Welcome to the Course

Welcome to the course blog for English 3333: Critical Responses to Poetry. What is "Critical Responses to Poetry?" In a nutshell, this is a course that challenges us to examine how literature works, how we should read and understand it, and who writes it (we know who they are, but not really who they are). As Johnathan Culler, one of our authors explains,

“Literature is a paradoxical institution because to create literature is to write according to existing formulas—to produce something that looks like a sonnet or that follows the conventions of the novel—but it is also to flout these conventions, to go beyond them. Literature is an institution that lives by exposing and criticizing its own limits, by testing what will happen if one writes differently. So literature is at the same time the name for the utterly conventional...and for the utterly disruptive, where readers have to struggle to create any meaning at all.” (Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction) 

In other words, if literature exists by following rules and breaking them, it become hard to know how to read it at all. Especially when the literature in question is poetry, a form that uses metaphor and paradox as its stock-in-trade. This course will examine both ancient, not-so-ancient, and near contemporary poetry as a way to ask questions about the purpose and uses of literature, as well as how we can appreciate it in new ways. For teachers, this class will be extremely useful, as it will show you numerous ways to read/teach a single poem, and give you endless ideas for your classroom. For non-teachers, this class will deepen your love for reading all forms of literature and show you that a poem is never just a poem: it changes each time you open the book, and each time you consider who is writing the poem, where they lived, what they thought, and what forces were shaping them as they wrote it. 

The books for the course are below. Be sure to check this site often, since I'll post assignments, announcements, and other details for your convenience. I look forward to spending the semester reading and thinking with you! 

Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction

Sappho, Stung With Love (Penguin Classics)

Cavafy, The Collected Poems (Oxford World’s Classics)

Shakespeare, The Sonnets (any edition)

The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader (Penguin)