The poetry and life of Robert Frost are characterized in opposition to the works of nineteenth-century poets and Modernists Eliot and Pound. Frost’s poetic project, how he positions himself among his contemporaries, his poetics of work, and his concept of “the sound of sense” are discussed. The poems “Mowing” and “ ‘Out, Out–’” are interpreted, and the tensions between vernacular language and poetic form that they showcase are explored.
Professor Hammer introduces students to the material that will be covered in the course of the semester. Course readings and requirements are also addressed. Early publications of poems are discussed as they appeared in small magazines such as Blast, Broom, and The Criterion. Book publication of the same poems and other poetry collections are then discussed in contrast. A number of modern English poets are presented such as Eliot, Hughes, Moore, Yeats, and photographs are shown in order to introduce students to the major poets of the early twentieth century.
The final exam was administered in class.
In this review session for the final exam, Professor Hungerford fields practice questions in an open forum so that students know what will be expected of their performance. She offers study advice from her own experience, and gratifies students’ curiosity about some of her own preferences and reservations regarding choices for the syllabus.
In her final lecture of the course, Professor Hungerford evaluates Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated with respect to one of her areas of expertise, American writing about the Holocaust. She points out how the novel takes on some of the questions of trauma theory in its examination of both the pain and the healing power of repetition. The most innovative characteristic of Foer’s novel is, for Hungerford, the way it addresses the inheritance of the Holocaust for third-generation Jews in America.
In this first of two lectures on the students’ choice end-of-semester novel, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated (2002), Professor Hungerford models several methods for approaching and evaluating a new work of fiction. She shows how Foer borrows and adapts themes and styles from other authors on the syllabus in service to his ambition as a writer to demonstrate the power of narrative fiction to address the great historical traumas of our time.
In this second lecture on The Known World, Professor Hungerford addresses Edward P. Jones’s ambitious and ambivalent relation to literacy. Jones shows us the power of narrative to bring together the fragmentation of the world, but is at the same time deeply aware of the fragility of text, all of the ways it can be destroyed, misinterpreted, abused, or lost.
In the first of her two lectures on Edward P. Jones’s The Known World, Professor Hungerford begins from the novel’s title, asking what counts as knowledge in the novel and why knowledge is central to the story. This leads to related questions: who is a knower, and what can be known? Highlighting several different versions of how knowledge of the past is communicated through storytelling within the novel, she draws distinctions between Jones’s model of historical knowledge and that of other writers on the syllabus.
In this final lecture on The Human Stain, Professor Hungerford argues that desire is the engine of narrative, for Roth, both at the structural level and in the very grammar of his sentences. Sex and writing are alike in their attempt to cross the boundaries between persons. Passing does not only occur racially, but is also likened to the process whereby a writer, like Roth or his proxy Nathan Zuckerman, comes to inhabit the subjectivities of other characters.
In this lecture Professor Hungerford discusses how the novels we read are shaped by legal and market constraints. She traces a history of censorship from the Comstock laws, to the policing of Joyce’s Ulysses and Ginsberg’s Howl, and shows how changes in publishing practices have tended to penalize more unusual, less profitable books. Hungerford also touches on the canon debates of the 80s and 90s (citing John Guillory and Toni Morrison), and the issues of intellectual property and internationalization raised by digital literature.
