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Apr 18, 2024
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ENG 388 - Living Traditions: Emily Dickinson (3)
The writing as well as the person of Emily Dickinson has come to stand for poetry at its most essential and potent: life itself distilled to the bones, the human being as solitary, alert, and alive. Famously reclusive yet fiercely committed, Dickinson wrote poems that on one hand are personal and private, concerned with domestic details of ordinary life, but which hum at the limits of syntax and grammar and diction, with the mysteries that hover beyond the reach of direct expression. In this course, we situate Dickinson within her relationship to American Puritanism and Romanticism as well as within the lyric tradition that stretches from Pindar and Sappho to Levertov and Ashbery. Dickinson explores with wit and courage the deepest perplexities of her age and thereby demonstrates in general the possibilities of poetry-especially poetry of the avant garde-to disrupt the status quo, even as it clarifies and consoles.
Prerequisite(s): ENG 200.
Spring 2024 and Spring 2027.
Living Traditions courses illuminate ways in which writers, writing from within their social milieu and in a given form or mode, use art to explore vital questions of human existence. Starting with a representative figure, these courses explore that author’s historical and literary influences as well as the contemporary legacy, examining ways in which literary artists and their ideas continue to transform culture.
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