ENG 202 - Reading Emily Dickinson

1 course unit

Emily Dickinson’s life, letters, and poems have attracted an unusually diverse set of “labels.” She is variously described as Romantic, Modern, Post-Modern, Puritan, anti-Puritan, feminist, anti-feminist, a victim of psychological disorders (agoraphobia, anorexia, depression), a victim of patriarchal oppression, a genius, a great ironist, and more. So Dickinson’s poetry offers us much to negotiate in the course, ways of reading as well as readings of individual poems. We will have the advantage of abstracts of book-length Dickinson criticism written by members of a previous seminar, a sort of readers’ guide to Dickinson which we will expand. We will also study poems by two twentieth century women writers, Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich, in light of Dickinson’s legacy, and try to trace Dickinson’s particular kind of “nature” poetry back to a seventeenth century tradition she admired.
Meets general academic requirements L and W and effective Fall 2013 HU and W.