50180 Culture and Poetics

Handbook description

This subject focuses on theories of language, theories of production and invention and ideas of the poetic. In part this question is studied historically, in particular considering issues such as the nature of voice, sign and structure inherited through Romantic, modernist and post-structuralist paradigms. Other core models such as the concept and practice of experiment, competing theories of the imagination and the influence of digital aesthetics may be studied. The subject asks questions about the meaning of contemporary definitions of reading and writing and how subjective experience is represented within current writing systems. Stressing the importance of the poem, the works of a number of contemporary writers are considered and students are asked to respond critically to debates and practices in contemporary poetics.

In 2008, a number of relevant critical areas will be established in the opening weeks of the class and explored in relation to selected poems and other writings. After considering key themes in the contemporary theorisation of the poem (in particular aspects of voice, subject, subjectivity, self-reflexivity and philosophical questions to do with epistemological limits of language and meaning) the lecture and tutorial series focus on central questions to do with contemporaneity, locality and environment in the work of recent poets and writers. Among a number of contemporary figures, the work of the American poets, Jorie Graham and Mark Doty and the Australian poets Lionel Fogarty, Sam Wagan Watson and others will figure.

Subject objectives/outcomes

This subject aims:

• to enhance each student's understanding of contemporary critical issues in the study and theorisation of language, in particular philosophies of language
• to enhance each student's theoretical understanding of creative and imaginative processes in relation to the practice of writing
• to enhance literary reading skills, especially in relation to contemporary texts and artifacts
• to provide an understanding of the nature of contemporary poetic practice
• to open up exploratory questions to do with the connections between traditional and innovative practices in writing generally and, particularly, in writing poetry;
• to encourage reflectiveness about one's own sources of creative practice.

Contribution to graduate profile

This subject:

• enhances creative and communicational skills
• builds critical understanding of contemporary cultural forms and innovative practices within those forms
• develops critical knowledge of cultural debates
• enhances the ability to think critically and creatively about future developments in cultural industries
• encourages sensitivity to multiple dimensions of social and cultural difference.

Teaching and learning strategies

• Lectures followed by a tutorial for most sessions.
• Study in seminar format of particular texts, passages and poems.
• Discussion, research, group exercises and class presentations on topics relating to the subject.
• Contribution to on-line bulletin boards where appropriate.
• Reading and writing activities which develop skills of analysis and thinking and ability to form questions.
• Compilation of research dossiers and notebooks.
• Writing of extended critical and essayistic pieces.
• Writing of creative and reflective pieces.

Content

The contemporary critical context with particular reference to theories of the sign, the glance, the gaze, location, place, displacement and diaspora.

Contemporary discourses of the voice and subjectivity with particular reference to the philosophy of language and discourses to do with the category of experience.

Study of contemporary poetry and other recent writing.

Assessment

Assessment item 1

Submission of a short piece of writing in the form of a critical or creative or exploratory piece (1500-2000 words maximum) to do with a poem, performance work, appropriately chosen music, or text related visual image etc in which issues to do with meaning, technological form or the role of metaphor are foregrounded. The subject matter can derive from examples in the course work or not, as students wish. We will discuss in week 1 how this assignment is integrated into the ongoing work of the seminar in terms of class presentation or electronic discussion. Notes, documents and a short paper should be entered on the class website at UTS Online.

Assessment item 2

Submission of a longer piece (2500 words maximum or in other agreed format) which should be a piece which reflects contemporary issues in the poetics tradition. Students may submit this work in the form of creative work accompanied by a short explanatory essay.

Minimum requirements

Students are expected to read the subject outline to ensure they are familiar with the subject requirements. Since class discussion and participation in activities form an integral part of this subject, you are expected to attend, arrive punctually and actively participate in classes. If you experience difficulties meeting this requirement, please contact your lecturer. Students who have a reason for extended absence (e.g., illness) may be required to complete additional work to ensure they achieve the subject objectives.

Indicative references

Giorgio Agamben: Language and Death: The Place of Negativity trans Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt: Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, c1991

Miguel de Beistegui: The New Heidegger, Continuum Press, 2005.

Andrew Bowie: Aesthetics and Subjectivity: from Kant to Nietzsche, Manchester University, Manchester, 1990.

Gaston Bachelard: 'The Dialectics of Outside and Inside,' from The Poetics of Space, trans Maria Jolas, Boston: Beacon Press 1969

Roland Barthes: 'Reflections on a Manual', from The Rustle of Language, trans Richard Howard, New York, Hill and Wang, 1986

Roland Barthes: 'Rhetoric of the Image' from The Responsibility of Forms, trans Richard Howard, New York, Hill and Wang, 1985

Basho, Matsuo, The narrow road to the Interior, trans Sam Hamill, Boston: Shambhala 2000

Jonathan Bate, What Are Poets For? from The Song of the Earth, Picador: London 2000

Edmund S. Casey "The time of the Glance: towards becoming otherwise" from ed Elizabeth Grosz, Becomings: Explorations in time, Memory and Futures, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 1999

Simon Critchley, Very Little, Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, London, New York : Routledge, 1997.

Edward S. Casey, 'Proceeding to Place by Indirection' from The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, University of California Press, Berkeley 1997/98

Hélène Cixous: 'Extreme Fidelity' and 'Deluge' from ed Susan Sellers, The Hélène Cixous Reader, London: Routledge 1994

James Clifford: 'Diasporas' and 'Immigrant' from Routes: Travel and Translation in the late 20th Century, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997

Robert Frost's 'Snow' in The Poetry of Robert Frost ed E.C. Latham. Henry Holt and Co, New York 1969

M.C.Dillon: Merleau-Ponty's Ontology, Northwestern: Evanston, 1988.

Mark Doty: Sweet Machine, Jonathan Cape: London 1998

Jorie Graham: The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems, 1974-1994, Hopewell, N.J. : Ecco Press, 1995.

Martin Harrison: Summer, Paperbark, Sydney, 2001.

Martin Heidegger, 'Language', trans Albert Hofstadter in Poetry Language Thought, Harper and Row, New York, 1971

Galway Kinnell: A New Selected Poems, Mariner, New York, 2001.

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Philip Bernard and Cheryl Lester: The Literary Absolute, State University of New York, 1988.

Jeff Malpas: 'Heidegger's Topology of Being' in Transcendental Heidegger, Stanford University, 2007.

Reinhard May, Heidegger's Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on his Work trans Graham Parker, London and New York: Routledge 1996

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, trans. Alphonso Lingis: The Visible and the Invisible, Northwestern University, Evanston, 1968.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, trans. Richard C. McCleary: Signs, Northwestern University, Evanston, 1964.

J-L Nancy's The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S Librett, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1997

Bob Perelman: 'This Page is My Page' from The Marginalisation of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History, Princeton University Press, N.J.1996

Kathleen Stewart: 'Mimetic Excess in an Occupied Place' and 'Chronotopes' from A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an "Other" America, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1996

Helen Vendler Jorie Graham: The Moment of Excess from The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass 1995

Helen Vendler, Soul Says; On Recent Poetry, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass 1995

Gregory Ulmer: Heuretics : The Logic of Invention , Baltimore : John Hopkins University Press 1994