Legacy Course Catalog
ENGL 596T - Poetic Transformation
| Effectivity: | 01/07/2008 - 05/03/2008 @ Purdue West Lafayette Traditional |
|---|---|
| Credits: | 3 |
| Instructional Types: | Lec |
| Usually Offered: | fal spr |
| Short Title: | Poetic Transformation |
| Description: | Ezra Pound's claim that "most arts attain their effect by using a fixed element and a variable" may well be the heart of this course. What happens in a poem between that staying put and going elsewhere will be our larger question. We will slow down and be doing a lot of close reading, considering how poems move and stay still, evade and reveal through various ingenious, often mysterious devices. Of course, we will be staring down metaphor, but other matters are architecturally certain to intervene, among them lineation and its white space fragmentation, cadence, narrative vs. lyric progression, the eternal battle between image and abstraction, verb tense, voice. To do this, we'll be entering the work of numerous poets, for starters possibly Larkin and Bishop, Oppen and Whitman, Hoagland and Hopkins, Simic and Gluck. We will look for habits of change as well, watching for patterns of metaphor and other slight-of-hand turns as they come into being in a poet's work and, perhaps, where they break down and/or reinvent themselves there. A serious concern of the course is not literary. We will try to see metaphor and other kinds of transformation in poems through the lens of one or more seemingly far-flung disciplines. Which disciplines will depend on the interest of class members but we might consider music theory or bridge engineering, ornithology, painting/drawing technique, basic physics or mathematics or body mechanics. Brief semi-formal presentations and active on-going participation in class discussion are expected. The final long paper in the term, due the last week of school, can be an original exploration that engages cross-disciplinary thinking and mainly primary sources, and has room for personal anecdote. It goes without saying our efforts over the term will require patience, ingenuity, imagination and curiosity. The course is open to scholars and writers, and those who happen to be both. |
| School: | College Of Liberal Arts |
| Department: | English |
| Credit By Exam: | NO |
| Repeatable Flag: | YES |
| Temporary Flag: | YES |
| Full Time Privilege Flag: | NO |
| Honors Flag: | NO |
| Variable Title Flag: | NO |
Fall 2007 *** indicates the course was still an active course and was transferred to the Banner Catalog effective Spring 2008. This course was not expired Fall 2007.
