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elentar posted:(I really do wonder what he and Allen Ginsberg actually talked about...) According to Burroughs, it was mostly Celine talking about "the jeeeews." Then Ginsberg gave him a copy of Howl which almost certainly went straight in the bin.
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Aug 31, 2015 15:58
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| # ? Dec 6, 2024 00:41 |
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So here's what I'm going with, though I might still fiddle with bits of it: Week by week 1: Intro; Edgar Allan Poe, "The Purloined Letter" 2: Comte de Lautréamont, various poems; T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land" 3: Sherwood Anderson, stories from "Winesburg Ohio"; Edith Sitwell, various poems; Gertrude Stein, various poems 4: James Joyce, excerpts from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake 5: Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse 6: Jean Toomer, excerpts from Cane; poems from the Harlem Renaissance 7: Djuna Barnes, Nightwood 8: William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury 9: spring break 10: Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman 11: Ezra Pound, excerpts from The Cantos; Allan Ginsberg, "Howl"; selections from LANGUAGE and concrete poets 12: Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker 13: Samuel Beckett, Endgame; Caryl Churchill, The Skriker 14: Toni Morrison, Beloved 15: Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless 16: Lydia Davis, various short shorts, Conclusion There's a lot of compromises in there, obviously, but I think it's an interesting enough cross-section. Now to see if anyone actually signs up for it. The bonus of the class is that since the reading is so intense, the writing component will be fairly tame.
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Nov 22, 2015 18:30
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So it's gonna be more of a discussion class? That sounds pretty fun even though reading To the Lighthouse in a week would make me want to kill myself. Good call on Jean Toomer, Cane is awesome.
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Nov 22, 2015 19:02
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Curious why you chose Ginsberg. If anyone from that particular crowd is "difficult" it's Burroughs especially his work with cutups. The only difficult thing about Howl is most of the time you won't know who/what he's referring to unless you read a bio or general history of that scene, but aside from the references it's very straightforward, much moreso than most "beat" poetry I would say.
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Nov 23, 2015 14:41
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Earwicker posted:Curious why you chose Ginsberg. If anyone from that particular crowd is "difficult" it's Burroughs especially his work with cutups. The only difficult thing about Howl is most of the time you won't know who/what he's referring to unless you read a bio or general history of that scene, but aside from the references it's very straightforward, much moreso than most "beat" poetry I would say. That's definitely one of the tweaks I might make, although I'll cover Burroughs alongside Acker late on (and have them make cut-ups etc.) The Beats on the whole seem fairly conservative in retrospect, especially against some of the other experimentation going on. Maybe I'll switch him out for Zukofsky or something. I have a secondary worry that if I keep steadily raising the bar throughout, keeping them at a uniform level of discombobulation, that they won't ever feel themselves capable of grappling with any of the literature on even terms. So having one or two subtly "easier" works scattered throughout isn't necessarily a bad thing, I think, at least to give them moments of looking at something and thinking, That's not really that difficult. But there's also plenty of flexibility in the back half of the list where I can just change thngs on the fly if I get a room full of poets, or short story writers, etc.
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Nov 23, 2015 15:33
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What's difficult about the purloined letter or beloved?
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Nov 25, 2015 20:18
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CountFosco posted:What's difficult about the purloined letter or beloved? "The Purloined Letter" is an example of the depths potentially hidden in even a seemingly simple story. It's one of the most contested in academia this last half-century or so, with Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Barbara Johnson, Shoshana Felman, Jane Gallop, Jerome McGann, and plenty of others all taking swings at it. Also, it's something short that we can come into class and talk about the first day or two, while enrollment's still getting sorted out. (I was going to use "The Turn of the Screw," but it's a little too long to allow for all the other stuff that needs to happen at the start of a class.) I don't think that Beloved is word-for-word as challenging as some of the other books are, but it's far more emotionally difficult to process than most of them, and it can't be easily reduced to just the mechanics of the prose the way some others of them can. Also thought about Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, and Octavia Butler's Kindred. And Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper, which is one of my absolute favorite books but just didn't seem to fit in quite the same. Might change my mind there.
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Nov 28, 2015 03:54
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elentar posted:"The Purloined Letter" is an example of the depths potentially hidden in even a seemingly simple story. It's one of the most contested in academia this last half-century or so, with Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Barbara Johnson, Shoshana Felman, Jane Gallop, Jerome McGann, and plenty of others all taking swings at it. Also, it's something short that we can come into class and talk about the first day or two, while enrollment's still getting sorted out. (I was going to use "The Turn of the Screw," but it's a little too long to allow for all the other stuff that needs to happen at the start of a class.) Have you thought about setting Richard McGuire's Here? It's experimental Modernism without all the words.
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Nov 28, 2015 11:56
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| # ? Dec 6, 2024 00:41 |
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I think you mean "good" literature, OP
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Nov 30, 2015 22:07
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