Modern Poetry in and out of World Systems

Catalog description

How can we think modern lyric on a world scale? This seminar will attempt to articulate two world systems and one world republic: the idea of the modern capitalist world system as a dynamic political- economic entity consisting of centers and peripheries in Immanuel Wallerstein's sense, the modern imperial discursive world system that codified a hierarchy of human difference and finally the modern world republic of letters centered in 19th century Paris and for the purposes of this seminar, on Baudelaire's creation of modern lyric. We will ask: how have poets crafted their lyric modernity partly through a poetic engagement with those dimensions of European modernism and aestheticism that touch upon the civilizational and racial difference that fix them in their imperial peripheries? Poets may include Cavafy, Aime Cesaire, Derek Walcott, Miraji, W.B. Yeats, Langston Hughes.