LIT 4385 - Fall 2025 - Kilgore

This course offers students a chance to read (really read) the poetry of Emily Dickinson, one of the greatest, strangest, most inspiring writers in the English language. Against the conventional image of the sad, alienated spinster, the Dickinson you will encounter in this class is positively ecstatic, affirmatively queer, wonderfully defiant--her own person on her own terms. Our primary focus will be on Dickinson's embodied relationship to textuality and language, genre and poetic form. Students will be exposed to recent scholarly practices in Dickinson Studies with particular attention to manuscript criticism and material poetics. But we'll also learn about Dickinson’s fascinating biography and consider more recent representations of her life and work in art and popular culture.