EN 729.01 Woolf and Stevens (Fall 2010-2011: 3)
A course focusing on the aesthetics of impersonality in Woolf and Stevens,
it will, in the perhaps unexpected encounter it stages, also question the
categories through which we organize our understanding of literature, especially
nation, genre, and period. What is visible in Stevens' poetry if it is
read in the context of British modernism, and in the context of modernism's
equivocal relation to the Victorian novel and aestheticism? What might
be perceived in Woolf's novelistic innovations if they read in the context
of a poetic tradition--and in her novels if read as if they were poems?
In asking such questions, we will also be attempting to frame the specific
outlines of the (very different) understandings of impersonality in these
two writers--the specific aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical imperatives
to which these understandings respond, and their poetic, novelistic, and
philosophical consequences.
Kevin Ohi
Last Updated: 01-DEC-10