Charles Bernstein
English 633
graduate seminar, Fall 1989

Investigating Poetry: Topics in 20th Century Poetry & Poetics

A series of interrelated topics will be the focus of wide-ranging explorations of modernist poetic practices and theories, including close readings of a broad sampling of poets, as well as philosophers and critics.  Topics include: Philosophy of language & the language of philosophy; poetry as ideology; representation/reference/reification/refutation; language & identity; dialect/idiolect/dialogue/dialectic (global English); form's genders/gender's forms; the art of appropriation--or, what is found (in) poetry?; the politics of poetic form (programmatic structures to "anti"structural processes); collage & its discontents; the visual representation of language (visual & concrete poetry); sound poetry; poetry and comedy; and teaching 20th century poetry. 

Among the writers to be considered: Louis Althusser, Bruce Andrews, David Antin, Arakawa & Madeline Gins, John Ashbery, Walter Benjamin, Bruce Boone, Nicole Brossard, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, Lenny Bruce, Basil Bunting, Stanley Cavell, Helene Cixous, James Clifford, Lucille Clifton, Clark Coolidge, Robert Creeley, Tina Darragh, Alan Davies, Ray DiPalma, Robert Duncan, Johanna Drucker, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Robert Duncan, Larry Eigner, Susan Howe, Langston Hughes, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Lyn Hejinian, Luce Irigeray, June Jordon, Groucho Marx, Velimer Khlebnikov, Jackson Mac Low, Hugh MacDiarmid, Nathaniel Mackey, Bernadette Mayer, Jerome McGann, Alice Notley, Frank O'Hara, Maggie O'Sullivan, Tom Raworth, Charles Reznikoff, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Leslie Scalapino, James Schulyer, Ron Silliman, Michael Smith, Jack Spicer, Gertrude Stein, Rosmarie Waldrop, Simone Weil, Hannah Weiner, W. C. Williams, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.  (List subject to change without notice!) 

Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, 1989, distributed by University of Chicago Press isbn 0-945953-00-3
Langston Hughes, Selected Poems (Vantage at McGraw Hill) isbn 0-394-71910-7
Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology, University of Chicago isbn 0-226-55850-9
Jerome & Diane Rothenberg, eds., Symposium of the Whole, University of California Press, 1983  isbn 0-393-95636-9

Order from from Small Press Distribution (1814 San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94702); assure prices as noted:
Ted Berrigan, The Sonnets $5
Clark Coolidge, Melancolia $3.50
Ted Greenwald, Common Sense $5.00
Bernadette Mayer, Sonnets $5
Ron Silliman, Tjanting $10
Hannah Weiner, Little Books/Indians $4

Supplemental text NOT required (order 5):
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philophical Investigations, tr. Elizabeth Anscombe (Macmillan paperback)

 Reserve Books

POETRY:
David Antin--"Real Estate" in Tuning
Amiri Baraka, Reggae or Not
Joe Brainard, I Remember
Joe Ceravelo, Fits of Dawn
Lucille Clifton, Good Woman
Clark Coolidge: Space
                                     The Maintains
                                    Polaroid
                                     Solution Passage
Tina Darragh, Striking Resemblances
Paul Laurence Dunbar, Complete Poems
Larry Eigner, Another Time in Fragments
Abraham Lincoln Gillespie, The Syntactic Revolution
Robert Grenier, Sentences
Lyn Hejinian, My Life
Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson
Langston Hughes, Montage of a Dream Deferred
P. Inman, Ocker
                        Uneven Development
Laura (Riding) Jackson--The Telling
June Jordan, Political Essays 
                           On Call 
Etheridge Knight, Born of a Woman
Audre Lord, Chosen Poems
Frank O'Hara, Collected Poems
Hugh MacDiarmid, A Drunk Man Looks at Thistle (in Complete Poems)
Nathaniel Mackey--Bedoin Hornbook
David Melnick, Pcoet
J.H. Prynne, "Kitchen Poems" or Collected Poems
Tom Raworth, Writing
Charles Reznikoff: Testimony Vol. 1 and 2
                  Collected Poems Vol. 1 and 2
Leslie Scalapino, Way
James Schulyer, A Few Days
Michael Smith, It A Come
Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America
W C Williams, Imaginations
Roy Young Bear, Winter of the Salamander

NON FICTION:
Paula Gunn Allen (ed), Studies in American Indian Literature
Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop
Louis Althusser, For Marx , ISA essay
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
Basil Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control
Michel DeCerteau, The Practice of Everday Life
James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture
Henry Louis Gates, ed., Race, Writing and Difference
Sander Gillman, Jewish Self-Hatred
Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual
Alvin Goulder, The Future of Intellectuals
Luce Irigeray, This Sex Which Is Not One
Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconcious
Henri Lefebre, Everyday Life in the Modern World
Jerome McGann, Romantic Ideology
Studs Terkel, Working
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

MAGS:
Socialist Review 89/2 (1989), pp. 37-52
Temblor 5, 1987 (poetry magazine)