3.00 Credits
In 1949, poet Muriel Rukeyser first published, The Life of Poetry, her treatise on the transformative value—and power—of poetry, as art.It is there that she argues, “art is action,” that “art is intellectual,” that “art is not a world, but a knowing of the world. Art prepares us.” For Rukeyser, “Art is practiced by the artist and the audience,” and, indeed, the experience of art not only applies to one’s life, it is “more than likely to lead you to thought or action, that is, you are likely to want to go further into the world, further into yourself, toward further experience.” And in the case of Rukeyser’s “art of poetry,” it led her to Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, in 1936, where she initiated a literary poetics that documented the odious politics of Southern racism and the blatantly unethical practices of industrial greed. This seminar aspires to pursue the path that Rukeyser’s work envisioned: to explore the efficacy of art in the pursuit of the ethical ideal of justice. Inspired by Rukeyser’s theoretical and poetic work, we will ground our study with the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, as the foundation for understanding what “ethics” entails, and as we consider other theorists of art--such as Derrida, Suzi Gablik, Lucy Lippard, Suzanne Lacy, and Guillermo Gomez-Pena, among others—we will then concentrate on the artistic “utterances” of American artists of difference: literary artists Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, N. Scott Momaday, Gerald Vizenor, Joy Harjo, Mary Oliver, Natasha Trethewey, among others; and visual artists Shimon Attie, Diane Arbus, Barbara Grygutis, and guest artist/lecturer, Multi-media Artist, Gerry Lang. This course is taught by Professor Linda Bolton.