Research-oriented and designed for upper-division English majors. Intensive examination of critical approaches, literary theory, or a special topic in literary and cultural studies. Topics vary from semester to semester. Students should consult the department's "Announcement of Classes" for offerings well before the beginning of the semester.

This seminar will provide you with a sustained reading course in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. We’ll begin with her early poetry, and trace her evolution into the singular poet we read today, with particular attention to her hymn forms and her poetic figures. We’ll also consider how her poems might be read in relation to history and her biography. Since Dickinson wrote most of her poetry in the span of a few years, we’ll group and read her poems largely by topics. Our topics will include gender and sexuality, definition and riddle, poetics, nature, religion, death and dying, suspense, horror, loneliness, despair and hope, self in society and by itself, abolition and war. We’ll also delve into her manuscripts of individual poems, packets of poems, and her letters. Especially with her later poems, the distinctions between verses, poems, and letters become hazy. To guage Dickinson’s singularity and commonness, we will also read poems and essays by her contemporaries (e.g., Lydia Sigourney, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Alan Poe, and Helen Hunt Jackson). Your first paper is diagnostic and will be a reading of a single poem. In the second half of the term, you will be choosing your research topic and discussing it with me. I will also help you choose and respond to Dickinson criticism. Your research paper will gather a collection poems on a topic of your choosing, in conversation with recent criticism. By the end of the seminar, you should be reading and writing on Dickinson with pleasure and satisfaction.

Book List:

Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R.W. Franklin

Requisites

• English 100 is prerequisite to English 190.

Repeat Rules