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LING-432 Ethnography of Poetry
Spring only
The enjoyment of poetry is a continuous process. An understanding of the ethnographic framework which has served the poet is essential to its appreciation and for the comprehension of its concealed meanings. This understanding includes the awareness of beliefs, norms, myths, and figures of speech specific to the cultural experiences behind poetry. Even similes and metaphors drawn exclusively from sensory experiences need some kind of ethnographic clarification.
Thus, with the belief that poetry springs from the specific impulses of place and time, and that its roots are deeply embedded in the experiences of poets, in this course we propose to study at least 50 poems and their ethnographies representing major cultures of the world.
Poets are in some ways far in advance of the point of view of their own time, and yet very much of it, very largely partake of its limited merits, faults, and fashions. Poets are universal, and at the same time confined by the particulars of their cultures, which they themselves do not create.
Poets are men with restless, critical, curious minds and the sense of the age. They often have great strength to suffer. Since they cannot escape suffering and cannot transcend it, so they attract pain to themselves. But what they could, with that immense passive strength and sensibilities which no pain could impair, is to study suffering.
Often much more that is perishable enters the work of a poet. To say this is only to say that a poet belongs to a definite place in time.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
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