Docente

Daniela Daniele daniela.daniele@uniud.it

Crediti

9 CFU

Obiettivi formativi specifici

Affine ai corsi di letteratura e civiltà inglese, l’insegnamento si propone di affrontare e approfondire l’analisi specifica di temi, generi, tendenze di area anglo-americana e di presentare autori e opere di particolare rilievo.

Programma

American prose poetry: a genre study

This class provides a survey of the major experiments in American prose poetry. It charts the ability of this genre to subvert and redefine narrative and lyrical boundaries, starting from the fluidity of the visual/verbal compositions of the New York School (O’Hara, Koch) to the intimate autobiographies of experimental writers from the Avant-gardes to the present (from Gertrude Stein to Dorothea Tanning, from Lyn Hejinian to Leslie Scalapino). We will study the mutability of this genre which, starting from its Joycian roots, alternatively takes the shape of lyrical narratives (Stein), nonfiction (Graves-Riding), Punk epics (Myles), Postmodern novels and novellas (DeLillo, Caponegro), Avant-garde plays (Koch, Ntozake Shange) and film scripts (Coolidge). A special attention will be given to the peculiar distortions of time and rhythm which, at moments, makes prose poetry approximate musical scores, especially in the performative expressions that this polymorphic form currently takes, by following the jazzy style of Beat poets and the objectivist cadences of Sound poetry. The unclassifiable forms taken by American prose poetry as a genre will be a matter of discovery and discussion, and also of translation.

Bibliography

Gertrude Stein, Three Lives (1909), Penguin, 1990.

Dorothea Tanning, Birthday, Lapis Press, 1987.

Laura Riding and Robert Graves, “From A Private Correspondance With Reality,” in Essays from ‘Epilogue’: 1935-1937, Carcanet, 2001.

Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works, California U.P., 2002.

Frank O’Hara. The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Merriam Allen, California U.P. 1995.

Kenneth Koch, The Banquet, eds. Karen Koch, Ron Padgett, Mac Wellman, Coffee House Press, 2013.

Clark Coolidge, Smithsonian Depositions/Subject to a Film , Petits Matins, 1980.

Eileen Myles, Inferno, OR Books, 2010.

Ntozage Shange,  for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. Methuen Drama, 1992.

Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson, New Directions, 1985.

Lyn Hejinian, My Life, Green Integer, 2003.

Leslie Scalapino, Zyther & Autobiography, Wesleyan U.P., 2003.

Mary Caponegro, All Fall Down, Coffee House Press, 2009.

Don DeLillo, Point Omega, Scribner’s, 2010.

Suggested readings

Mary Ann Caws, The Art of Interference: Stressed Readings in Verbal and Visual Texts, Princeton U.P., 1989.

Michel Delville, The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre,  Florida U.P., 1998.

Peter Quartermain, Disjunctive Poetics, Cambridge U.P., 1992.

Requirements

A final paper written in the MLA or Chicago Style on a topic related to prose poetry in America and officially approved by the instructor. Translation students might replace their final research paper with a translation of one of the texts examined not yet available in Italian. Even this assignment should be negotiated in advance with the instructor.