UNIV 104JPostwar Global Poetry: 1945-19

Catalog

POSTWAR GLOBAL POETRY : 1945-1965 - - - The UNIV 101 & UNIV 104 courses offer a blended course format which includes two primary components, one focusing on the academic topic, taught by a faculty member with the second component devoted to new student transition topics, taught by a professional staff partner instructor. This freshmen seminar course will explore an intriguing intellectual topic, help freshmen hone critical thinking and writing skills, and assist students in making a successful transition to university life. - - - A new social order was wrought in the wake of World War II; this seminar explores the poetic creation of and response to that order across national, linguistic, and ideological boundaries. Between 1945 and 1965, the world experienced reconstruction and ruin, decolonization and Cold War polarization, the consolidation of new empires and the collapse of old ones. This course asks: How did poets register, resist, mourn, and reimagine this transformed world? What forms did lyric take when confronted with nuclear anxiety, mass displacement, consumer modernity, revolutionary hope, and private despair? We will read brief poems by major twentieth-century poets from Europe, the Americas, and beyond, placing them in dialogue across traditions. Our focus will principally be thematic, as we examine alienation, love, loss, war, peace, exile, sexuality, faith, but we also explore form. We will consider how poetic technique itself changes in response to historical rupture: fragmentation, confession, surrealism, documentary poetics, political lyric, and experimental performance. NOTE: All UNIV 101 and UNIV 104 courses are restricted to students in their FIRST SEMESTER at the University. Students MAY NOT register for more than one UNIV 101 or UNIV 104 course.