Under
Construction
This course is not yet on the
schedule but is likely to be offered in Spring 2014
|
Dr. David Lavery
|
|
Office:
PH
316 | Office Hours:
by arrangement |
E-mail:
david.lavery@gmail.com
| Office Phone/Voice-Mail: 615-898-5648 |
Home Page:
http://davidlavery.net/
|
|
Dr.
David Lavery is
Director of Graduate Studies and
Professor in the English Department at
MTSU (1993- ). The recipient of the University's 2006 Distinguished Research Award,
he is the author of
over one hundred and fifty published essays, chapters,
and reviews, he is author / co-author / editor / co-editor of over twenty
books, including Joss Whedon, A Creative Portrait:
From Buffy
the Vampire Slayer to
The Avengers,
TV Goes to Hell: An
Unofficial Road Map of Supernatural, The Essential Cult
Television Reader, and
The Essential Sopranos Reader.
The co-convener of international
conferences on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the work of Joss
Whedon and on The Sopranos,
co-founder of the Whedon Studies Association, and founding co-editor of the journals Slayage: The Online
International Journal of Buffy Studies, Critical Studies in
Television, and Series/Season/Show, he has lectured around the world on the subject of
television (Australia, Turkey, the UK, Portugal, New Zealand, Ireland,
Germany) and has been a guest/source for the BBC, NPR, the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation, The New York Times, A Folha de Sao
Paulo (Brazil), Publica (Portugal), Information (Netherlands),
AP, The Toronto Star, USA Today. From 2006-2008, he taught at
Brunel University in London.
|
1250-0310
pm, PH 303A
Click
on the images above to go to the
Amazon page for
each book or order online from any other seller. You will also be reading Stuart
Flack's play, American Life and Casualty (click
on the cover image to access aPDF).
About
This Course
When I first taught this class in the summer of 1994, I thought
of it as a "full immersion" approach to Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), one
of the most difficult and demanding poets imaginable and now considered
to be one of the major poets in English of the 20th Century. In a new,
radical approach to acquiring a foreign language (pioneered, I believe,
by Middlebury College in Vermont), students were locked in a dorm for a
set period of time and required to "immerse" themselves completely in the
language they sought to acquire, giving up English, plunging, sink or swim,
into Spanish, French, German, etc. To learn to read Stevens, I theorized,
we would need to approach his masterful poetry as a kind of foreign language.
A summer term graduate course, it seemed, would be an ideal time to undertake
such a demanding task, and indeed the class was, in my estimation, a great
success; I rank it as one of the greatest experiences I have ever had in
over three decades of teaching. I think the seminarians—Mary
Suchan, Rosie Duplas, Tim Henderson,
Jim
Baker,
Pat Bradley,
Mark
Roberts,
Randy Mackin, Mandy
McDougal, Shirley Cohn, Tim Long,
Renee
Lewis—would agree. Each seminarian earned a
diploma
certifying his/her fluency at the end of the course.
This summer's reincarnation of the Stevens seminar
will be very like the first. We will immerse ourselves in Stevens poetry
and prose (from
The Necessary Angel). As in the first Stevens
seminar, we will read Stuart Flack's wonderful play about an imaginary
meeting—an encounter which takes us behind the scenes of the always very
private Stevens' home and marriage—between the poet and his fellow Connecticut
resident, the modernist composer Charles Ives. But the text(s) will be
different this time:the recent appearance of the Kermode/Richardson edited Library of America
collection Stevens: Collected Poetry & Prose makes virtually
everything we will need to read available in one volume.
1893 |
1900 |
1922 |
Elsie and Wallace Stevens |
Stevens and Holly (1925) |
Elsie Stevens
and Wallace Stevens (1938) |
Wallace Stevens 1939 |
Wallace Stevens 1940 |
Wallace Stevens |
Wallace Stevens 1948 |
Wallace Stevens 1952 |
Wallace Stevens 1955 |
Agenda
Class Meeting | Subject/Reading Assignments (pages in SCPP) | Requirements Due
1 | Week of January 20 | Introduction | Wallace Stevens: Man Made Out of Words
(videotape
from the PBS Voices and Visions series); Adagia 900
2 | Week of January 27 | American Life and Casualty (handout)--performed
in class
3 | Week of February 3 | Domination of Black 7; The Snow Man 8; Le Monocle de
Mon Oncle 10; Metaphors of a Magnifico 15; The Doctor of Geneva 19; On the Surface of Things 45; A High Toned
Old Christian Woman 47; The Place of the Solitaires 47; The Curtains in the
House of the Metaphysician 49; The Emperor of Ice Cream 50 | Major Poem:
The Comedian as the Letter C 22
4 | Week of February 10 | Six Significant
Landscapes 58; Anecdote of the Jar 60; Life is Motion 65; Tattoo 64; To the One of Fictive Music 70; Peter Quince
at the Clavier 72; Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird 74; The Man
Whose Pharynx Was Bad 81; Sea Surface Full of Clouds 82; The Idea of Order
at Key West 105; The Sun This March 108; Evening Without Angels 111 |
Major Poem: Sunday Morning 53
5 | Week of February 17 | Poetry Is a Destructive Force 178; The Poems of Our Climate
179; Study of Two Pears 180; The Glass of Water 181; The Man on the Dump
184; The Latest Freed Man 187; Anything is Beautiful If You Say It Is 191; Connoisseur of Chaos 184; The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand
Man 205; Of Modern Poetry 218; Woman Looking at a Vase of Flowers 223;
Mrs. Alfred Uruguay 225; Aside on an Oboe 226; Extracts from Addresses
to the Academy of Fine Ideas 227; Phosphor Reading by His Own Light 240
| Major Poem: The Man with the Blue Guitar 135
6 | Week of February 24 |
Wallace Stevens and Benjamin Lee Whorf. Language, Thought,
and Reality [1-133]; "Imagination
and Insurance: Wallace Stevens and Benjamin Lee Whorf at the Hartford"
(handout); "The Mind
of Benjamin Lee Whorf" (handout);
The
Benjamin Lee Whorf WWW Site
7 | Week of March 3 | Stevens and
Whorf (continued) | Language, Thought, and Reality (134-270
8 | Week of March 17 | The Motive for Metaphor 257; So-and-So Reclining on Her
Couch 262; Chocorua to Its Neighbor 263; Crude Foyer 270; The Creations
of Sound 274; Less and Less Human, O Savage
Spirit 288; The Pure Good of Theory 289; A Word with José Rodriguez-Feo
292; Paisant Chronicle 283; Description without Place 296; Man Carrying Thing
306; A Completely New Set of Objects 307; Men Made Out of Words 309; Thinking of
a Relation Between the Images of Metaphors 310; Chaos in Motion and Not in
Motion 311; Credences of Summer 32 | Major Poem: Esthétique du Mal 277
9 | Week of March 24 |
The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination
637-751
10 | Week of March 31 | Notes Toward a
Supreme Fiction 329
11 | Week of April 7 | Large Red Man Reading
365; The Solitude of Cataracts 366; The Ultimate Poem is Abstract 369; The Owl
in the Sarcophagus 371; Saint John and the Back-Ache 375; A Primitive Like
an Orb 377; Metaphor as Degeneration 381; What We See is What We Think 392;
Angel Surrounded by Paysans 423 | Major Poem: The Auroras of Autumn 355
12 | Week of April 14 | The Plain Sense of
Things 428; Vacancy in the Park 434; The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain
435; Two Illustrations That the World is What You Make of It 435;
Prologues to What is Possible 437; Looking Across the Fields and Watching the
Birds Fly 439; The World as Meditation 441 | Major Poem: An Ordinary
Evening in New Haven 399
13
|
Week of April 21 | Uncollected Prose,
Notebooks, Journals and Letters 755
14 | Week of April 28 | Long and Sluggish
Lines 442; A Quiet Normal Life 443; Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour
444; The Planet on the Table 450; The River of Rivers in Connecticut 451; Not
Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself 451; First Warmth 597; As You Leave
the Room 597 | Major Poem: The Rock 445
15 | Week of May 5 [Final Week]
