Seminar in American Culture

3 units

Organized around the theme of "the trouble with normal," in this course we will reflect on the lives, works, and reputations of poets who engaged their own gendered anxieties and ambitions through their psychologically complex encounters with Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). Beginning with Dickinson's first poem, a satiric valentine that mocks the imperative to marry, we will explore some of the ways in which the self-described "Queen of Calvary" and her critics influenced modernist poets such as Marianne Moore (1887-1972), Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), and Sylvia Plath (1932-1963). There will be some attention to the electronic archives that enable twenty-first century literary editing; "troubling" theorists will include Robert Duncan, Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Susan Howe, Toni Morrison, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michael Warner, Lauren Berlant, Peter Coviello, and Sianne Ngai.