AML 5017 Spring 2020 Kilgore

This course focuses on four U.S. poets—Phillis Wheatley, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Audre Lorde. We will historically contextualize the politics of style and the style of politics in their work and aim to understand the constitutive relationship between experimental poetic praxis and experimental modes of self and being. Thus, how poetic form, philosophical engagement, and identity politics work together will be the primary unit of analysis, foregrounding feminist and queer readings of each author. While the course will mostly be devoted to poetry, participants can also expect to read several prose works written face to face with poetry—e.g., Dickinson’s letters, Stein’s stories, Lorde’s essays.