417 Shanks Hall, Blacksburg, VA 24061
Phone: (540) 231-6901
tom.gardner@vt.edu
Course Descriptions
English 2604: Introduction to Critical Reading
This course is an introduction to the techniques and theoretical implications of close reading. We will emphasize how readings of texts are constructed and defended, and we will explore the connections between close attention to textual details and various critical approaches. Essentially, this is a course that teaches a responsiveness to language's complexity. Writing Intensive. Texts: The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare, King Lear, Thoreau, Walden, Woolf, To the Lighthouse.
English 4504: Modern Poetry
Simply put, we'll be learning a series of new languages--those developed by Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, H.D., W. C. Williams, Langston Hughes, and W.B. Yeats. We will attempt to grasp the essential characteristics and the theoretical underpinnings of these language experiments, and we will read with an eye for the complications that disturb the apparently confident surface of modernism. In that way, we will see in what senses this rich heritage is available and of use to writers today.
English 4514: Contemporary Poetry
What we will be thinking about in this study of various contemporary poets is the way in which an acknowledgment of language's problematic nature--words "slip, slide, perish / Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place" (Eliot)--has generated a very interesting series a new verbal strategies. Why would a poet claim "I need to feel the places where language fails" (Jorie Graham)? Why define poetry as "--the little that we get for free, the little of our earthly trust. Not much" (Elizabeth Bishop)? How does such a concern with language lead to the ambitious questions that poets are now asking about our place in the world? Writers will include the following: Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, Robert Hass, Jorie Graham, Lyn Hejinian, Louise Gluck, Seamus Heaney, Susan Howe, and John Berryman.
English 4644: American Authors After 1900: T.S. Eliot and Elizabeth Bishop
We'll be looking at the complete works of these two twentieth-century poets. We will also do some work with their biographies, letters, and interviews, and with some of the critical discussion that have arisen around each. Most of our time will be spent trying to read these two bodies of work from the inside, becoming familiar with the related, but different, ways each writer raises and responds to problems. We will also be thinking about how one writes, responds to, and talks about poetry--issues important to our work outside the class as teachers, writers, and thinkers.
English 5244: American Authors: Dickinson, Stevens, Bishop, Graham
We'll be looking at major American poets from four literary periods--19th century, modern, mid-20th-century, contemporary. Bishop draws from and transforms the work of Stevens, while Graham does the same with all three of her predecessors, so we will think carefully about how such conversations between writers can be read. We will repeatedly return to Wallace Stevens' idea that a poem dramatizes a mind and body at work on the page--as he puts it, "the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice."