English 496-002
Major Figures--Emily Dickinson and Mina Loy:
Strategies of Textual Reticence
Griffin 202, 1:00-2:15 MW
Clai Rice
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Office: Griffin 357
Phone: 482-1327 
Email: crice at louisiana.edu
Office Hours: MW 9:00-12:00
and by appointment

UL Moodle

Course Description:  "Emily Dickinson and Mina Loy: Strategies of Textual Reticence"
Women poets Dickinson and Loy share a well-documented aversion to the kind of fame formulated by contemporary public discourse, a personal stance that constantly conflicts with their formidable poetic voices. This course will examine the poetry, art, and lives of both women in detail, asking how their negotiations with social expectations of all kinds--gender, vocation, family-- operate richly within their poetics and life choices. Two areas that will receive close attention are textuality and poetic rhythm. Both poets have never had a firm canon because they did not share their contemporaries' views of textuality, and both have had their poetry maligned because it distorted traditional or accepted poetic rhythms. Students will complete short, technical papers on topics relating to each author, and a longer research project focusing on an open topic related to one or both authors. The course can count as either Early American or Modern American for graduate students.

Textbooks:
The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, R. W. Franklin (Editor)
The Emily Dickinson Handbook, by Gudrun Grabher (Editor)
The Lost Lunar Baedeker, by Mina Loy, edited by Roger Conover. NY: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996.

Suggested for Graduate Students:
Burke, Carolyn. Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.
Jackson, Virginia. Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading. Princeton UP, 2005.
Sewall, Richard B. The Life of Emily Dickinson. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1974.


Daily Schedule:

Mon
Wed
August 25 First Meeting: Review Course Requirements
Marianne Moore's "Poetry"
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/moore/poetry.htm
 27 What is a text? What is a poem?
Read Peterson and Honigsblum on "Poetry"
LLB: "Editorial Guidelines and Considerations" 169-74
September 1 No Class: Labor Day
 3 LLB I: 3-50 "Parturition" "Italian Pictures" "Babies in Hospital" "The Effectual Marriage"; essays "Aphorisms on Futurism" 149-52, "Feminist Manifesto" 153-6; Futurist Manifesto
September 8 (hurricane)
 10 (hurricane)
September 15 LLB II: 51-68 Songs to Joannes 17 Songs to Joannes
September 22 LLB III
 24 Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose (photocopy)

29 LLB IV:
 1 LLB IV: Paper I due
October 6 We play at Paste F282
I'll tell you how the sun rose F204
The nearest dream recedes F304B
Safe in their alabaster chambers, F124 		8 THE RAT is the concisest tenant F1369
A narrow fellow F1096
A bird came down the walk F359
The birds begun at four o'clock F504
The long sigh of the frog F1394
October 13 Smith, "Dickinson's Manuscripts" EDH 113-37
The Soul's Superior instants F630
Me prove it now F631
To lose one's faith F632
I saw no way F633
 15 Cameron, "Dickinson's Fascicles" EDH 138-160
Of Bronze and Blaze F319
There's a certain Slant of light F320
This is my letter to the World F519
It sifts from Leaden Sieves F291
October 20 "Emily Dickinson Writing a Poem"--at ED Archives. Be sure to read the preface and all the manuscripts and transcriptions.
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers F124
 22 Paper II due
Flower poems: F98, F205, F134, F200, F235, F256, F347, F367, F443, F520, F534, F641, F642, F843, F862, F888, F915, F1496, F1668, F1779
October 27 Porter, "Dickinson's Themes" EDH 183-196
"easy" poems--A sample of 67 poems that have the word "easy": 11, 217, 242, 337, 348, 368, 381, 388, 391, 415, 441, 445, 516, 535, 547, 616, 747, 856, 1772
 29 Gothic Dickinson: 123, 141, 336-46, 360, (388), 407, 425, (619), 916, 1163, 1350, (1405), (1433), 1618
Costumes encouraged.
"The Grave yields back her Robberies --"
November 3 Weisbuch, "Prisming Dickinson," EDH 197-223
Dickinson's Brain: (264), 267, 340, 384, 407, 423, 428, 445, 477, 518, 563, 585, 598, 604, 833, 867, (887), (891), 1088, 1112 		5 Rhythm: 207, 238, 269, 266?
November 10 Grabher, "Dickinson's Lyrical Self," EDH 224-239
(grad students: Dickie, "Dickinson's Discontinuous Lyric Self." American Literature 60.4, 1998: 537-53.)
Poems 604, 522, 348 		12 Crumbly, EDH, 93-108. poems F519, F1603, 1050
November 17 Read 2 sections from Alfred Habegger's recent biography of ED, My Wars are Laid Away in Books, one about death and one about revival. We will discuss "discourse" and poems 241, 310, 314, 476, 477, and 478 19 Paper III due
ED and Science, poems 1354, 833, 595
November 24 "Wife" poems: 185, 194, 225, 267; (307, 613, 705) 26 No Class
December 1 By Request: 720, 721, 229, 709
Also: "Taking off Emily Dickinson's Clothes" by Billy Collins
 3 Final paper due
My Life had stood -- a Loaded Gun (764): reread Weisbuch 205-11, Hagenbüchle 359-82 in EDH
"Parturition" (Loy)


Points for Each Assignment: (200 points total)
 
3 short papers (3-5 pages)
 25 
Class Participation (poem responses, attendance, discussion) 25
Longer paper (10-15 pages)
 100

Each short paper will be about 3-5 pages long in MLA format. The short paper will focus on your own reading and ideas, with minimal use of secondary sources. The topics, in order of assignment, will be:
1. On a Loy poem in its first print context: Find a copy of the first printed version of a poem of your chosing. Examine the context of the poem to see if you can construe how the first readers of the poem might have understood it differently from the way you understand it in the collection. Does the context emphasize different things about the poem than what you expected? Is the version itself different from the version you have?
2. On textual versions: Compare two or more versions of either a Dickinson or a Loy poem. Do they mean different things when differently shaped? Is one version better than the others? Does having more than one version somehow enhance the individual versions? Who is responsible for the variety of forms? What is "a poem"?
3. On Dickinson's rhythm: Select one or two poems (if you choose to work by comparison) and discuss how you see the rhythm of the poem working with (or against) the poem as a whole.

Poem responses: On Monday's please bring to class a paragraph of written response to one of the poems assigned for that week. I will collect and read them, but more importantly they will serve as basis for discussion. You may include anything you wish--questions, analysis, "look-ups" (things you've looked up), poetic responses, images.

The longer paper will be on a topic of your own choosing, with secondary sources used where appropriate. Make sure you give evidence of having learned something about Loy's and/or ED's publication history, especially by double-checking the varioum (for ED) or Conover's notes (for Loy) to see if variatiosn int eh text enlighten you. Please adhere strictly to MLA format.

Graduate students will also be expected to write a book review suitable for publication. I suggest visiting the review page of a refereed journal for a list of books that are available for review. Also, check publisher's catalogs and lists of books recieved in scholarly print journals for new titles in your field. Select one that will be relevant to your research topic, and contact the review editor about doing a review. Journals that have lists available on line include: College Literature, Review of English Studies, Rocky Mountain Review, Midwest MLA Journal. The regional MLAs are especially good places to begin looking for available titles. Recent titles of interest to us include:
Mitchell, Domhnall. Measures of Possibility: Emily Dickinson's Manuscripts. Amherst, MA : U of Massachusetts P, 2005.
Finnerty, Páraic. Emily Dickinson's Shakespeare. Amherst, MA : U of Massachusetts P, 2006.
Modernist Articulations: A Cultural Reading of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Miller, Cristanne. Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, and Else Lasker-Schuler. University of Michigan Press, 2005.
Mao, Douglas, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, eds. Bad Modernisms. Duke University Press, 2006.


Attendance: University policy is that you may miss 10% of the class meetings without serious consequences.  Subsequent absences will cause your grade to suffer.  No make-up tests will be given unless you tell me in advance of class that you will be absent for some (important) reason.

Various Text and Author Links:

Dickinson Electronic Archives
The Emily Dickinson International Society
Emily Dickinson Lexicon
The Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst
Jones Library Dickinson Collection (Amherst Public Library)
William S. Beaumont Braithwaite, an African American, edited the Anthology of Magazine Poetry & Year Book of American Poetry from 1913 to 1939. The Year Book lists all poetry published in the larger venues during the given year, making it a nice research tool.
--A partial text of the 1913 Year Book is available online
--The 1920 Year Book is online at Bartlby's
Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons
Poetry magazine has a complete historical index organized alphabetically by author
Mina Loy at Modern American Poetry pages for Cary Nelson's anthology.