The
poet Ezra Pound once came up with a nice efficient description of what we read
in English courses and what it’s good for. “Literature,” Pound declared, “is
news that STAYS news.”
A
lot of the literature we’ll be reading in this course this semester will
demonstrate that staying power in a special way: the extremely strange and
extremely wonderful way called myth. Some stories, it turns out, keep on
telling themselves to us again and again, in all kinds of different words, and
every time we hear them we respond to them again. Those are the myths, and
we’ll be dealing with some of them.
The
two media through which we’ll access them will be poetry and drama. Poetry is
the most powerful, most efficient mode of communication in language: a way that
takes advantage not just of a word’s properties as a label but of its
properties as a sound effect capable of working on our music receptors. Tie
that efficiency to the sound of the voice itself and the look of the body
moving and you have drama. And – a practical application – after a few weeks of
poetry and drama, your own prose will respond like a blossoming flower and
you’ll never write boringly again.
Assignments for the grade: four five-page papers,
midterm and final.
Required texts: The Norton Anthology of Poetry, shorter edition
Gilgamesh, translated by Stephen
Mitchell
Euripides,
The Bacchae, translated by C. K.
Williams
A.
R. Gurney, “Darlene” and “The Guest
Lecturer”
Shakespeare,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream