ENG 202 - Reading Emily Dickinson

Course unit(s): 1
Meets GAR: Meets general academic requirements HU and W.
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 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 religious tradition she admired. Satisfies departmental Reading X, Social Justice, and Poetry requirements.