3VMA8LUS Littérature américaine poésie américaine des 20e et 21e siècles : « The dialectics of agency »

Programme

The Modernist claim for a clean break away from Romanticism is based on a questioning of agency, of the part the poet’s subjectivity plays in altering the reader’s perception of the world. The poems oscillate between the persistence of personal expression and the desire for universality through depersonalization. The seminar will examine the various ways in which poets attempt to achieve this depersonalization, from the grammatical erasure of the « I » to the devising of compositional procedures that relocate agency outside the psycho-social framework of individual decision.
Poems by Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, George Oppen, Frank O’Hara, Lyn Hejinian and David Antin among others will be examined.

Bibliographie

Aji, Hélène. William Carlos Williams: un plan d'action. Paris: Belin, 2004.
Blau DuPlessis, Rachel and Peter Quatermain, eds. The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1999.
Fredman, Stephen.  A Concise Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry. London: Blackwell, 2005.

Mis à jour le 18 avril 2017