| Unit name | American Avant Garde |
|---|---|
| Unit code | ENGL20114 |
| Credit points | 20 |
| Level of study | I/5 |
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24) |
| Unit director | Dr. Kennedy-Epstein |
| Open unit status | Not open |
| Pre-requisites |
None |
| Co-requisites |
None |
| School/department | Department of English |
| Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
The idea of the Avant-garde has represented various kinds of boundary breaking from the late 19th-C to the present. It has defined both political and artistic movements, and shaped cultural production. This unit will consider how the Avant-garde remains a useful category for understanding the relationship between politics and aesthetics in American literature and visual culture. We will trace a lineage from the radical 19th-C French origins of the term and the poetic experimentation of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, to the Dadaists and the little-magazines of Modernism, to expatriate Paris and Mexico City, to the Beat and Black Arts movement to contemporary poetry. We will think about the Avant-garde in America as a polyphonic and evolving idea that both provokes new thinking about race, gender, sex and nation, and reflects those social changes through new formal modes. Students will be given the opportunity to submit a draft or outline of their final, summative essay of up to 1,000 words and to receive feedback on this.
On successful completion of this unit, students will be able to:
1. demonstrate an understanding of the cultural, theoretical, literary and historical traditions of the American Avant-garde;
2. apply an understanding of historical, cultural and intellectual contexts to readings of images, films, music, prose and poetry.
3. discriminate between and analyse different critical perspectives on the avant-garde and the ways in which aesthetics and politics overlap.
4. present and critically assess pertinent evidence to develop a cogent argument;
5. demonstrate advanced skills in close analysis, argumentation, and critical interpretation using evidence from primary materials and secondary sources;
1 x two-hour seminar per week
1 x 3500 word summative essay (100%). [ILOs 1-5]
Emily Dickinson, The Master Letters (U Mass Press, 1998)
Hart Crane, The Bridge (Liveright, 1992)
Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (DalkyArchive, 1996)
Gwendolyn Brooks, The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks (Library of America, 2014)
Diane Di Prima, Memoirs of a Beatnik (Penguin, 1998)
Fred Moten, In the Break (Duke, 2003)
