LITR 4232 American Renaissance UHCL 2008 Text-Objective Presentation

Introduction 2554-58; Poems: "I like a look of Agony" (2558); "Wild Nights" (2565); "There's a certain slant of light" (2567); "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain" (2568)

Emily Dickinson is recognized as one of the greatest American poets and continues to exert enormous influence on the way writers think about the possibilities of poetic craft and vocation.

Her dazzlingly complex lyrics explore a wide range of subjects. Though each poem is individually short, when collected in one volume, her nearly eighteen hundred surviving poems have the feel of an epic produced by a person who devoted much of her life to her art.

Writing about religion, science, music, nature, books, and contemporary events both national and local, Dickinson often presented her poetic ideas as terse, striking definitions or propositions, or dramatic narrative scenes, in a highly abstracted moment, or setting, often at the boundaries between life and death. The result was a poetry that focused on the speaker’s response to a situation rather than the details of the situation itself.

Dickinson wanted to be published but only a dozen poems appeared during her lifetime. It wasn’t until after her death in 1886, a friend transcribed Dickinson’s poetry and with the help of an editor from Atlantic Monthly succeeded in publishing volumes of her work.

Course Objectives:

1. To use "close reading" and "Historicism" as ways of studying classic, popular, and representative literature and cultural history of the "American Renaissance" (the generation before the Civil War).

2. To study the movement of "Romanticism," the narrative genre of "romance," and the related styles of the "gothic" and "the sublime." (The American Renaissance is the major period of American Romantic Literature.)
Related topics or themes: the Byronic hero; correspondence

3. To use literature as a basis for discussing representative problems and subjects of American culture (Historicism), such as equality (race, gender, class); modernization and tradition; the individual, family; and community; nature; the role of writers in an anti-intellectual society.

Questions:

1. What about Dickinson’s poetry fits into the American Renaissance?

2. Would you classify Dickinson’s poetry as classic, popular or representative?

3. How are the poems Romantic?

4. Are there elements of the gothic or sublime apparent in her lyrics?

Instructor's question(s):

Standard critical theory is to concentrate on the poem itself and not to consider a poet's life story or image while reading it. But like Poe, Dickinson so fascinates or disturbs readers that she seems to become part of the poem.

What is the image of Dickinson?

In what ways is the author's image compatible (or not) with her poems?