GERST 4220 - Technologies of Verse

(crosslisted) COML 4413, ROMS 4225, VISST 4221
(LA-AS)

Fall. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Taught in English.

T. Solanki.

Poems disrupt the flow of reading. In so doing, rather than rendering them transparent, they call attention to their media – often the page or voice. This course will examine the experimental writing techniques of a set of German, French, and English poets from the 18th -20st centuries as they explored the potentialities of the media technologies that were innovative in their time, including books, radios, magazines, pre-cinematic devices. What kinds of reading techniques did these new poetic forms initiate? What were the political implications of the readability or audibility of the formats, materials, and technologies mediating verse vis a vis the publics they include and exclude? Poets include Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Stéphane Mallarmé, Charles Baudelaire, Ingeborg Bachmann, and the Dada and Oulipo movements.