Course module - The Image of Language

Code : ENGL31082
Credit rating: 20
Semester : 2

Aims

To introduce students to a range of key twentieth-century poems and poets.

To read twentieth-century poetry's engagement with visual art.

To develop and advance students’ command and technique of reading poems.

To develop students’ understanding of the relationship between subject-matter and choices of poetic form and style.

To encourage students to produce clear and effective written arguments of a standard appropriate to Level 3.

Objectives (Learning Outcomes)

By the end of the module students should be able to:

Demonstrate a knowledge of historic connections between poetic and artistic representation, and understanding of key poems in this tradition;

Demonstrate a capacity for the close-reading of poems;

Demonstrate skills of critical thinking and analysis through close engagement with a range of poems;

Demonstrate the ability to construct clear, substantiated and independent written arguments.

Assessment

One 2,500-word essay (40%); one 2-hour seen written examination (60%)

The use of dictionaries in the examination is prohibited. This rule applies to all categories of students, including all Visiting Students.

Information

THIS COURSE IS NOT AVAILABLE AS FREE-CHOICE

Course Content

The aim of this course is to read twentieth-century poetry's engagement with visual art and to examine how poets have used paintings and sculpture to rethink the intersection between ethics and aesthetics, and to reformulate the ways in which poems engage with textual and visual representations of time and human relations across time.

THE IMAGE OF LANGUAGE

The course would cover a broad sweep of twentieth-century and pre-twentieth century poetry in the UK, the US and Ireland.

Week 1: Ekphrastic traditions: Keats 'To a Grecian Urn'; Browning, 'My Last Duchess'; Tennyson, 'The Lady of Shalott'

Week 2: Against the 19th century: Imagism, WC Williams 'Pictures from Breughel' (and Marianne Moore)

Week 3: Perfect art: RM Rilke 'Half archaic Torso of Apollo'; Don Paterson, 'Postmodern'

Week 4: History and Myth: WB Yeats 'The Municipal Gallery Revisited', 'Leda and the Swan'

Week 5: Private art: WH Auden, 'Musee des Beaux Arts', 'The Shield of Achilles'

Week 6: Public art: Robert Lowell, 'For the Union Dead'; Philip Larkin, 'An Arundel Tomb'

Week 7: Bad art: Elizabeth Bishop, 'Large Bad Picture' and 'Poem'; Octavio Paz, 'Objects and Apparitions'; Allen Ginsberg, 'Cezanne's Ports'

Week 8: Writing relationships: David Harsent, 'Bonnard' / 'Marriage'; Paul Muldoon, 'Incantata’;

Week 9: Postmodern self: John Ashbery 'Self-Portrait in a convex mirror'; Frank O'Hara, 'Why I am not a Painter' and 'On seeing Larry Rivers' "Crossing the Delaware"'; Thom Gunn 'In Santa Maria de Popolo' and 'Behind the Mirror'.

Week 10: Private histories: Derek Mahon, "The Hunt by Night', Courtyards in Delft', Girls on a Bridge'; Jorie Graham 'Luca Signorelli's Resurrection of the Body'

Week 11: On perception: Michael Donaghy, 'Upon a Claude Glass'; Don Paterson, 'Phantom'

Course Materials

Tutor(s)

McAuliffe, Mr John

Timetable

PROVISIONAL TIMETABLE FOR 2013-2014

Seminar: Thursday, 10.00-1.00

Teaching Methods

One 2-hour seminar, plus one 1-hour tutorial per week.

Preliminary reading

Poems, as listed above.

Abse, Dannie and Joan. Voices in the Gallery: Poems and Pictures. London: The Tate Gallery, 1986.
Altick, Richard D. Paintings from Books: Art and Literature in Britain, 1760-1900. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985.
Barry, Peter. “Contemporary Poetry and Ekphrasis.” The Cambridge Quarterly 2002 31(2):155-165
Bal, Mieke. Reading "Rembrandt": beyond the word-image opposition: the Northrop Frye Lectures in Literary Theory (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in Illuminations trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken Books, 1969).

Caws, Mary Ann. The art of interference : stressed readings in verbal and visual texts (Cambridge: Polity Press in association with B. Blackwell, 1989).

Collins, Christopher. The Poetics of the Mind's Eye: Literature and the Psychology of Imagination (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).

Drucker, Johanna. The dual muse: the writer as artist, the artist as writer (St. Louis, Mo.: Washington University Gallery of Art: 1997).

Drucker, Johanna. The visible word: experimental typography and modern art, 1909-1923 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1994).

Hagstrum, Jean H. The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

Hines, Thomas Jensen. Collaborative form: studies in the relations of the arts (Kent, Ohio : Kent State University Press, 1991).

Krieger, Murray. Ekphrasis : the illusion of the natural sign (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

Lessing, G. E. "Laocoon, or On the Limits of Painting and Poetry" in German Aestheitc and Literary Criticism ed. H.B. Nisbet. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

Longley, Edna. “Derek Mahon: Extreme Religion of Art.” In Poetry in Contemporary Irish Literature. Edited by Michael Kenneally, 280-303. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1995.
Edna Longley, ‘No More Poems about Painting?’, in Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe 1994), pp.227-51.
McClatchy, J. D., editor. Poets on Painters: Essays on the Art of Painting by Twentieth-Century Poets. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
McLuhan, Marshall. Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).
Martin, Jay. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).

Meisel, Martin. Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.

Mitchell, WJ.T. Iconology : image, text, ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture theory : essays on verbal and visual representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

Nicholson, Graeme. Seeing and Reading (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1984).

Rothenberg, Jerome. Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia and Oceania (New York: Doubleday, 1968).

Shapiro, H.A. Myth into Art: Poet and Painter in Classical Greece (New York; London: Routledge, 1994).

Smitten, Jeffrey R. and Ann Daghistany. Spatial Form in Narrative (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1981).

Steiner, Wendy. The colors of rhetoric: problems in the relation between modern literature and painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

Stewart, Susan. Nonsense, aspects of intertextuality in folklore and literature (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).

Keywords

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