Document Type

Syllabus

Publication Date

Spring 2024

Course Description

Quoting Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gertrud Schackenberg's poem "Strike Into It Unasked" (The Paris Review, Spring 2021) describes the miraculousness of poetic inspiration: "The wonder of it, that the briefest touch / Can instigate a shock that's mutual." Just as the windhover's "Headlong freefall" culminates in "A blowing-by / As rapturous as if creation / Were an end unto itself," Schnackenberg's lines compel us to see, in poetry, "a glimpse / Of the creation, surging past—": the final dash in a text punctuated only by commas and dashes is, in itself, a miraculous coda. The "striking" and "surging" imagery of this foundational poem will complement images from Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of Ones' Own (1929) as we explore works both artistic and literary in which dislocation or potential catastrophe turns into opportunity, loss into restoration, apathy or shock into awe. Schnackenberg alludes to lines from poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins and echoes a passage from a letter he wrote at age twenty (10 Sept. 1864) about an essay he planned to write: he describes what he considers three kinds of verse: "The first and highest is poetry proper, the language of inspiration. The word inspiration need cause no difficulty. I mean by it a mood of great, abnormal in fact, mental acuteness, either energetic or receptive, according as the thought which arise in it seem generated by a stress and action of the brain, or to strike into unasked." He adds that inspired poetry "can only be written in this mood of mind, even if it only last a minute, by poets themselves. Everybody of course has like moods, but not being poets what they then produce is not poetry." In Hopkins's poem "The Windhover" about a type of common kestrel (falco tinnunculus), the speaker conveys his admiration of the way the bird succeeds in resisting a powerful gust of wind that tries to dash it to the ground; the octave ends with a striking exclamation, "the achieve of, the mastery of the thing." By transforming the verb "achieve" into a noun and by using the vague noun "thing," Hopkins conveys the impossibility of doing justice to the windhover's prowess. (A blog by Schnackenberg's publisher features her poem "Strike Into It Unasked"- - for which see https:blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/thebestamericanpoetry/ 2023/10/strike-into-it-unasked-poem-by-gertrud-schnackenberg.html. The photo on p. 2 of this syllabus comes from this blog.) In the final week of the semester we will return to Schnackenberg's poem. By then we will have discussed poetry by such poets as Caedmon, John Keats, Henry Vaughan, and William Wordsworth; art by Van Gogh, Hokusai, and two Flemish painters, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca. 1525/30-1569) Jacob Pieter Gowy (ca. 1610-before 1664); Shakespeare's comedy Twelfth Night; selections from Ovid's Metamorphoses and from Cathy N. Davidson's 36 Views of Mount Fuji: On Finding Myself ni Japan; Paul Kalanithi's memoir, When Breath Becomes Ari (2016); and five novels: Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811), James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), Barbara Kingsolver's Unsheltered (2018), and Celeste Ng's Our Missing Hearts (2022). Although we are al mortal and therefore vulnerable, our post-pandemic, climate-changing world-and of course, most recently, the crisis in Gaza-have given age-old questions special urgency, so I hope that as we marvel at the gift of inspiration and probe the effects of xenophobia, racism, and systemic injustice on the world that we have inherited, we can try, both individually and collectively, to give meaning to our lives. On or about December 1910, human character changed. I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date ti about the year 1910. As I prepared this syllabus, I could not help thinking that we have undergone an equivalent experience in the 21st century: at DePauw I would date its beginning to March 12-13, 2020, the last two days of class before the Covid-19 pandemic sent students home for an early spring break. When classes resumed two weeks later, they took place online. It seems strange now to think that I had never heard of Zoom until my advisee Emma Houston '20 mentioned it at the last non-virtual class meeting of my senior seminar. You were four years away from college then, but you would have experienced your own share of disruption, confusion, anxiety, and isolation. Had you been my students, you would have received this paragraph from me in an email that March: As we face the great unknown, I have faith in our resilience and tenacity. This experience will have made us recognize the aptness of John Donne's aphorism in Meditation 17 of his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions when he asserted, "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." If Donne were writing today rather than four centuries ago, he might well have used gender- neutral language, but his geographical metaphor still holds— and feels more relevant than ever in these days of huge ecological change when we can't help realizing our interdependence and the fragility of our entire globe. When I mentioned this paragraph in an email to Schnackenberg, whose poem "Strike Into It Unasked" inspired the tile of our seminar, she replied, "Isn't it rather astonishing that it applies to our current circumstances in every way, even etymologically? 'Island' from Isola and 'isolation,' now commonly hyphenated with self—' it's uncanny and somehow comforting, as if Donne has written to tell us in 2020, 'No human is isolated." Just as I took comfort from Donne's and Schnackenberg's words at a time when systemic injustices exacerbated by the pandemic called our attention to all sorts of social inequities in the U.S., including those that had launched the Black Lives Matter movement and raised awareness about the need to ensure diversity and inclusion in our society, I began to feel grateful for the knowledge that the pandemic had marked us forever: it had called us to take action by repairing our broken world. So now I draw on the Japanese term kintsugi, which means "broken repair" or "broken joinery," a technique that repairs a broken object not by hiding the breaks but by highlighting them with a mixture of lacquer and gold. By confronting our losses and working together to keep one another safe during the Covid years, we realized that collective effort pays off. I hope that this spirit of collaboration and community will guide our semester together in HONR 102 and that each of you will feel that the texts you read and the writing you do will give meaning to your life. No matter what you eventually choose as your major, I hope that you will enjoy our discussion of ideas that will emerge from the texts in the course be they visual or verbal, old or contemporary—and that you will appreciate the way they respond to each other, either directly or indirectly. For instance, we will discuss an interactive article on Elizabeth Bishop's villanelle "One Art" in conjunction with "19 Lines that Turn Anguish Into Art" (New York Times, 2021), along with Megan Marshall's essay "Elizabeth and Alice: The Last Love Affair of Elizabeth, and the Losses Behind 'One Art'" (The New Yorker; 27 Oct. 2016). Arecent stroke of serendipity has linked the Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota to forthcoming books of poems by a Jewish American poet, Jessica Jacobs, and an Arab American poet, Philip Metres (The Washington Post, 7 Jan. 2024, Section B). It's fun to think about this coincidence in light of the link that came about when the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) inspired the Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890): Van Gogh's painting The Starry Night owes its dramatic swirls in the sky to those of the sea in Hokusai's woodblock print of The Great Wave Of Kanagawa. I hope that, throughout this semester, you will find that words matter—not only in the texts we will read, but also in your own writing, which I invite you to approach not as some people in the tech world do: "they're of a mind that once they've entered something online, they're 'done —and never want to see it again. So different from the very basic idea of rethinking, revising, editing, and multiple iterations!" Can you tell that June Rugh, the editor friend I'm quoting here, who works in that world, majored in English literature? Accordingly, I trust that this course will help you to develop control over language, so that you may, by expressing your ideas clearly, concisely, and elegantly, take pleasure in your own creations.

Student Outcomes

Student Outcomes You will be able to: 1. Love learning and commit yourself to continuing to learn throughout your life. 2. Maintain curiosity and openness. 3. Show intellectual courage through your willingness to be challenged and to challenge. 4. Develop knowledge of, and respect for, diverse perspectives and backgrounds. 5. Communicate ideas through discussion in a collaborative setting. 6. Appreciate writing as a process and gain confidence as a writer. 7. Use sources responsibly and explore interconnections between disciplines as you lay the groundwork for your senior thesis three years from now.

Download

Share

COinS