Disobedience: The Defiance of Genre in Contemporary English Language Writing
RELIGION 2492
Subject & Catalog Number
Course Information
Description
“Poetry is the new space of possibility and everyone knows it,” writes Eileen Myles, thereby defining poetry as possibility rather than anything whose boundaries can be prescribed. As Myles explains, “a lot of things that people like are beginning to need to happen in the same pieces of writing and those things may be gossip, theory, sexual description, or simply an implication that it’s there or just happened (art).” We will explore this principled disobedience – an aesthetic, philosophical, and perhaps also a theological act – through the reading of important pieces by contemporary artists, among them Eileen Myles, Susan Howe, Alice Notley, Claudia Rankine, Maggie Nelson, Dana Ward, Rob Halpern, and Bhanu Kapil.
Course Notes
Offered jointly with the Divinity School as 2566.
Available for Harvard Cross Registration
