ENGL 90530 - 20th Century Poetry and Theory: Convergences between Philosophy, Theology, Socio-Linguistic Theory

Institution:

University of Notre Dame

Subject:

English

Description:

Yeats famously suggested that "poetry and religion are the same" - and while many might have thought such ideas died with him in 1939, or even much earlier, changing conceptions of what both poetry and religion are (or might be) have recently reopened the debate in rather spectacular ways. My interest is in bringing students into the increasingly busy intersection between these once opposed modes of thinking (and into the site of my own current book project). The course will introduce students to several of the major movements in philosophy and literary theory that most powerfully impacted poetics - among them phenomenology, Wittgensteinian linguistics (or his "philosophy of religion," as some have described it), and deconstruction (which Derrida late in life admitted had been "structured like a religion"); it will also demonstrate the ways in which traditional histories of twentieth-century poetic innovation and development are currently being re-read. Starting with (Lutheran convert) Edmund Husserl and his students Martin Heidegger and St Edith Stein (as well as with Husserl's claim that the whole point of his phenomenological project was to discover a "path back to God"), the course charts collisions between essentially Christian existential phenomenology and, for example, the Jewish thought of its later critics by focusing on how poets on both sides of the Atlantic absorbed and continued to process such ideas. Neo-Thomist thinking as put forward by figures like Jacques and Raïssa Maritain will also be studied, alongside various mystical and Gnostic alternatives. A very small number of poets will be picked for attention and close-reading; major figures like T.S. Eliot will be studied alongside small-press figures like Brian Coffey, and the course will end with living poet-thinkers Fanny Howe and Hank Lazer who have contributed much to our understanding of how all these fields of inquiry fruitfully overlap. Two presentations and two papers (as well as attendance at one or two poetry readings and lectures) will constitute the requirements; students may instead opt to write one longer essay (with an eye towards possible publication) if they so desire.

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.nd.edu

Phone Number:

(574) 631-5000

Regional Accreditation:

North Central Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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