The course description and booklist for the class I will be teaching in the Fall 2013 semester: INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE.
Pursuit of the (Barefooted) Pneuma: James Alan McPherson’s “A Matter of Vocabulary”
A mini-essay examining James McPherson's "A Matter of Vocabulary" and the struggle to verbalize communal identities.
A Conversation about John Ashbery
Jumping into an already-completed conversation is hard enough, but when that conversation is about one of my favorite poets -- John Ashbery -- the stakes are even higher. I think a strong case can be made, however, that I make a strong case here.
Thoughts on Value as a (Contingent) Social Construct
Currently reading Barbara Hernstein Smith’s Contingencies of Value (1988, Harvard UP) and thinking a lot about how value (literary, aesthetic, moral, or otherwise) could operate as a contingent yet rigorous system of interrelated evaluative decisions. Echoing Chaim Perelman’s notion that ‘knowledge’ is determined via a network of socially agreed-upon standards and rules (cf. Wittgenstein’s “language … Continue reading Thoughts on Value as a (Contingent) Social Construct
The Utilitarian Language of E.E. Cummings
Student: “But what does this Cummings poem even MEAN?” Teacher: “Uhh…” Though the student’s question is flawed from the outset—to ask what an E.E. Cummings poem “means” is to miss the point entirely—it remains a common concern for readers approaching these poems for the first time. And if we are to, as Richard Kostelanetz argues … Continue reading The Utilitarian Language of E.E. Cummings
Pound, Nietzsche, and the “Will to Power”
Though Ezra Pound said of Frederick Nietzsche’s “will to power” that “[n]othing more vulgar, in the worst sense of the word, has ever been sprung on a dallying intelligentsia” (Feng Lan, Ezra Pound and Confucianism 119), the true relationship between Nietzsche’s theory and Pound’s own “will toward order” belies the poet’s loud protestations. Pound desired … Continue reading Pound, Nietzsche, and the “Will to Power”
tom jesse 