Readings

Readings by session are available below.

Required Books

Buy at Amazon Whitman, Walt. Selected Poems. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1991. ISBN: 0486268780.

Buy at Amazon Doolittle, Hilda. Trilogy. New York, NY: New Directions, 1998. ISBN: 0811213994.

Buy at Amazon Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York, NY: Picador, 2001. ISBN: 0312420099.

Buy at Amazon Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York, NY: Penguin, 2002. ISBN: 0142000663.

Buy at Amazon Williams, William Carlos. Early Poems. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1997. ISBN: 0486292940.

Buy at Amazon Pound, Ezra. Early Poems. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1996. ISBN: 0486287459.

Buy at Amazon Blaisdell, Bob, ed. Imagist Poetry: An Anthology. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999. ISBN: 0486408752.

Supplementary Readings

Buy at Amazon Agee, James, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. New York, NY: First Mariner Books, 2001. ISBN: 0618127496.

Buy at Amazon Doolittle, Hilda. Tribute to Freud. New York, NY: New Directions, 1984. ISBN: 0811208974.

Buy at Amazon Steichen, Edward. The Family of Man. Prologue by Carl Sandburg. New York, NY: The Museum of Modern Art, 1983. ISBN: 0870703412.

Buy at Amazon Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1982. ISBN: 0374521344.

Readings by Session

LEC # TOPICS READINGS
1 Introductions, syllabi

Daguerreotypes/Walt Whitman
Whitman, Walt. "There Was a Child Went Forth," selections from "Song of Myself." In Selected Poems.
  No class, but reading assigned Whitman poems from previous class.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."
2 The Civil War, photography, witness and motion Whitman, Walt. Drum Taps. In Selected Poems.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography.

Factoid (1) Matthew Brady, Timothy O'Sullivan, and others

Factoid (2) Stereographs

Factoid (3) Eadweard Muybridge

Alternate Factoid: Abu Ghraib photos and "testimony." (c.f., Buy at Amazon Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Reprint ed. New York, NY: Picador, 2004. ISBN: 0312422199.)
3 Poems by Robert Browning, Wilifred Owen, and Ezra Pound Browning, Robert. "Andrea del Sarto," "The Bishop Orders His Tomb," "In a Spanish Cloister," and "My Last Duchess."

Owen, Wilfred. "Dulce et Decorum Est," and "Strange Meeting."

Pound, Ezra. Lustra. New York, NY: Knopf, 1917.

———. Cathay. London, UK: E. Matthews, 1915.

———. Early Poems. pp. 1-15 and 27-47.

Factoid (4) Wilifred Owen poems

Factoid (5) The social construction of postcards

Factoid (6) Diane Arbus' "freak" photos
  No class, but excursion assigned Students were asked to visit either the photography show at the Harvard/Fogg Museum (Carpenter Center Collection) or the Ansel Adams exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. On the way, students should watch for paintings from the same period and think accurately and comparatively about how questions of "realist" representation changed theories and praxes of painting. Where for instance does Impressionism fit in?
4 Film: Manahatta Aldington, Richard. "At Night," "London," "Images," "Two Impressions," and "Amalfi." In Imagist Poetry.

Williams, William Carlos. "Marriage," "The Young Housewife," "Tract," "Spring Strains," "To a Young Disciple," "The Widow's Lament in Springtime," "Smell," and "The Great Figure." In Imagist Poetry.

Lawrence, D. H. "Fireflies in the Corn," "The Mowers," "Scent of Irises," "Green," "In Trouble and Shame," "Gloire de Dijon," and "Nostalgia." In Imagist Poetry.

Factoid (7) Alfred Steiglitz and Modernist Photography

Factoid (8) Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler, Precisionism

Alternate Factoid: Cindy Sherman and the "mechanical" polyvalence of postmodern personality

Alternate Factoid: Robert Mapplethorpe and the "mechanical" formalism of the organic body
5 William Carlos Williams poems Read more William Carlos Williams poems, especially "Spring and All" and "To Elsie." In Imagist Poetry.

Stevens, Wallace. "Peter Quince," "Sunday Morning," "Metaphors of a Magnifico," "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," and "O, Florida, Venereal Soil." In Imagist Poetry.

Buy at Amazon O'Hara, Frank. Lunch Poems. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1964. ISBN: 0872860353.

U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (Library of Congress)

Factoid (9) Margaret Bourke-White and her changes

Alternate Factoid: Poems by Frank O'Hara, "personalism"
6 Charlie Chaplin

Film: Modern Times
Factoid (10) Chaplin's politics

Factoid (11) Chaplin and sentimentality

Factoid (12) "Films of Merit"
7 Films: The River, The Plough that Broke the Plains

Carl Sandburg, W.H. Auden, the text of The River

Factoid (13) Buy at Amazon Wright, Richard, and Edwin Rosskam. 12 Million Black Voices. New York, NY: Thunder Mouth's Press, 2002. ISBN: 1560254467.

Factoid (14) The text of The River as a poem: what do you make of it?

Factoid (15) Olympiad: its history its aesthetics

Alternate Factoid: Abu Ghraib photos and "testimony" (c.f., Buy at Amazon Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Reprint ed. New York, NY: Picador, 2004. ISBN: 0312422199.)

8 "The Migrant Mother" Factoid (16) U.S. Farm Security Administration

Factoid (17) Dorothea Lange and federal sponsorship

Factoid (18) Walker Evans' photographs in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Factoid (19) James Agee's modernist experiments in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Alternate Factoid: Sally Mann's family photos
9

The Grapes of Wrath

Team Presentations

Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath.

Film: The Grapes of Wrath. Directed by John Ford. 1940.

For instructions for team presentations, please see assignments.

10 Hilda Doolittle's Trilogy Doolittle, Hilda. Trilogy.

Doolittle, Hilda. "Hermes of the Ways," "Priapus," "Acon," "Epigram," "The Pool," "Oread," "Euridice," and "Fragment XXXVI." In Imagist Poetry.

Factoid (20) H.D. and Freud (c.f., the "vision" from "Tribute")

Factoid (21) Help us through the "visionary" ending of the Trilogy

Alternate Factoid: Herb Blau's family photos
11 Student presentations of curatorial projects