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English 377: Modern Poetry, Painting, Music
First Essay: Required Topic
Choose one (1) of the following suggestions
for interdisciplinary comparison:
- Compare Gertrude Stein's "Three
Portraits of Painters" to either Picasso's portrait of Stein
(1906) or his "Portrait of Wilhelm Uhde" (1910). If
these are truly attempts at portraiture, how successfully does
the artist or writer represent the character or appearance of
the subject? What do we understand about the nature of the individual
portrayed? What similarities are there between Stein's use of
language and Picasso's use of composition, color, and line? How
do we distinguish between essence and appearance in these portraits?
Are Stein's portraits also Cubist?
- Compare one or several of the short
prose poems devoted to "objects" in Gertrude Stein's
Tender Buttons to Picasso's "Still Life with Chair
Caning" (1912). Do these works "refuse" to represent
the objects in their titles; that is, are they entirely abstract?
Is the effort at representation ironic-offering only a partial,
teasing glimpse-or are we treated to a more "essential"
view of the thing itself? Do Picasso and Stein force us to see
the world in an entirely new way? Again, compare Stein's use
of language as the "material" of her art with Picasso's
use of various materials-including the printed word-in his collage.
- Compare Ezra Pound's Vorticist poem
"The Game of Chess" with Wyndham Lewis's "Slow
Attack" (1913). What aesthetic techniques are most favored
by the Vorticist movement? How do we locate "dynamism"
in an essentially static medium of paint on canvas or words on
a page? What social, psychological, or emotional traits are being
expressed and valorized by these works? Do these works reflect
the "modern age," and if so, is this an entirely good
thing?
- Compare Ezra Pound's "The Beautiful
Toilet," or "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter,"
to the Impressionist paintings of Claude Monet, especially "Water
Garden and Japanese Footbridge" (1900) and "Water Lillies"
(1906). In what sense is Pound's language "pictorial"?
In what ways are these poems "arrangements in color"
and non-representational, qualities that Pound ascribes to Impressionist
painting? Is it possible to say of the Monet paintings that they
depict "the precise moment when an outward, objective thing
transforms itself into an inward, subjective thing," which
is Pound's definition of the image?
Your essay should be five to seven pages
in length. It is due in class on Monday, October 4. Papers should
adhere to the format for essays described in the syllabus.
English 377: Modern Poetry, Painting, and Music
Second Essay: Required Topic
1. Examine the following poems by William Carlos Williams,
in Selected Poems: "Overture to a Dance of Locomotives"
(29-30), "The Rose" (44-45), "Nantucket"
(72), "The Attic Which is Desire" (73), "The Locust
Tree in Flower" (first version) (93), and "Tribute
to the Painters" (220-22). How do these poems resemble paintings
in their composition? How does Williams, working in the medium
of printed words, create something of the effect of spatial form,
as when paint is applied to canvas?
These poems employ different techniques, and are perhaps influenced
by different concepts and movements in modern painting. What
specific verbal gestures in the poems indicate an adaptation
of painterly techniques? How does Williams use line breaks to
control the form (or shape, or composition) that the poem takes?
Is there something especially painterly about the objects or
places that Williams chooses to describe? What is the relationship
between particularity (detail) and abstraction in these poems?
Is Williams’s "eye" for the world, his perception,
as acute as that of the painters we’ve examined?
Your essay should provide a thorough analysis of at least
one of the poems. While you may want to make reference to several
poems (even others not listed above), you needn’t feel obliged
to cover all six.
2. One of Wallace Stevens’s favorite aphorisms was "reality
and the imagination are one." In "Thirteen Ways of
Looking at a Blackbird," does the viewer’s multiple
perspective allow for a portrayal of the blackbird that is "more
real" than conventional vision? What indications are there
that the poet’s imagination is at work in creating the scenes
that he describes? In what way does the composition of the poem—in
its individual stanzas, or in the thirteen parts taken together—suggest
the facets of analytical cubism? Does this method of composition
truly unite reality and the imagination?
Your essay should be at least five pages in length, and it
is due in class on Monday, November 1. The essay should adhere
to the format for papers described in the syllabus.
Research Paper Abstracts
In preparation for the research paper due at the end of the
semester, I would like to have a one-paragraph statement of your
research topic by Friday, November 19. You should discuss the
author(s), artist(s), or composer(s) and the relation in which
you hope to place them in your paper. You do not have to have
an explicit thesis at this time.
The abstract should be accompanied by an initial bibliography
of primary and secondary sources--at least some of which should
be print sources available in the library. You may use online
resources as well, but they will have to be documented according
to the MLA
Stylesheet.
Last Revised on Sunday, November 7, 1999 |