This course deals with Atlantic Poetry from the long eighteenth century to the present, and from both sides of the Atlantic. It focuses on how engagements with the theme of the Atlantic have (re-)worked aesthetic conventions, negotiated historical events and shifting power relations, and contributed to how people perceive themselves (i.e. for example their ethnic, cultural, national, gender, or sexual identities) and others. We will discuss how, across time, poems have drawn on each other intertextually, in terms of both themes and styles, and how they have broken conventions and to what effects. We will discuss how Atlantic poetry has facilitated imaginings of transculturality and interconnectedness, or cultural specificity and uniqueness; how it has functioned as a medium for translating culture; and what emotions or emotional journeys it has triggered, turning the Atlantic itself into an emotional space with its own emotional geographies. We will work chronologically, beginning with poetry that engages with the Atlantic voyages of early colonialism and first settlements in the Americas, then with slavery and abolitionism (including later notions of the ‘Black Atlantic’ and ‘Red Atlantic’); with Romantic poetry; with transcendentalism, modernism, war time poetry, and postcolonial poetry. We will finish with distinctly current material, the focus of which we will choose together.
Information for reading preparations will be provided here in due course.
- Lehrende/r: Caroline Koegler