Course syllabus
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Week 1 (16 July) |
Week 2 (23 July) |
Week 3 (30 July) |
Week 4 (6 August) |
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Week 5 (13 August) |
Week 6 (20 August) |
Week 7 (10 September) |
Week 8 (17 September) |
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Week 9 (24 September) |
Week 10 (1 October) |
Week 11 (8 October) |
Week 12 (15 October) |
Course Overview
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Lecture: Monday 11am - 1pm in 201N-429
Tutorials Weeks 2-12
Tues 1 - 2pm in Arts 1, Room 215
Tues 2 - 3pm in Arts 1, Room 217
Convenors:
Professor Michele Leggott, Arts 1, Room 603
Office Hours: Tues 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 - Trulie Astley tast266@aucklanduni.ac.nz & Blaine Kelly jkel770@aucklanduni.ac.nz
Week 1 (16 July). Transforming human consciousness (Introduction)
No tutorial
Week 2 (23 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 (30 July). 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 (6 August). Transforming language and performance (Modernist manifestos)
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 63, 5.30pm Wednesday 8 August at Old Government House, Cnr Princes St and Waterloo Quadrant. All welcome!
Week 5 (13 August). Transforming the self (Lola Ridge)
Tutorial: poetic transformations (entry ticket: bring your transformed poem to class and be prepared to discuss it with your group)
Week 6 (20 August). Transforming the city (TS Eliot)
Tutorial: writing clinic (entry ticket: bring a hard copy of your draft critical reflection)
Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day Fri 24 August. Look out for poetry events all over the city.
Poetic Transformation Assignment due Friday 24 August by 11:59 pm (40%)
See the FAQs for the Transformation Assignment here
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Mid-semester break 25 August - 9 September
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Week 7 (10 September). Transforming genre (Virginia Woolf)
Tutorial: Field trip to UoA Library Special Collections (entry ticket: tba)
Week 8 (17 September). Transforming myth (Rainer Maria Rilke)
Tutorial: Anthology Assignment poems and themes (entry ticket: choose 5 texts from across the semester and come prepared to discuss your preliminary ideas for a connecting theme; be sure to bring printed copies of the texts to class.)
LOUNGE 64, 5.30pm Wednesday 29 September. at Old Government House, Cnr Princes St and Waterloo Quadrant. All welcome!
Week 9 (24 September). Transforming history (William Butler Yeats)
Tutorial: Anthology Assignment prospectus (entry ticket: bring a 1-paragraph prospectus for group feedback, ie a statement of what you’re planning to do and why)
Week 10 (1 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 required this week)
Week 11 (8 October). Transforming America (Federico Garcia Lorca and Langston Hughes)
Tutorial: Anthology Assignment (entry ticket: bring your anthology to class for show-and-tell)
Week 12 (15 October) Transforming Modernism (Ern Malley)
Test in tutorial on Tuesday 16 October (20%)
Extra office hours will be available in week 12 for students who want feedback on their draft critical reflection.
LOUNGE 65, 5.30pm Wednesday 17 October at Old Government House, Cnr Princes St and Waterloo Quadrant. All welcome!
Anthology Assignment due Friday 26 October by 11:59 pm (40%)
Course 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
Poetic Transformation Assignment (40%)
Anthology Assignment (40%)
Modern Poetry Test (20%)
The assignments will be marked using a system called 'contract marking'. Click here for details.
Course Objectives
This course fosters three of the most crucial of the ‘general intellectual skills and capacities’ described in the UoA Graduate Profile: a capacity for critical, conceptual and reflective thinking; a capacity for intellectual openness and curiosity; and a capacity for creativity and originality. Throughout the semester you will develop and demonstrate the following transferable skills:
- Close reading, analysis and comparison of challenging Modernist texts and the poetic strategies employed by their authors
- How to plan and carry out a creative/critical independent project
- How to surprise, delight and intrigue a reader or audience (‘we who love to be astonished’ – Lyn Hejinian)
Our ambition is to create a course that will inspire students to be curious, engaged, proactive and productive. We want you to:
- Care about poetry that makes you think, poetry that challenges its readers, poetry that carries on the traditions and legacy of literary Modernism
- Care about learning
- Care about the world and where it is heading
- Care about poetry as more than something that is just written on a page or circulated online – what is its social impact?
- Care about the future of poetry – what’s going to happen to poetry when books disappear? Who is going to keep it alive, and how, and where?
Info & Assistance
Canvas
Course messages will be sent via Canvas to your university email account, which is the University’s official source of communication with students. Please check your university email account regularly. Computers are available for use in the Library and in the Kate Edgar Information Commons.
Libraries and Learning Services
For workshops on all aspects of essay writing and tests: https://www.library.auckland.ac.nz/booking/
For guides to Library sources for all undergraduate papers in English including 222: http://coursepages.library.auckland.ac.nz/english/
English Language Enrichment (ELE)
For resources on writing essays, understanding lectures, doing presentations or any other aspect of working in English as an additional language: http://www.library.auckland.ac.nz/ele/
General
Plagiarism
The work that a student submits for grading must be the student’s work, reflecting his or her learning. Where work from other sources is used, it must be properly acknowledged and referenced. This requirement also applies to sources from the World Wide Web. All assessed work in this course will be reviewed against electronic source material using computerised detection mechanisms.
For more detailed information, see the University’s guidelines for students on -
- Academic integrity
- Academic conduct
Copyright Warning Notice
Copyright material is protected by copyright and has been copied by and solely for the educational purposes of the University under licence for use in course readers, tutorials, lectures and on Canvas. You may not sell, alter or further reproduce or distribute any part of this material to any other person. Where provided to you in electronic format, you may only print from it for your own private study and research. Failure to comply with the terms of this warning may expose you to legal action for copyright infringement and/or disciplinary action by the University. See the University of Auckland’s Copyright for Staff and Students page for more information:
Complaint Procedures
In the first instance, students or the class representative should take any concerns they have with their course delivery or assessment to the lecturer or tutor or convenor concerned. Students or staff may approach the Mediator’s Office or the Student Advocacy Network at any time for assistance. In the event that the matter is not resolved satisfactorily at an informal level, students or the class representative should approach the Head of the English, Drama and Writing Studies disciplinary area with a formal statement of their complaint.
For more detailed information, see the University guidelines regarding Academic Disputes and Complaints at:
Other support services such as the AUSA, PGSA and the University’s Proctor offer their assistance in dispute resolution and may be found at:
Course summary:
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