LIT 5038 Fall 2020 Epstein

This graduate seminar will use the poet Frank O'Hara (1926-1966) as a focal point for the study of postwar American poetry and culture. One of the central figures in the avant-garde movement known as the New York School of poetry, O’Hara is generally considered one of the most important and influential American poets of the post-1945 period – one whose work is increasingly ubiquitous, showing up in television shows like Mad Men, in the epigraphs and titles of recent novels, and in seemingly every corner of the digital age.

This course will give students the opportunity to do a rare deep dive of the kind that scholars and writers do all the time for their own work – to immerse themselves in the entire body of work of a single fascinating literary figure, to understand that poet’s connections to other writers and to the culture of their time, and to become very familiar with the critical conversation surrounding their work. O’Hara is a particularly good figure for this kind of immersion because his life and work radiate out in so many directions – the politics and culture of the 1950s and 1960s, visual art, popular culture (especially film and jazz), LBGTQ history and culture, issues of race and sexuality, and so on. We will discuss writers and art movements that influenced O’Hara (like Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, the French and Russian avant-garde, Cubism, Surrealism, Dada, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, classical music, bebop); his fellow New York School poet friends (John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest); his contemporaries and rivals (Amiri Baraka, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell); and various writers, musicians, and television shows he has influenced (including Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, and Mad Men, among many others).

Throughout, the course will read O’Hara in light of such issues as friendship and collaboration, race, class, sexuality, consumerism/capitalism, the city, as well as within the context of Cold War culture, the history of the avant-garde, queer studies, postmodernism, and other critical frames.