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MLitt Module

EN51004: Constructing Identities: Self, Subject and Persona in Contemporary Poetry

Module Organiser: Dr Andrew Roberts

This module explores in depth a key theoretical and aesthetic debate in contemporary British poetry, revolving around ideas of the self and its role in poetry. Late modernist poets such as Geoffrey Hill and Roy Fisher, and postmodernist or ‘linguistically innovative’ poets such as Denise Riley and Tom Raworth, have been concerned to avoid a conventional lyrical self in their poetry, but have found alternative ways of engaging with subjectivity and selfhood. The module will place such poetry, and the critical debates surrounding it, in its literary historical context, by reference to the Romantic and Modernist roots of certain ideas and competing paradigms.

The module is assessed by a research essay (max. 5000 words).

Module Schedule

Week 1 - Introductory Session

Week 2 - William Wordsworth, ‘There Was a Boy’, and Books I and II of The Prelude (1805 version)
M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford University Press, 1953 and 1971), Chapter 9, ‘Literature as a Revelation of Personality’, introduction and sections i (‘Style and the Man’, ii (‘Subjective and Objective, and Romantic Polysemism’) and iii (‘Subjective and Objective in English Theory’).

Week 3 - Modernist Legacies
T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’
T.S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’
Maud Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality: T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Brighton: Harvester, 1987)
           
Week 4 - Late Modernist Strategies (1) : Geoffrey Hill
Geoffrey Hill, ‘The Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz’
Excerpts from essays and interviews

Week 5 - Late Modernist Strategies (2) : Geoffrey Hill
Geoffrey Hill, Speech! Speech!
Excerpts from essays and interviews

Week 6 - Late Modernist Strategies (3): Roy Fisher
Roy Fisher, poems from Poems 1955-1980 (Oxford University Press, 1980)
Roy Fisher, Interviews Through Time and Selected Prose (Shearsman Books, 2000)

Week 7 - Late Modernist Strategies (4): Roy Fisher
Roy Fisher, poems from Poems 1955-1980 (Oxford University Press, 1980)
Roy Fisher, Interviews Through Time and Selected Prose (Shearsman Books, 2000)

Week 8 - Postmodernist Negotiations (1): Denise Riley
Denise Riley, poems from Selected Poems (Reality Street Editions, 2000)
Denise Riley, excerpts from interviews and criticism

Week 9 - Postmodernist Negotiations (2): Denise Riley
Denise Riley, poems from Selected Poems (Reality Street Editions, 2000)
Denise Riley, excerpts from interviews and criticism

Week 10 - Postmodernist Negotiations (3) Tom Raworth
Tom Raworth, poems from Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2003)
       
Week 11 - Postmodernist Negotiations (4) Tom Raworth
Tom Raworth, poems from Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2003)

Week 12 - Review and Summary Session

Primary Texts

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