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Academic Year 2003/2004

Poetry and Insight
ENGL 269 FA

The thesis of this course is that acts of knowing use imaginative and intuitive powers. To study how imagination functions, we will read a selection of British and American poetry in the tradition of Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. We will also read essays on the nature of imagination and on cultivating a consciousness capable of insight. Attentional exercises will provide first-hand experience of students’ own capacities for "insight-imagination." Students will keep a notebook monitoring their experience with the exercises and will also write essays on course themes. The course is for intellectually mature and inquiring students. Casual effort is not sufficient for this kind of work.

MAJOR READINGS

Selected poems and some prose by: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Emerson, Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Langston Hughes, Adrienne Rich, Lucille Clifton, Joy Harjo. Collateral essays by such authors as Owen Barfield, Rudolf Steiner, Henri Bortoft.

EXAMINATIONS AND ASSIGNMENTS

See course description.

ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS and/or COMMENTS

Prerequisite: ENGL201 or another college-level course in poetry. No preference to majors and does NOT fulfill any of our Departmental requirements.

Permission of Instructor. Interested students should pick up an application outside Gertrude Hughes's office at 279 Court Street and follow instructions that they will find there.

COURSE FORMAT: Lecture/Discussion

REGISTRATION INFORMATION

Level: UGRD    Credit: 1    Gen Ed Area Dept: HA ENGL    Grading Mode: Graded   

Prerequisites: ENGL201 Links to Web Resources For This Course.

Last Updated on MAR-19-2004

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