This course is a small, faculty-led seminar on the practice and discipline of literary analysis. It is meant for all students who seek an introductory literature course and would like to improve their ability to read and write critically, including those who may wish to major in English. Focusing on the close study of a few works, rather than a survey of many, the seminar will help students develop college-level skills for interpreting literature, while gaining awareness of different strategies and approaches for making sense of literary language, genres, forms, and contexts. The seminar also will develop students’ ability to write about literature and to communicate meaningfully the stakes of their analysis to an audience.

In this course, we’ll read the poetry of Seamus Heaney, from his early work to his last poems. We’ll also take a look at some of his prose and translations. Our sense of the poet will be amplified by reading Dennis O’Driscoll’s book of interviews with the poet. We’ll study Heaney’s craft in detail, thinking about what his work says about form and reality. And we’ll look around the poet, reading some of the work of Heaney’s contemporaries, writers and thinkers in the Anglophone world such as Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Derek Walcott, and we’ll read the poetry in terms not only of form and lyric, but also colonialism, empire, translation, transatlantic culture, the natural world, childhood, and the connections—as well as vast differences—between rural life and the urban milieu in which many poets end up living and working. So our aim, first of all, will be to understand what Heaney’s styles, forms, methods, and principles have to say. The twentieth century was a time of great change and violence, and we’ll think about how that change and violence might’ve registered in some of the century’s poetry. Our second main purpose is to understand what it means to read, in the deepest sense, a poet’s oeuvre, their entire body of work. Reading—close reading, as it’s called in the field—is, from the perspective of literary studies, the fundamental wellspring, the method, and, arguably, the reason-for-being. We’ll try to understand how different ways of reading lead to different styles of literary and critical thought. We’ll also explore how to research literary topics and how to incorporate research in your essays. We’ll study the summary and synthesis of materials we read, the construction of logical and persuasive arguments, the conveying of attitudes and information.

Required Texts:

Seamus Heaney. Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996.
Seamus Heaney. Selected Poems 1988-2013.
Dennis O’Driscoll and Seamus Heaney. Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills