Literary Interpretation: Beyond the Limits of the Lyric

In this seminar we’ll read individual poems closely within a set of questions about the moral and political position of poetry – and of intellectuals – in different cultural contexts. Of course, part of the divergence in the social positions of poetry [and of ’the aesthetic’] depends on the dominant paradigm of the social, political and literary culture; part of the divergence derives from the momentum of literary development in the culture [how did the culture experience modernism?, for instan…

The syllabus, on MIT OpenCourseWare

The full course — syllabus, assigned readings, problem sets, exams, and lecture notes — lives on OCW. These open the real thing: