English 303ap - Seminar: Topics in American Literature: American Poetry in the Age of Emergency

What is poetry’s role in bearing witness to an age of seemingly unremitting emergency? How can poets represent and respond to ongoing crises such as collapsing public health infrastructure, racialized police brutality, and environmental devastation? Conversely, what is poetry’s relationship to highly mediatized “crisis events” like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina? Through literary and cultural analysis, this course will explore and historicize the concept of “emergency” in the United States. What is a state of emergency, and who gets to declare it? Moving between shorter, witness-based poems and longform documentary poems, we will consider how poetry can compel us to reimagine the terms upon which crises are rendered socially, politically, and culturally legible. Permission of instructor.

[CE] JR/SR only