I-Series Course Proposal Form

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I-Series Course Proposal Form

For further information about this form or the I-Series course approval process, please contact Doug Roberts, Associate Dean for General Education, (), 301-405-9357.

Course Information

Course Title: Why Poetry Matters

Course Number (if known):289

Instructor:Joshua Weiner

Department:ENGL

Proposed course size: Approx. 198 Students

Semesters to be offered in the next academic year: Fall 2011and Spring 2012

Please list all prerequisite courses, if applicable. Preference will be given to courses with no prerequisites.

N/A

Please describe the course (200 words or less):

The power of language finding form in poetry, in the most intensely charged interplay of sound and meaning, has provided pleasure, knowledge, wisdom, and solace since civilization’s earliest days, and perhaps even before that. It has developed and changed in the course of history, and much of human history and the meaning of human existence is embedded and distilled in its lines. The art of poetry is not an artifact from the past, but a living art, changing as our use of language changes, becoming itself a vehicle for such change, both keeping pace with social transformations, and setting the pace for them. The art of poetry of the living moment includes the art of poetry as we have inherited it; and every time a poem from the past is read and recited it lives again in the living human body. An existential art that unfolds in time, poetry enacts our experience of time, making artful shapes with the language we otherwise use every day in the most mundane functional manner. To the degree that our language distinguishes us as a species, poetry distinguishes the very best we can do, as a species. It is, in the end, if not at the end, our most intimate art of being, and of being together.

Please write 2 or 3 sentences that we can use to advertise your course to students:

Why does poetry matter? A wide-ranging course that introduces students to the formal fundamentals of poetry while exploring the role poetry plays in how we think about the human condition; what constitutes knowledge and wisdom, interior subjectivity and communal identity; and how this knowledge is to be used in confronting new challenges and the perennial questions: how to live with oneself, and as oneself; in time, and with others; here, where we reside; and elsewhere, where we imagine ourselves going.

Learning Outcomes

Indicate how your course fulfills the I-Series Learning Outcomes. You must address at least 4 of the 6 outcomes listed below.

On completion of an I-Series course, students will be able to:

1) Identify the major questions and issues in their I-Series course topic.

We live in a world as saturated in mass media entertainment as it is in raw information. Novels, plays, movies, television, music, video games, and the many diversions of the internet. What is the role of poetry in such a world? Why does poetry matter, and how does the matter of poetry continue to thrive in the world? The cutting edge of computer programming, the newest forms of vocal performance, the longest reach of community outreach; the disciplines of linguistics, history, philosophy, religion, anthropology, let alone literature; all attend to poetry. Why? What is special about poetry? What are its essential qualities and properties? How is it finally different from all the other arts, even other verbal arts? Why do we need it? Why do we want it? How does it play a role in defining the central questions of what it means to be human, and what it means to care about a larger world, not exclusively defined by the human? How does poetry connect us to other species? How has poetry played a fundamental role in the development of scientific knowledge? How has it dramatized human relations to the divine? How has it come to define our notions of the imagination?

2) Describe the sources the experts on the topic would use to explore these issues and

questions.

The primary source for exploring these issues and questions is the rich body of poetry that belongs to us, that is our inheritance, and an on-going process of return, renewal, response, and innovation. Secondary sources include classic writings on poetry from Aristotle to Eliot, and including postmodernism (e.g. Olson, O'Hara, Ginsberg, Duncan); aesthetics (e.g. Kant, Lessing); anthropology (e.g. Levi-Straus); linguistics (e.g. Crystal); biology (e.g. Wilson); history (e.g. Herodotus), etc.

3) Demonstrate an understanding of the basic terms, concepts, and approaches that

experts employ in dealing with these issues.

Students will build an understanding of the fundamental terms of construction and of analysis: rhythm, syntax, line, stanza, rhyme, figurative language, dramatic structure, diction, voice, as well as the ethics of imagination and formal making (poeisis). They will be able to distinguish between the different sub-genres of epic, lyric, narrative, dramatic, epistolary, ode, meditation, epitaph, ballad, etc. They will have the opportunity to hear poetry by prominent poets of today through the English Department’s long-running reading series, Writers Here & Now; and such a poet, by arrangement, will visit the lecture hall to read and answer students’ questions. A web component such as Blackboard will direct students to the best authoritative poetry sites on the internet, as well as making available audio and video recordings of poets, rap emcee’s, country and blues musicians, all of whom contribute to the rich and varied world of poetry, in multiple forms, formats, and mediums.

4) Demonstrate an understanding of the political, social, economic, and ethical

dimensions involved in the course.

Students will gain a sense of the reach of poetry through presentations about the poetry programs in the prisons; the state of new media poetics presently explored at the Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities; a guest lecture by the Poet Laureate of Maryland; the poetry archive at Hornbake Library; the poetry series at the Library of Congress, and at the Folger Shakespeare Library; the DC culture of slams and performance poetry. They will learn about the role of poetry in language acquisition; in political rhetoric; in the formation of national identity; in social movements (e.g. the role of broadside ballads in the civil rights movement); even in the way poetry connects us to other species, such as the transmutations of whale song conventions and the song patterns of birds. The role of poetry and of the figure of the poet has a symbolic function in our society, as well, valorizing our ideas of the imagination, and often standing in for the very presence of imagination at work (hence the ever growing genre of movies, plays, and novels about poets, historical and fictional); and students will learn how the figure of the poet maintains symbolic currency in our culture.

5) Communicate major ideas and issues raised by the course through effective written

and/or oral presentations.

Short essay assignments in which students address the role of specific poetic elements will indicate how well students are keeping up with the reading, the lectures, the discussion sections; and how well they are integrating a fundamental knowledge of poetry with larger questions: always moving from emphasis of text to consideration of context. Exams will include prosodic analysis (scanning rhythm & meter), and require students, through short-answer questions, to place such analysis in the context of comprehending the poem as a whole. Long-answer questions will require students to address the relationship between forms and subjects, and to extend their answers to more speculative considerations of poetry's role in the creation and dissemination of knowledge.

6) Articulate how this course has invited them to think in new ways about their lives,

their place in the University and other communities, and/or issues central to their major

disciplines or other fields of interest.

Poetry is, essentially, figuration. Figuration requires metaphor and metaphorical thinking. Metaphorical thinking is a unique kind of "transformational" grammar, in which the world as we thought we knew it is altered, not incontrovertibly, but rather "controvertibly"--through a sequence of powerful conversions based on new equations, new connections. Metaphorical thinking subverts the status quo and presents new ways of seeing: everything. New crops are nurtured in the central fields of interest or the soils dry up and blow away.

Describe how student learning will be assessed:

English 289 will seat fewer than 200 students a semester, and will require at least three T.A.'s every semester to run nine weekly discussion sections (of about 22 students each. Four T.A.'s would be better.) In those sections, T.A.'s will continually assess learning through discussion of materials and ideas presented in lecture, and through quizzes, exercises, recitations, and the like. Exams will include multiple choice questions, identifications, matching sets, prosodic scanning of primary passages, short answer and long answer questions. In addition, short essay assignments in which students address the role of specific poetic elements will indicate how well students are keeping up with the reading, the lectures, the discussion sections; and how well they are integrating a fundamental knowledge of poetry with larger questions: always moving from emphasis of text to consideration of context.

NOTA BENE: English 243, a related but quite different course presently offered, sits firmly at the center of the English Department curriculum and the very discipline of literary studies. It is offered every semester, and consistently seats over 250 students. Two to three faculty members rotate in the teaching of the course from semester to semester. Every semester the English Department commits its resources to this fundamental and very popular course. Many students’ first experience studying literature at Maryland takes place in 243, and the course attracts many students to the English major. THE I-COURSE PROPOSED HERE IS A VERY DIFFERENT KIND OF COURSE, aiming to extend the reach of its curriculum beyond the discipline of English and further into the intersection of the humanities more generally. Though it might cap at something more like 200 students, it would still require several T.A.’s to run smaller discussion sections.

In addition, it should be noted that, due to the demands of the MFA Program in Creative Writing, only one of the Program's distinguished faculty of poets is available to teach a Gen. Ed. course each semester. If the high demand and popularity of 243 suggest the potential demand for the 289 I-course being proposed here, the format of a larger-than-usual size for I-courses is justified.

Other Information

Describe how this course will provide valuable knowledge to students in all majors:

Poetry matters because it is our deepest, richest, most primary, complex source of metaphor; and all of human knowledge is based on our ability to comprehend the way metaphors work; to understand the metaphorical thinking we've inherited, and to make new metaphors ourselves. This ability is required in every learned discipline. Poetry has only one essential element, figuration. Poetic figuration is the making of patterns with language; verbal patterns are the primary pattern-making of the species. Why Poetry Matters will introduce students to how such figuration works, and will show students how such figuration plays a role in multiple disciplines.

Describe the approaches to be used in this course to engage students:

The primary objective is to increase students' perception and understanding of the shapes poems make with language, and the significance of those shapes. Powerpoint is an effective tool in presenting how poems constitute language shapes, as one can highlight, analyze, and even restructure poems to emphasize their formal nature. Audio clips of great poets reading their poems, and of musicians, are effective even in a big lecture hall. Real poets visiting the class is a powerful demonstration that poetry is a living art. Guest lectures by specialists in linguistics, anthropology, and new media technology introduce students to the importance of poetry in the thinking of disciplines other than literary studies. The best approach, however, is to demonstrate to students how to make the effective sounds of poetry with their own mouths; how, in a sense, to read the poem as a score for the voice, that attends to all the fundamental formal elements of the poem, as well as its dramatic situation, and the historical character of its compositional moment. The poem doesn't really exist until it's said/read; and it is impossible to think about its cultural significance if one doesn't perceive it accurately. This appears obvious, but it is a point routinely overlooked, even in the discipline of literary studies. What are the sounds of poetry, and how do they make their meaning? Lecture; performance or recital by students in the lecture hall; demonstrations of literary analysis (Powerpoint, close reading); historical contextualization; connections to other disciplines; field trips; small group work in discussion sections.

Will this course involve teaching assistants? (select all that apply)Graduate ONLY

What role will the teaching assistants play in the active engagement of students?

T.A.'s meet with students once a week in discussion sections; they work the front line trenches in answering questions about technical issues presented in lecture, such as prosody, figurative language, syntax, and the like. The T.A.'s are essential in helping students ask the best questions for refining their comprehension of lectures and readings. They are coaches, task-masters, and cheerleaders.

General Education Designation

I-Series courses can be used to satisfy Distributive Studies categories in the new General Education program. The Learning Outcomes for these categories may be found at GeneralEducation Learning Outcomes. Please indicate which of these categories you feel this course may satisfy. You may select as many as you feel are applicable:

Distributive Studies (select as many as may apply)

• Humanities

Courses may also count toward the General Education diversity requirement. Double-counting with Distributive Studies is allowed. Please indicate which diversity category your course may count toward:

Diversity

• Not applicable