21st Century American Poetry

elective courses

Course for first degree (BA) students

English language requirements - B2

Blended learning

The goal of the course is to familiarise students with the most important trends in 21st century poetry, focusing on the ways in which contemporary poets react to issues such as climate change (or, more broadly, the planetary crisis in the Anthropocene) and how poetry answers new political and ethical challenges of our times. The course will involve elements of broadly defined ecopoetics as well as black studies, indigenous studies, ethnolinguistics and sound studies.

Course for first degree (BA) students

The goal of the course is to familiarise students with the most important trends in 21st century poetry, focusing on the ways in which contemporary poets react to issues such as climate change (or, more broadly, the planetary crisis in the Anthropocene) and on how poetry answers new political and ethical challenges of our times.

More specifically, the course will look at the ways in which contemporary poetry “invites otherness” - both human and nonhuman - through its questioning of anthropocentric and Eurocentric modes of thinking about politics, ethics and aesthetics. As Lawrence Buell (1996) and others have suggested, the ecological crisis is, in the first place, the crisis of the imagination; the ultimately destructive exploitation of more-than-human nature is made possible, at least partly, by the hegemony of instrumental reason coupled with the myth of infinite progress.

The dynamically developing field of ecopoetics will offer some of our tools in helping to outline manifestations of ecological imagination in innovative poetries of what Lyn Keller defines as the “self-conscious Anthropocene” (2018). But the exploitation and silencing of non-human earthlings cannot be separated from the larger problem of extraction economy whose roots reach far into the history of colonialism and slavery, therefore the course intends to foreground the intersections of ecopoetics with black and indigenous studies as well as various modalities of posthumanist thought (animal studies, new materialisms, biosemiotics, affective ecocriticism, sound studies).

The poets discussed in the course will include: Forrest Gander, Brenda Hillman, Juliana Spahr, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Tommy Pico, Ocean Vuong, Jody Gladding, Jonathan Skinner.

Course for first degree (BA) students

English language requirements - B2

Primary sources:

Gander, Forrest, Be With (2017)

Glading, Jody, selected poems

Gumbs, Alexis Pauline, M Archive (2018)

Hillman, Brenda, Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days (2018)

Pico, Tonny, Nature Poem (2017)

Spahr, Juliana (selected poems)

Vuong, Ocean, Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016)

Skinner, Jonathan, Chip Calls (2014)

Anthologies:

American Poets in the 21’st Century: The New Poetics, ed. Claudia Rankine & Lisa Sewell, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.

The New American Poetry of Engagement: A 21st Century Anthology, ed. Anne Keniston and Jeffrey Gray, McFarland&Company, 2012.

Black Nature, ed. Camille Dungy, University of Georgia Press, 2009.

Secondary sources:

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous, Vintage, 1996.

Gander, Forrest, and John Kinsella, Redstart. An Ecological Poetics. University of Iowa Press, 2012.

Gibson, Katerine, et al. Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene, punctum books, 2015.

Keller, Lynn. Recomposing Ecopoetics: North American Poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene, University of Virginia Press, 2017.

Retallack, Joan „What is experimental poetry and why do we need it”? (Jacket no. 32, April 2007, online)

Shockley, Evie. Renegade poetics.Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry. University of Iowa Press, 2011.

Yusoff, Kathryn, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

Knowledge:

- students become acquainted with the most important trends in contemporary poetry

- students become acquainted with the political, ethical and aesthetic challenges posed by the Anthropocene

Skills:

- the course improves students’ poetic competence - the ability to read and interpret nuanced poetic texts

- the course improves students’ overall literary competence

Social competences:

- students understand the need to express themselves in a coherent, clear, logical and precise manner in order to function effectively in contacts with others

students are able to acknowledge the character of the most pressing contemporary problems and how they relate to language and expression

English

- In class discussions students acquire skills of expressing their thoughts in a clear, coherent, logical and precise manner, with the use of language which is correct grammatically, lexically and phonetically.

- Education at language level B2+.

The final grade is going to be based on the following components:

response papers -- 20%

group presentations -- 30%

final paper -- 50%

Over 50% in each of the segments is required for passing the course.

2 absences are allowed

If the class is failed, re-take is possible in the next examination session in the form of a longer research paper. Only for students who did not exceeded the allowed number of absences.