This seminar is designed to provide English majors with intensive and closely supervised work in critical reading and writing. Although sections of the course may address any literary question, period, or genre, they all provide an introduction to critical and methodological problems in literary studies.

This seminar explores archaism as an enduring aesthetic practice and the philosophical or theoretical methods most pertinent to its study. Students will engage writers from the Early Modern period to the present whose work employs—in various ways and to various ends— antiquated diction, obsolete verse forms, and/or otherwise outmoded literary styles. This includes well-known archaists like Edmund Spenser, S.T. Coleridge, and Ezra Pound, as well as the postwar American novelist Thomas Pynchon. But it also includes contemporary poets and experimental artists like Caroline Bergvall, Jos Charles, Alice Oswald, and others. (It may also include a film or two.) To better appreciate and understand these many writers—separated by centuries and political orientations—students will also engage a handful of theoretical writings that take up questions of nostalgia, desire, backwardness, and the meaning and value of history. We will ask what it means to be “untimely,” in Nietzsche’s terms, and how that untimeliness endorses or disrupts normative claims of belonging—to land, communities, and modes of thought.

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills