augments, limits, or benefits from the poetry under discussion.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• Students will gain detailed knowledge and understanding of the key contributions that have defined the last thirty years of critical theory, and come into their own sense of how various poetries intersect, resist, or augment these modes of thinking.
• Over the course of two 3000 word essays, students will be able to develop their own sense of what it means to think with poetry, and be able to justify why poetry matters now.

Subject-specific Skills:

• Students studying this module will develop:
• critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts
• an ability to demonstrate knowledge of a range of texts and critical approaches
• informed awareness of formal and aesthetic dimensions of literature and ability to offer cogent analysis of their workings in specific texts
• sensitivity to generic conventions and to the shaping effects on communication of historical circumstances, and to the affective power of language
• an ability to articulate and substantiate an imaginative response to literature
• an ability to articulate knowledge and understanding of concepts and theories relating to literary studies
• skills of effective communication and argument
• awareness of conventions of scholarly presentation, and bibliographic skills including accurate citation of sources and consistent use of scholarly conventions of presentation
• command of a broad range of vocabulary and an appropriate critical terminology
• awareness of literature as a medium through which values are affirmed and debated

Key Skills:

• a capacity to analyse critically
• an ability to acquire complex information of diverse kinds in a structured and systematic way involving the use of distinctive interpretative skills derived from the subject
• competence in the planning and execution of essays
• a capacity for independent thought and judgement, and ability to assess the critical ideas of others
• a capacity for collaborative work
• skills in critical reasoning
• an ability to handle information and argument in a critical manner
• information-technology skills such as word-processing and electronic data access information
• organisation and time-management skills.

• Seminars: encourage peer-group discussion, enable students to develop critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts, and skills of effective communication and presentation; promote awareness of diversity of interpretation and methodology.
• Consultation session: encourages students to reflect critically and independently on their work.
• Independent but directed reading in preparation for seminars provides opportunity for students to enrich subject-specific knowledge and enhances their ability to develop appropriate subject-specific skills.
• Typically, directed learning may include assigning student(s) an issue, theme or topic that can be independently or collectively explored within a framework and/or with additional materials provided by the tutor. This may function as preparatory work for presenting their ideas or findings (sometimes electronically) to their peers and tutor in the context of a seminar; informal position papers encourage students to advance claims and refine them in the light of seminar discussion
• Coursework: tests the student's ability to argue, respond and interpret, and to demonstrate subject-specific knowledge and skills such as appreciation of the role played by the imagination in literary production and the close reading and analysis of texts; they also test the ability to present word-processed work, observing scholarly conventions.
• Feedback: The written feedback that is provided after the first assessed essay allows students to reflect on examiners' comments, giving students the opportunity to improve their work for the second essay.

Before the first assessed essay, students have an individual 15 minute consultation session in which they are entitled to show their seminar leader a sheet of points relevant to the essay and to receive oral comment on these points. Students may also, if they wish, discuss their ideas for the second essay at this meeting.

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