Instructor: Carlson TR 2:00 PM – 3:20 PM
Writing, Picturing, and the Shock of the New
The best writers reimagine the world we think we know; they help us see it as we’ve never seen it before. Ezra Pound likened them to antennae—receiving vibrations from the ether before the rest of us and broadcasting new messages in new forms. For the ancient Greeks, poets were prophets. In this course we’ll investigate writings that shaped our modern era—challenging prejudices and bringing about new ways of thinking, feeling, and knowing. Writers who changed perceptions of enslaved and colonized people; writers who put women’s minds and bodies to the fore for the first time; writers who put the thought-ways of the poor and excluded onto the page; writers who intuited a future of ecological destruction and technological apocalypse. One, William Blake, engraved his own works and integrated them with colorful visual designs to “cleanse the doors of perception.” In addition to Blake’s visual-verbal hybrids, and illustrated works by Christina Rossetti and Lewis Carroll, texts include novels, poems, short stories, and non-fiction by Virginia Woolf, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alfred Tennyson, Mary Prince, William Wordsworth, Edward Leary, and Wilfred Owen.