Week 1 (24 July)	Week 2 (31 July)	Week 3 (7 August)	Week 4 (14 August)
Week 5 (21 August)	Week 6 (28 August)	Week 7 (18 September)	Week 8 (25 September)
Week 9 (2 October)	Week 10 (9 October)	Week 11 (16 October)	Week 12 (23 October)

Course Overview

                 ~ * ~

Lecture: Monday 10-12 in Arts 1, Room 315

Tutorials Weeks 2-12

Wed 11-12 in Arts 1, Room 210 

Wed 1-2 in Arts 1, Room 210 

 

Convenors: Professor Michele Leggott, Arts 1, Room 603

                       Office Hours: Wed 2-3 or by appointment

                       Email: m.leggott@auckland.ac.nz

 

                       Professor Helen Sword, 18 Waterloo Quadrant, Fisher Building, third floor  

                       Office Hours: By appointment

                       Email: h.sword@auckland.ac.nz

Makyla Curtis, for Eng222 Canvas enquiries, mcur487@aucklanduni.ac.nz

Class Rep - Dasha dzap949@aucklanduni.ac.nz

Class facebook page - https://www.facebook.com/groups/338194003269885/?source=create_flow

You can find the coursebook here

Week 1 (24 July). Transforming human consciousness (Introduction)

No tutorial

Week 2 (31 July). Transforming art (Gertrude Stein)

Tutorial: introductions; the challenges and pleasures of reading difficult poetry (entry ticket: find the close reading guide in your coursebook and use it to write some comments on the short Stein poem assigned to your group) 

Week 3 (7 August). Transforming the image (HD, Pound, Williams)

Tutorial: close reading of the poem you have chosen for Assignment 1 (entry ticket: use the close reading guide to generate a preliminary close reading for discussion with your group)

Week 4 (14 August). Transforming the self (Lola Ridge)

Tutorial: discuss your transformation ideas (entry ticket: write a brief prospectus for your transformation: what you plan to do with the poem and why)

LOUNGE 57 Wed 16 August. All welcome! 

Week 5 (21 August). Transforming language and performance (Modernist manifestos)

Tutorial: poetic transformations (entry ticket: bring your transformed poem to class and be prepared to discuss it with your group)

Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day Fri 25 August. Look out for poetry events all over the city.

Week 6 (28 August). Transforming the city (TS Eliot)

Tutorial: writing clinic (entry ticket: bring a hard copy of your draft critical reflection)

Poetic Transformation Assignment due Friday 1 September by 11:59 pm (40%)

Mid-semester break 2 - 17 September

Week 7 (18 Sept). Transforming genre (Virginia Woolf)

Tutorial: Field trip to UoA Library Special Collections (entry ticket: tba)

LOUNGE 58 Wed 20 September. All welcome!

Week 8 (25 Sept). Transforming myth (Rainer Maria Rilke) 

Tutorial: Anthology Assignment poems and themes (entry ticket: choose 5 poems and discuss preliminary ideas for a connecting theme; bring printed poems to class, including full bibliographic information in MLA or Chicago style)

Week 9 (2 Oct). Transforming history (William Butler Yeats)

Tutorial:  Anthology Assignment prospectus (entry ticket: bring a 1-page prospectus for group feedback, ie a statement of what you’re planning to do and why)

Week 10 (9 October). Transforming Imagism (‘William Carlos Williams)

Tutorial:  Freebie!  Tutorials optional for those who want to come with questions about their anthology project (no entry ticket or upload required this week)

Week 11 (16 October). Transforming America (Federico Garcia Lorca and Langston Hughes)

Tutorial: Anthology Assignment (entry ticket: bring your anthology to class for show-and-tell) 

LOUNGE 59 Wed 18 October. All welcome!

Week 12 (23 October)

No Class on Monday

Test in tutorial on Wednesday 25 Oct (20%):

11-12 noon in Arts HSB 201E-259 Lab

1-2 pm in Arts Fale Pasifika Lab 274-130

Extra office hours will be available in weeks 12 and 13 for students who want feedback on their draft critical reflection.  

Anthology Assignment due Thurs 2 Nov by 11:59 pm  (40%)

 

Description

"On or about December 1910", according to Virginia Woolf, "human character changed".  Like Ezra Pound with his famous dictum "Make it new!", Woolf spoke for a generation of artists and writers who were subverting traditional forms, re-imagining genre boundaries and foregrounding the conditions of art-making and writing. Henceforth, a poem might find itself in a sculpture court, a cabaret or a little magazine. A reading might consecrate or burn down its theatre of operations. A flow of language acts might look like prose on a page or a typographical vortex whirling off into space. When you break up the world and remake its fragments, new possibilities open and old hierarchies are leveled.

Today, whenever we read, write, watch or listen to contemporary poetry, we are embracing and transforming the consequences of that Modernist moment, responding to acts of poetic provocation now more than a hundred years old. 

This course takes transformation as its theme and a selection of influential Modernist works from the 1910s and 1920s as its textual focus. We will investigate Gertrude Stein’s seriously playful Tender Buttons, Hilda Doolittle’s time-travelling Sea Garden and Lola Ridge’s Sydney-based Sun-Up. We will explore TS Eliot’s ruinous Waste Land, William Carlos Williams’ ecstatic Spring and All and William Butler Yeats’ searing political poems. We will read Imagist, Futurist, Dada and Surrealist proclamations (and an unpublished feminist manifesto) to map some of the possibilities for avant-garde poetry. We will consider the lasting impact on English language poetries of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus and Federico Garcia Lorca’s Poet in New York. We will take Virginia Woolf’s letter-press Kew Gardens, illustrated by her sister Vanessa Bell, as a supreme example of the modern prose poem. We will hear black Harlem find its voice in the poems of Langston Hughes’ first collection, The Weary Blues. And finally we will attempt to answer the question of Modernist legacies by marvelling at Ern Malley’s Darkening Ecliptic, that most celebrated work of Australian Modernism, a hoax that has become an enduring community project.

We like physical books and we like digital resources. We think Modernism is one of the most exciting developments for poetry in the 20th and 21st centuries. We know there have never been so many ways of accessing the textual and contextual treasures of the period. We aim to put as many of them as possible into play in order to reveal the richness and connectivity of the poet’s world, building from fragment to mosaic to sequence to epic.

Required texts

• English 222 Modern Poetry: Making It New. Course Reader.
• Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms. Facsimile edition. City Lights, 2014.
• Lola Ridge, Sun-Up: A Poem. Facsimile edition. English, Drama and Writing Studies, 2015.
• TS Eliot, The Waste Land. Facsimile Edition. Liverwright Classics, 2013 or WW Norton & Co, 2015.
• William Carlos Williams, Spring and All. Facsimile edition. New Directions, 2011.
• William Butler Yeats, Easter 1916 and Other Poems. Dover Thrift Edition, 1997.

 

Assessment & Workload

100% coursework: See here for details