Selected Topics in Medieval and Early Modern Lit.: Baroque and Neo-Baroque

Catalog description

Baroque poets including Shakespeare favored the rich, the strange, even the bizarre. Early Modern Poet John Donne compared a young girl to a gory beheading, love to a fleabite, God to a rapist, a hermaphrodite to an inside-out glove. "The most heterogeneous objects are yoked by violence together," complained an early critic. This course begins with Early Modern shocks and outrages (Donne, Milton, Crashaw, Anne Bradstreet, Amelia Lanyer, Margaret Cavendish). We then proceed to new American radical neo-baroque interventions: the Flarf school of (chiefly women's) poetry; neo-metaphysicals (Edward Hirsch's "Still Life: An Argument" and Djuna Barnes’s great novel, Nightwood); classics of neo-baroque such as Marianne Moore, Severo Sarduy, and John Ashbery. These writers have one thing in common: they defy expectations, exceed all limits, and explode poetic conventions.