LITERATURE
course descriptions and related projects

MODERNISM AND MASS-CULTURE **professor Jonathan Flatley**This course looks at the relationship, and often tension, between Modernism and Mass Culture. We began the semester by looking at Frankfurt school interpretations of Mass Culture, particularly Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse. Then we studied the development of Mass Culture by reading Ohmann's Selling Culture and Jackson Lear's Fables of Abundance. Our study of Modernist Poetry included T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, and William Carlos Williams. Finally, we looked at Russian Mass Culture and it's relationship to artists like Rodchenko and Mayakovsky.

Projects:
A Usable Angel for a Usable History; Understanding T. S. Eliot in Light of Walter Benjamin


TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY **professor Raymond Nelson** We primarily looked at the Modernist poets, and only briefly skimmed the Post-Modernists. The projects, available below, were to present a report on a specific poem, write a short paper about a specific poem, and write a long paper about any poet.

Projects:
T. S. Eliot's "East Coker"

Charles Olson's "There Was a Youth Whose Name Was Thomas Granger": A Report

What are Portraits and Why Does Gertrude Stein Produce So Many of Them


ADVANCED CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY**professor Gregory Orr**A poetry workshop. We each provided 6 poems to the workshop over the course of the semester. Four of these were revised for a final portfolio. In addition, we wrote weekly magnetic poems--that is, using the magnetic poetry kit. Our text for the semester was professor Orr's manuscript on disorder/order theory in the personal lyric. Many of our additional assignments came from this text.