CRITICAL READINGS
ENG 10010
Level
One English Module, 2005-06: 1st Semester,
Tuesdays
at 10am in Theatre L and Thursdays at 10am in Theatre L
Lecturers: Dr. John Brannigan (JB), Dr. Danielle Clarke (DC),
Dr. Catriona Clutterbuck (CC), Dr. Anne Fogarty (AF)
This module will examine two novels and a wide range of poetry (including a major focus on the sonnet), using texts that are accessible, challenging and interesting. The central theme of the module is ‘Literature and Politics’. As a result, criticism will be deployed in a dynamic way, to advance unfamiliar readings of the primary texts, and to address the relationship between texts and politics, texts and history. Selections from critical essays will be examined in tandem with the novels and poems. The emphasis throughout will be on introducing students to the 3rd Level study of literature in English.
Students attend two lectures per week, one focused on poetry and one on a novel. In addition they attend five tutorials devoted to this module. Please note that lecturers presume that students have read the set material for each lecture before attending.
Module Assessment:
Required Texts:
- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed Ross Martin (Bedford / St. Martin);
- Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes (eds), The Schoolbag (Faber & Faber, 1997);
- Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (any edition)
Selected materials on the sonnet will be made available
For Lecture Schedule, see below:
LEVEL
ONE ‘CRITICAL READINGS’ MODULE (ENG 10010)
LECTURE
SCHEDULE
Tues 13 Sept (13.09) DC: Module Introduction
Thurs 15.09 FREE for private reading of Heart of Darkness and poetry from The School Bag (see hand-out of list of poems for each lecture in this segment of the module)
Tues 20.09 CC: What is a political poem? (poems from The School Bag – see hand-out with list of poems)
Thurs 22.09 JB: Reading Heart of Darkness
Tues 27.09 CC: Poetry and the Politics of Powerlessness (using The School Bag)
Thurs 29.09 JB: Biographical and Historical Criticism: Heart of Darkness
Tues 4.10 CC: The Politics of the Other in poetry: forms of creative resistance (using The School Bag)
Thurs 6. 10 JB: Narrative and the Reader: Heart of Darknes)
Tues 11.10 CC: The Politics of Gender in Poetry (using The School Bag)
Thurs 13.10 JB: Race, Gender and Colonialism in Heart
of Darkness
Tues 18.10 CC: Poetry and the politics of art (using The School Bag)
Thurs 20.10 JB: Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness
Tues 25.10 AF: Politics and Subjectivity in the Sonnets of Thomas Wyatt and Edmund Spenser
Thurs 27.10 DC: Context in To Kill a Mockingbird
Reading week: no lectures (31st Oct.-4th Nov.)
Tues 8.11 AF: Re-inventing Tradition: The Sonnet Cycles of William Shakespeare and Mary Wroth
Thurs 10.11 DC: Form in To Kill a Mockingbird
Tues 15.11 AF: The Sonnet and World War 1: Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Edward Thomas
Thurs 17.11 DC: Race in To Kill a Mockingbird
Tues 22.11 AF: Twentieth-Century Departures - The American Sonnet: Edna St Vincent Milay, Claude McKay, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath
Thurs 24.11 DC: Gender in To Kill a Mockingbird
Tues 29.11 AF: Hibernicizing the Form? Demarcations of the Private in the Contemporary Irish Sonnet: W.B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Medbh McGuckian
Thurs 1.12: DC, AF, CC and JB: Module Conclusion
Critical
Readings Module (ENG 10010):
Poetry
Texts for Dr. Catriona Clutterbuck’s segment of the course:
from Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes (eds) The School Bag (Faber,
1997)
Note:
the following is the list of poems to which reference may be made in these five
lectures; some texts will be treated in detail and some may be treated only
incidentally or not at all. The focus here is on approaches to political
readings of poetry, not ‘coverage’ of the poets, periods or partisanships
represented by these poems. You are asked to read the full range of texts for
each lecture before you attend: keep an eye on the category under which
they are organized for these lectures, but the primary purpose at this
preparation stage is to enjoy and respond to the material on your own terms.
Therefore, do not worry too much about references you don’t understand in the
poems (although having a dictionary to hand may be useful for an occasional key
word); more in-depth work on individual poems is appropriate in preparation for
tutorials and your forthcoming essay. Remember that we understand poems with our
unconscious as much as our conscious minds: these five lectures aim to prompt
the poems to come into conscious political focus in your minds, but this is
unlikely to happen if the ‘unconscious’ work is not done beforehand – that
is, if the very first time you meet the poem is in the lecture. Again, the idea
is not to ‘get’ each poem – your ideas on any one poem will change in the
re-reading anyway – but rather, to be stimulated and develop the confidence to
think in new ways about how any poem you read – on or off the list below –
is relevant to its time of writing and reading. A suggestion: getting together
in a small informal group in order to read the poems aloud to each other, is an
excellent method of preparing for these lectures, and is great fun.
1.
Tues 20th September; What is a political poem?
Mangan,
‘Siberia’, p.244, and Ledwidge, ‘Lament for Thomas McDonagh’, p.508;
Anonymous,
‘Adze-Head’, p.4, and Rodgers, ‘Field-Day’, p.88;
Cowper,
‘Epitaph on a Hare’, p.230, and Hopkins, ‘Inversnaid’, p.129;
Shelley,
‘Ode to the West Wind’, p.558, and Bishop, ‘At the Fishhouses’, p.5
Raleigh,
‘The Lie’, p.111; Davidson, ‘Thirty Bob a Week’, p.257; Goldsmith,
‘The Deserted Village’, p.275; Emerson, ‘Blight’, p.321; Merriman,
‘The Midnight Court’, p.360; Gray, ‘Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard’, p.403; Milton, ‘Lycidas’, p.509
C:
Politics and the personal in poetry:
Whitman,
‘Song of Myself’, Section 4, p.379; Morgan, ‘The Unspoken’, p.41;
MacNeice, ‘Meeting Point’, p.533; Spender, ‘The Truly Great’, p. 557;
Marston, ‘To Everlasting Oblivion’, p.558; Hardy, ‘Afterwards’, p.558
2.
Tuesday, 27th September: Poetry and the politics of powerlessness
Dylan
Thomas, ‘Fern Hill’, p.283 and Goldsmith, ‘The Deserted Village’, p.275
B:
Strategies for bringing home the reality of an implacably destructive political
force:
Anonymous,
‘The Viking Terror’, p.36; Stafford, ‘At the Bomb Testing Site’, p.137;
Hecht, ‘Behold the Lilies of the Field’, p.183
C:
The question of individual powerlessness in the face of cultural change:
varieties of response in poetry
Melville,
‘The Berg’, p.39; Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’, p.4; Lowell, ‘Waking Early
Sunday Morning’, p.324; Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’, p.219; Empson, ‘Let it
Go’, p.328; Crane, ‘In the Desert’, p.40; Tannahill, ‘The Tap-Room’,
p.542; MacDiarmuid, ‘The Bonnie Broukit Bairn’, p.542; Berryman, from
‘Dream Songs’, p.342; Wright, ‘Eli, Eli’, p.197; Gray, ‘Elegy Written
in a Country Churchyard’, p.405; Clare, ‘The Badger’, p.423
D:
Poetry’s engagement with the defence of the law:
Meredith,
‘Lucifer in Starlight’, p.182; Southey, ‘After Blenheim’, p.289; Auden,
‘Law like Love’, p.308; Randall, ‘Booker T. and W.E.B.’, p.310; Tate,
‘The Swimmers’, p.293; William Carlos Williams, ‘Pictures from
Breughal’, p.291; Wilde, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, p.254
E:
Questions raised by the theme of submission as a means to (re)empowerment:
Herbert,
‘The Collar’, p.92; Anonymous, ‘The Deer’s Cry’, p.75; Shelley, ‘Ode
to the West Wind’, p.537; Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’, p.376. ; Dryden, from
‘The Secular Masque’, p.561
3.
Tuesday, 4th October: The politics of the Other in poetry: creative
resistance
A:
The Act of Othering (ie,
the exclusion, alienation or elimination of those deemed to be one’s opponent
or of a completely different or ‘foreign’ make-up and identity – an
exclusion which usually testifies to one’s un-admitted fascination with such
figures):
Brown,
‘The Stone Cross’, p.36; Wilde, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, p.254;
B:
Dramatizations of the process of meeting the Other:
O’Riordain,
‘Switch’, p.430; Dobson, ‘Folding the Sheets’, p.541
C:
Specific ‘real-life’ contexts for meeting the other, and their broader
applications:
Wilde,‘The
Ballad of Reading Gaol’, p254; Owen, ‘Strange Meeting’, p.52; King Lear,
p.55ff
D:
Killing the Other with kindness: political correctness and missed meetings with
the Other
Beer,
‘The Postilion has been Struck by Lightening’, p.253; Mac Giolla Ghunna,
‘The Yellow Bittern’, p.349; Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’, p.376, Sections
1, 2, 4, 7, 10, 13, and 14; Ginsberg, ‘A Supermarket in California’, p.396
Marianne
Moore, ‘A Grave’, p.8; Bishop, ‘At the Fishhouses’, p.5; Wordsworth,
‘Resolution and Independence’, p.46; Anonymous, ‘I have a yong sister’,
p.311; Yeats, ‘Long-Legged Fly’; MacCaig, ‘Summer Farm’, p.124; Whitman,
‘Song of Myself’, p.376; Blake, ‘Auguries of Innocence’, p.305; Emerson,
‘Blight’, p.321; Reed, ‘Naming the Parts’, p.122; Langston Hughes,
‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’, p.554; Shelley, ‘Ode to the West Wind’,
p.537
4.
Tuesday, 11th October: The politics of gender in poetry (categories
to be announced)
Clarke, ‘The Straying Student’, p.91; Donne, ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’, p.98; Ferriter, ‘Lay your arms aside’, p.99; Lear, ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’, p.101; Marvell, ‘The Garden’, p.116; Keats, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, p.126; Fleming, ‘A Sonnet on a Monkey’, p.229; Hopkins, ‘Inversnaid’, p.129; Lawrence; ‘Bavarian Gentians’, p.142; Spencer, ‘Prothelamium’, p.130; Rossetti, ‘Eve’, p.146; Jeffers, ‘Fawn’s Foster Mother’, p.148; Langley, ‘Native Born’, p.149; ‘I have a yong sister’, p.311; Merriman, ‘The Midnight Court’, p.358; Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’, p.376, Sections 5 and 11; Gray, ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’, p.404; ‘Johnny I Hardly Knew You’, p.413; ‘Donal Og’, p.416; Allingham, ‘The Fairies’, p.420’; McKay, ‘The Hidden Dancer’, p.434; Herrick, ‘Delight in Disorder’, p.438; Colum, ‘She Moved Through the Fair’, p.440; Amelia Langer, Salve Deus Rex judaeorum’, p.441; Larkin, ‘Wedding Wind’, p.449; O’Rahilly, ‘The Reverie’, p.452; Ni Chonaill, ‘Lament for Art O Laoire’, p.475; Lyley, ‘Pan’s Syrinx was a girl indeed’, p.492; Dobson, ‘Folding the Sheets’, p.541; Brooks, ‘The Rites for Cousin Vit’, p.541; Spender, ‘The Truly Great’, p.557; Riding, ‘The Wind Suffers’, p.533.
5.
Tuesday, 18th October: Poetry and the Politics of art:
This
lecture returns to poems already read for this course in order to investigate
how art or the idea of the aesthetic is itself always inherently political.
Particular focus here is on poems that make the writing of poems or the work of
the imagination their key theme. This lecture will include a survey of some of
the main strategies we have seen by which poets and readers politicise their
material to effect.
1.
‘For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its
making…,/ A way of happening, a mouth’
(W.H. Auden, ‘In Memory of W.B.Yeats’, 1939)
2.
‘Poetry is both a shaping by, and a shaping of, the politics of its time’
(Stephen
Regan, 2005)
3.
‘A good poem is a paradigm of good politics’ (Derek Mahon)
4.
‘Poetry can be equal to [harsh reality] and true [to harsh reality] at
the same time…There is [a] kind of adequacy which is specific to lyric poetry.
This has to do with the ‘temple inside our hearing’ which the passage of the
poem calls into being. It is an adequacy deriving from… ‘the steadfastness
of speech articulation’, from the resolution and independence which the
entirely realized poem sponsors. It has as much to do with the energy released
by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and
tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem’s concerns or the
poet’s truthfulness… In lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a
ring of truth within the medium itself… The form of the poem, in other words,
is crucial to poetry’s power… to persuade that vulnerable part of our
consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around
it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values’.
(Seamus Heaney, from
‘Crediting Poetry’, 1995)
5.
‘We have art in order that we may not perish from truth’ (Nietzsche)
6.
‘The world imagined is the ultimate good’ (Wallace Stevens)
7.
‘As far as politics is concerned, the poet’s most important work is to
fiddle while Rome burns.’ (Robert Crawford)
8.
‘Poetry and politics, like church and state, should be separated. And for the
same reasons: mysteries distort the rational processes which ideally prevail in
social relations; while ideologies confiscate the poet’s special passport to terra
incognita.’ (Edna Longley, ‘Poetry and Politics in Northern
Ireland’, 1985)
9.
‘Language is not neutral. It’s very much a political tool. It’s charged
with prejudices. So a poet who says ‘I’m not in politics’ is not being
realistic’. (Chinua Achebe)
10.
‘A poet is a politician against his will’ (Yevgeny Yevtushenko)
11.
‘It’s all too typical for contemporary poets to write as if they assume that
the social importance of what they advocate – justice for women, the
environment, the poor, etc. – gives importance to the self-identity of the
poet, as if suffering can be ‘borrowed’.’ (Judith
Kitchen)
12.
‘I was sceptical of the very structure of the… poem [where] its inherited
voice, its authoritative stance… accrued too much power to the speaker to
allow that speaker to be himself a plausible critic of power… I do not believe
the political poem can be written with truth and effect unless the self who
writes that poem – a self in which sexuality must be a factor – is seen to
be in a radical relation to the ratio of power to powerlessness with which the
political poem is so concerned.’ (Eavan Boland, ‘Subject Matters’,
1995)
Ireland [by Paul
Muldoon, 1980]
The
Volkswagen parked in the gap,
But gently ticking over.
You wonder if it’s lovers
And not men hurrying back
Across two fields and a river.