Course Description
In a collection of aphorisms the modern American poet Wallace Stevens writes that “in poetry at least the imagination must not detach itself from reality.”
This statement initially might appear counter-intuitive since poetry is often regarded as an aesthetic form relying on a high degree of abstraction and compression that indicates a removal from the ever elusive “real.” But Stevens and other American poets believed that poetic expression is not only a means of representing a subjective perception/
experience of the material world, but also a very concrete way of fundamentally understanding it. Concordantly, one of Stevens’ most famous poems is titled “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself” and concludes with the speaker obtaining a “new knowledge of reality.”
Poetry can therefore be considered an attempt to get closer to the truths of the world by using rhyme, meter, and cadence not as devices of distancing but as organizing principles that reveal rather than obscure (even though the causal connoisseur of verse might beg to differ). As such, poetry closely aligns itself with epistemological and ontological concerns about the nature, constitution, and aspect of the real that are commonly associated with philosophical thinking.
In this reading and discussion intensive seminar we will tackle this interrelation of poetic expression and philosophical thinking in American literature from Romanticism to Modernism. Using poems by writers such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, and Hilda Dolittle as well as philosophical texts by Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and Charles Saunders Pierce, we will examine the philosophical underpinnings of American poetry and engage with poetry as a form of philosophical thinking.
Syllabus 03.03.2021: Introduction: The Eternal Question of Jar vs. Urn- Excerpts from Wallace Stevens, ”Adagia”
- John Keats, ”Ode on a Grecian Urn”
- Wallace Stevens, ”Anecdote of the Jar”
10.03.2021: Introductory Case Study: The Real Ain't What it Used to Be - Bart Eeckhout, ”Stevens and Philosophy”
- Wallace Stevens, ”The Snow Man”
- Wallace Stevens, ”The Idea of Order at Key West”
17.03.2021: Rhyme vs. Reason? Questions of Philosophy and Poetry- Richard Rorty, “Getting Rid of the Appearance-Reality Distinction”
- William Wordsworth, ”The World Is Too Much With Us”
- Robert Frost, ”Neither Out Far Nor In Deep”
24.03.2021: Transcendentalism: Emerson’s Transparent Eyeballs - Jonathan Levin, ”Divine Overflowings: Emerson's Pragmatic Idealism”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, excerpt from Nature
14.04.2021: Transcendentalist(ish…) Poetry - William Cullen Bryant, ”A Forest Hymn”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, ”Each and All”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, ”The Snow-Storm”
21.04.2021: Walt Whitman: The Sacred Commute (Until They Built that Bridge)- ”One’s-Self I Sing”
- “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
28.04.2021: Emily Dickinson: The Elated Epistemology of — Enjambment- Jed Deppman, ”Trying to Think With Emily Dickinson”
- ”I Dwell in Possibility”
- ”The Brain is Wider Than the Sky”
- ”A Route of Evanescence”
- ”Split the Lark”
05.05.2021: Pragmatism: Whatever Works… - Jonathan Levin, ”William James and the Metaphorics of Transition”
- William James, ”A World of Pure Experience”
12.05.2021: The Aesthetics of Pragmatism: Some Light Prose to Lighten the Mood- Gertrude Stein, ”Picasso”
- Henry James, ”The Real Thing”
19.05.2021: Robert Frost: Was Cool With Ice - ”Fire and Ice”
- ”For Once, Then, Something”
- ”The Road Not Taken”
- ”Mending Wall”
- ”The Census-Taker”
26.05.2021: Wallace Stevens I: Was an Ideas Person...- Sebastian Gardner, ”Wallace Stevens and Metaphysics: The Plain Sense of Things”
- ”Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself”
- ”Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
- ”The Plain Sense of Things”
02.06.2021: Wallace Stevens II: ...But He Also Liked Things- ”Description Without Place”
- ”A Primitive Like an Orb”
- ”Connoisseur of Chaos”
09.06.2021: Back-Up Session (which we will definitely have to use) 16.06.2021: Conclusion: The Point at Which You Should Know More Than Before