Autumn semester, 2016
Course syllabus
Title: Modern poetry and criticism
Status: required-optional
Format: seminar
Programme: PhD in British Studies
Year: 1 and 2
Time: Fri 10.00-11.40; 12.00-13.40
(For days please see the week-to-week schedule below.)
Room: Országh Seminar Room (119)
Teacher: István Rácz
Office hours: Mon 15.00-16.00, Wed 10.00-11.00, or by appointment (Room 108/2)
Requirements:
1. Take-home essay. Each student is asked to select a post-1945 British poet and to write an essay about his/her poems and their critical assessment. (Length should be between 5,000 and 7,000 words.) The poems and the pieces of criticism can be freely chosen, but students are advised to have previous consultation with the course teacher. The deadline for this essay is 20th January.
2. The discussion of a freely chosen poem in class (see week 14). This can be treated as preliminary study for the take-home essay.
3. Contribution to the discussion in class. Each week a student will be asked to prepare with a brief introductory talk to start discussion in class; other students will be asked to make their comments (both on the poems and on criticism).
Texts: course packet
Douglas Dunn. Elegies (available from the library)
WEEK DATE TOPICS AND ASSIGNMENTS
1 23/9
12.00-13.40 Orientation
3 7/10 Language, nature and gender in romantic poetry
10.00-11.40 William Wordsworth. “Tintern Abbey”
S. T. Coleridge. “Kubla Khan”
John Barrell. “The Uses of Dorothy: ‘The Language of the Sense’ in ‘Tintern Abbey’” (In: Poetry, language and politics. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1991)
Jane Moore. “Plagiarism with a Difference: Subjectivity in ‘Kubla Khan’ and Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark” (In: Stephen Copley and John Whale, ed. Beyond Romanticism. London: Routledge, 1992)
3 7/10 Identity construction in Victorian poetry
12.00-13.40 Robert Browning. “My Last Duchess”
“Andrea del Sarto”
“Bishop Blougram’s Apology”
E. Warwick Slinn. “The Drama of Self-Comception” (In: Browning and the Fictions of Identity. Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes and Noble Books, 1982)
5 21/10 Variations on the dramatic monologue
10.00-11.40 P. B. Shelley. “Julian and Maddalo”
John Keats. “Ode to a Nightingale”
Matthew Arnold. “Dover Beach”
Alfred Tennyson. “Ulysses”
G. M. Hopkins. “The Windhover”
Thomas Hardy. “The Darkling Thrush”
Ralph W. Rader. “The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms.” (Critical Inquiry 3 [1976]: Autumn)
5 21/10 Language, gender and sexuality in Philip Larkin
12.00-13.40 Philip Larkin. “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album”
“Maiden Name”
“Deceptions”
Cecil Day-Lewis. “The Album”
Graham Holderness. “Reading ‘Deceptions’—A Dramatic Conversation” (In: Stephen Regan, ed. Philip Larkin. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997)
6 28/10 Philip Larkin: religious or agnostic?
10.00-11.40 Philip Larkin. “Church Going”
“Nothing To Be Said”
“The Explosion”
J. R. Watson. “The other Larkin” (Critical Quarterly 17.4 [1975])
James Booth. “Death.” (In: Philip Larkin: Writer. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992)
6 28/10 Philip Larkin: for or against the empire?
12.00-13.40 Philip Larkin. “At Grass”
“Naturally the Foundation will Bear Your Expenses”
“Homage to a Government”
Tom Paulin. “Into the Heart of Englishness” (In: Stephen Regan, ed. Philip Larkin. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997)
James Booth. “The First-Person Poems” (In: Philip Larkin: Writer. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992)
9 18/11 Language, society and culture in Tony Harrison
10.00-11.40 Tony Harrison. “Them and [uz]”
v.
Richard Hoggart. “’Them’ and ‘us’” (In: The Uses of Literacy. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957)
Bruce Woodcock. “Classical vandalism: Tony Harrison’s invective” (Critical Quarterly 32: 2 [1990])
Helmut Haberkam. “’These Vs Are All the Versuses of Life’: A Reading of Tony Harrison’s Social Elegy v.” (In: C. C. Barfoot, ed. In Black and Gold. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994)
9 18/11 Harrison’s monster
12.00-13.40 Tony Harrison. “The Gaze of the Gorgon”
Joe Kelleher. “The Poet and the Gorgon” (In: Tony Harrison. Plymouth: Northcote House, 1996)
Sean O’Brien. “Tony Harrison: Show the Working” (In: The Deregulated Muse. Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1998)
12 9/12 Elegies and narratives: Douglas Dunn
10.00-11.40 Douglas Dunn. Elegies
Sean O’Brien. “Douglas Dunn: Ideology and Pastoral” (In: The Deregulated Muse. Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1998)
12 9/12 Constructing a female identity: Carol Ann Duffy
12.00-13.40 Carol Ann Duffy. “Standing Female Nude”
“The Dolphins”
“Model Village”
“Free Will”
“Poem in Oils”
Jane E. Thomas. “’The Intolerable Wrestle with Words’: The Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy” (Bête Noire 6 Winter [1988])
Sean O’Brien. “Carol Ann Duffy: A Stranger Here Myself” (In: The Deregulated Muse. Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1998)
13 16/12 The discussion of a poem chosen by each student
10.00-11.40
13 16/12 The discussion of a poem chosen by each student (continued)
12.00-13.40