Spring 2008 Courses

English 403-01: Seminar in American Authors: Whitman and Dickinson (Cohen)

M/W/F 2:20-3:20pm Old Main 001

This seminar will study the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, the two authors most commonly represented to be the yin and yang, or the father and mother, of a distinctively "American" poetry. Whitman is the ebullient, masculine advocate of democracy, the open road, the American landscape and the American worker. Dickinson is the reclusive, solitary lyric poet, communing with herself, a feminist visionary at odds with the religious orthodoxy and bourgeois complacency of late-nineteenth-century culture. As we shall see, however, on closer reading the apparent familiarity of these authors quickly recedes and dissolves, and they appear far stranger and more elusive when the history of their poems is laid open to view. Our work will be to understand them, to locate them in nineteenth-century culture, and to trace out their critical legacy. To that end, we will read deeply in their poems and other related writings; we will chart out the textual history of their work, from manuscript to printed book to the internet; and we will become familiar with the critical heritage that has crafted them into iconic American poets.

For English majors, this satisfies the requirement for a course in pre-1900 U.S. literature, and it fulfills the capstone requirement.

Spring 2008 Course Listings