This week, our group met to discuss some questions of the course Prof. Middlebrook offered to us, we recorded our session and the content of this post comes from the transcription of that discussion. In response to the first prompt: The self in Montaigne is imagined physically. “I am the matter of this book”. He […]

Sam Beeker is writing for Ava, Miguel, and Paige We began our class discussion by looking back at Brooks’s “The Anniad” as a means to explore the form of the contemporary epic and the ways that builds from traditional epic forms like those established in Virgil’s “The Aeneid”, Homer’s “The Odyssey”, and Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”. However, […]

We began discussion by looking at the beginnings of the three Greek and Roman epics and comparing them to Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” While Homer and Virgil called upon a muse to inspire the lyrics of their poems, and Ovid called directly upon the gods to inspire his, Whitman began his epic by situating himself […]

“We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from […]

As we continue on with the main themes of our COLT 470 seminar, we were especially reflective this week upon the themes of: why write, women’s writings, muses, petrarchan influences in poetry, and heavily reflective upon Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” and our reactions to his paper.   When we started the discussion […]

We opened class this week with a Susan Stewart quote speaking on the purpose of poetry. Stating that “the work of poetry is to counter the oblivion of darkness,” the quotation segwayed into a discussion covering form and expression of self. One of the grad students brought up a fascinating concept from classical Chinese poetry […]