Poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson 3301-M-LA127
The course is to extend the students' knowledge of the work of the two greatest American romantic poets, Walt Whitman and Emily Dikinson, read against their respective socio-historical background. The poems to be analyzed include the best-known and the most celebrated texts by Whitman and Dickinson as interpreted in critical discourses representative of the recent tendencies in reading American romantic , pre-modern and modern poetry. Whitman and Dickinson scholars of the last three decades focus on the problematics of cultural difference encoded in aesthetic texts through the categories of class, race, and gender, shaping and defining diverse forms of the 19th century poetic avant-garde in America. In this connection, we shall discuss the themes of love, sexuality, death, war, race and class difference as they appear in both writers' poems, producing two opposed types of creative sensibility and aethetics which in their radical difference from poetry written anywhere else in the world at that time became an origin and a base for the modern poetic idiom of the 20th-century America.
Type of course
Bibliography
Walt Whitman
Biography:
Kaplan, Justin, Walt Whitman. A Life, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980.
Criticism:
Asselineau, Roger, The Evolution of Walt Whitman, 2 vols, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1960-2.
Dougherty, James, Walt Whitman and the Citizen's Eye, Baton Rouge, London: Louisiana UP, 1993.
Erkkila, Betsy, Whitman the Political Poet, New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.
Greenspan, Ezra, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.
Kummings, Donald D., ed., A Companion to Walt Whitman, MA: Blackwell, 2006.
Nathanson, Tenney, Whitman's Presence. Body, Voice, and Writing in Leaves of Grass, New York: New York University Press, 1992.
Price, Kenneth M., Whitman and Tradition. The Poet in His Century, New Haven, London: Yale UP, 1990. Reynolds, David S., ed., A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman, New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.
Emily Dickinson
Bibliography:
Johnson, Thomas H., ed., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 1960, 3 vols.
Franklin, R.W., ed., The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Cambridge, Mass,: Harvard UP, 1998.
Biography:
Sewall, Richard, The Life of Emily Dickinson, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974.
Criticism:
Anderson, Charles, Emily Dickinson's Poetry: A Stairway of Surprise, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1960.
Cameron, Sharon, Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979.
Farr, Judith, ed., Emily Dickinson. A Collection of Critical Essays, Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, 1996.
Juhasz, Suzanne, ed., Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983.
Keller, Karl, The Only Kangaroo Among Beauty: Emily Dickinson and America, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979.
Martin, Wendy, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.
Miller, Cristanne, "Whose Dickinson," American Literary History, Spring/Summer 2000, vol. 12, no. 1-2.
Porter, David T., Dickinson. The Modern Idiom, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1981.
St. Armand, Barton Levi, The Soul's Society. Emily Dickinson and Her Culture, Cambridge, New York: Cambridge UP, 1984.