History of Western Civilization II
Writing about Literature Social Movements in America Survey of Literary/Cultural Theories |
Course Description:
The history of Western Civilization since the Renaissance has been a piling up of catastrophes. These catastrophes have pretty names: Renaissance, Baroque, Enlightenment, Romanticism, Modernism. Behind every masterpiece lies a horror story. Behind Shakespeare the slaughter of the Americas, Behind the rise of England the fall of India, Africa and Asia. Behind Rembrandt the Dutch rape of Indonesia. Behind the French Revolution, the French Revolution. Behind the American Revolution, television. There aint no way out of this pickle jar. Course Description: Absolute Despair, the title of this course, should not mislead you. There is something funny about self-consciousness but I don‘t know what it is. Maybe we will find out, but only at the deepest, darkest point, the nadir, the breaking point of your spirit‘s quest for any kind of hope. ‘Freiheit!‘, ‘Freiheit!‘ cried out Beethoven‘s Fidelio from the depths of his dungeon before a broken sewage pipe filled it with political prisoner‘s raw sewage and he drowned. Course Description: This is about American rich and poor. Rich don‘t count. American culture as it is known was created by white trash from anywhere close to the southern Mississippi and enslaved african americans anywhere close to New Orleans. So what you get is a culture built on deprivation and lies. In fact there is no American culture except for jazz/blues/country, whether in music, literature or film. Course Description: This course will focus on poetry and theory. We will do poetry from Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Marvell, essentially a Western Canon approach, Blake, Wordsworth, giving you a view into the evolution of the English poetic mind, Poe, Whitman, Eliot, Stevens, and American disruption, as its civilization mouths off/ emerges. Alongside of which we will look at the theory battles that go alongside reading the DWM‘s (dead white males), which involves reading some DWF‘s, Dickenson, Elizabeth Bishop, by which time we might read some non DW‘s, like Walcott, Brathwaite, Neruda, (being D but not W), and Others. So readings of Poetry and Poetry. |