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Semester 2

Poetry, Politics and Place (ENLI10202)

Course Website

https://www.ed.ac.uk/literatures-languages-cultures/english-literature/undergraduate/current/honours

Subject

English Literature

College

CAHSS

Credits

20

Normal Year Taken

3

Delivery Session Year

2023/2024

Pre-requisites

Visiting students must have completed 4 English Literature courses at grade B or above. We will only consider University/College level courses, and we do not consider civilisation & other interdisciplinary courses, freshman seminars, writing/composition courses or film/cinema/media courses; visiting students who have taken multiple courses in literature in other languages, should have passed at least two courses in English Literature as well. **Please note that this course may incur additional costs to purchase core texts** **Please see Additional Restrictions below**

Course Summary

This course considers how poetry helps us explore large and urgent questions of individual and cultural identity (particularly the ways identity may be thought of in gendered, racial, regional and national terms), how we engage in community, and the various power-relations that constitute the modern nation-state. Throughout the course we will also examine the various ways in which our selected poets have explored these issues of individual identity, cultural value and social authority by figuring and refiguring ideas of "landscape" and "place".

Course Description

The focus in the seminars will be on collective close readings of some of the most important, stylistically distinctive and politically urgent poets of the twentieth and twenty-first century, supplemented by contextual introductions each week by the Course Organiser, and selected critical essays uploaded to LEARN for very writer intended to develop your understanding of all 9 poets on the course. The aim of the seminars is to go slowly and deeply into the texts, encouraging student contribution, developing their interpretative and close-reading skills, and encouraging students to think individually and collectively about the politics of interpretation and the interpretation of politics. The poets on the course have been chosen both for their stylistic singularity and brilliance and for the way they provide fascinating individual perspectives on a series of shared course themes: Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns develops an intriguing and unsettling imaginative parallel between the violent emergence of a primitive form of the English state in the Eighth Century and post-1945 English notions of nation, power and place; Elizabeth Bishop and Seamus Heaney explore ideas of archaeology, map-making, cultural mythology, imperial history, internal exile and racial and sectarian difference to rethink questions of power and identity through a post-colonial lens; Sylvia Plath rewrites the forms and assumptions of patriarchy by developing a new mythic vision of female creativity; Mark Doty seeks to queer notions of American identity, community and cultural value by reframing the contemporary American moment through the history of the AIDS epidemic; Michael Ondaatje presents a revisionist and wholly original re-reading of the American outlaw Billy the Kid to explore the role of cultural myths, desires and anxieties in the formation of national self-representations; John Ashbery examines the various ways we now construct our ideas of the "self" in the time of postmodern media and technology; Claudia Rankine explores the fraught, often tragic, relation between the African-American subject and ideas of American "dreaming" and citizenship in the time of Black Lives Matter; while Terrance Hayes continues this focus on how the black subject might try to live in an anti-black world by exploring the politics of race in the age of Donald Trump.

Assessment Information

Written Exam 0%, Coursework 100%, Practical Exam 0%

Additional Restrictions

Unless you are nominated on an English Literature exchange agreement, visiting students are only permitted to enrol in one 3rd year English Literature course each, per semester, before the start of the relevant semester’s welcome period – and spaces on each course are limited so cannot be guaranteed for any student. Enrolment in a second course from this group will depend on whether there are still spaces available in the January Welcome Period, and cannot be guaranteed, and students will not be permitted to enrol in three 3rd year English Literature courses in the same semester at any time. It is NOT appropriate for students to contact staff within this subject area to ask for an exception to be made; all enquiries to enrol in these courses must be made through the CAHSS Visiting Student Office. This is due to the limited number of spaces available in this very popular subject area.

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