LIT 5038 - Spring 2026 - Stilling

This course will examine the relationship between modern Anglophone poetry, arts such as painting and sculpture, and the modern museum as an institution, display gallery, source of cultural prestige, and repository of colonial loot. While the idea of ekphrasis, the poetic description of works of art, has its deepest roots in Western culture going back to Homer and Horace, we will explore how this tradition has been shaped by the museum as an institution. We will investigate how poetry from the Romantic era through the modernism to the postcolonial era has both shaped and been shaped by the values of Western museum culture and collecting practices. We will ask how Western museum culture has been challenged by non-Western ideas about artistic production and the social meaning of the arts. We will examine what role poetry may have played in developing ideas around cultural restitution, anticipating the current movement toward the return of objects and artworks to their peoples and places of origin. We will explore how the collection of art and objects by modern art galleries has shaped our understanding of modern poetry's relation to the visual arts when it comes to issues of race, gender, and sexuality. Along the way, we will address theories of ekphrasis and intermediality between the so-called “sister arts.” We will cover a wide range of poetry from the nineteenth century to the present, including works by John Keats, Lord Byron, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Michael Field, W.H. Auden, Frank O’Hara, Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka, Grace Nichols, Robin Coste Lewis, Derek Mahon, and Daljit Nagra, among others.

Requirements: This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Post-1900 Literature and Culture; Colonial, Postcolonial, and Transnational Literary and Cultural Studies, and a Literary Genre (Poetry). Depending on one’s final project, the course may, with the appropriate approvals, fulfill the concentration requirement for British Literature 1660-1900.