About the Seminars--Literature and Poetry of Place

Safe as houses!

Thomas Reed, English10:30 MWF

From Beowulf to Gosford Park, or “The Three Little Pigs” to Home Alone, the theme of the house under siege has been a staple of Western narrative. This seminar will examine a broad variety of literary and cinematic texts, most of them Anglo-American, with an eye to revealing what various treatments of the house-builder/house-breaker motif might tell us about the artists who created them and the audiences for whom they were created. We’ll consider, among other things, the house as a shelter from the dangers of Nature; as a “golden world” of social elitism; as a potent symbol and tool of social and sexual ideology; as an icon of stifling traditions and attitudes; and as a secret nest for “evil.” “Home” has been called “sweet” – “where the heart is.” Just how sweet the place, just how settled the heart, we’ll be exploring in classics like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Coventry Patmore’s “The Angel of the House,” Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day. We’ll also view and discuss films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Bryan Forbes’ The Stepford Wives, Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, and John Landis’ Animal House.

Poetry of Place and Identity

Adrienne Su, English 1:30 MTh

Before there was print, poetry was a spoken art, with close affinities to song – hence rhyme and meter. It also tended to start locally, so poets didn’t have to do much explaining about place and culture. Today, with worldwide distribution available at the click of a mouse, poetry has little previously understood sense of locality and cultural context. There’s also a broad, sometimes chaotic sense of what constitutes the canon. As a result, poets must themselves establish the historical, cultural, and geographical context of their poems. We’ll examine how many modern poets create a sense of place and negotiate their relationship to literary history. We’ll do lots of close readings of poems. You’ll write critical papers and a poem or two of your own. Among the likely poets: Seamus Heaney, Mark Doty, Robert Lowell, Jorie Graham, Derek Walcott, Yehuda Amichai, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Nick Carbo, Langston Hughes, Les Murray, Octavio Paz, Wislawa Szymborska, and Charles Wright.

[Literature and Poetry of Place LC Wiki Page]

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