ENGH 454: Topics in Poetry
ENGH 454-001: Film and Poetry
(Spring 2012)
03:00 PM to 04:15 PM TR
Krug Hall 5
Section Information for Spring 2012
Actor, director, Oscar-host, and now "Poet Geek," James Franco, interested in the cinematic possibility of Hart Crane's poetry, decided to make a film: a biopic with the texture of poetry, as he has described it. Hart Crane was a modernist poet who wrote admittedly difficult poetry and committed suicide at the age of 33. Needless to say,The Broken Tower was not a blockbuster hit, but nor was it meant to be. Media scholar, Francisco Ricardo writes about the experience of the film as neither motion picture nor character study, a film "not [to] to be viewed as much as navigated." Franco's project sheds light on rich cross-genre possibilities, but what does Ricardo mean? Can we apply our sense of ourselves as readers of poetry to viewers of films and vice versa? Is there another way we can experience film and literature without the expectation of genre, some path in between? How do fact, memory, image, and text interact differently in poetry and in film and what may be gained by reading one form of expression through another?
Team taught by Carla Marcantonio (film studies) and Sally Keith (poetry), this course will juxtapose contemporary projects in poetry and film, examining questions of form and content to enlarge our sense of a particular theme or narrative by considering it in a new context. The films and poetry for this course often challenge expectations of genre and/or assume innovative formal tactics such as erasure and collage. Films will include work by Pedro Almodovar, Wong Kar-Wai, Derek Jarman, Chris Marker, and Bus Van Sant; for poets we will read Claudia Rankine, Raul Zurita, D.A. Powell, Srikanth Reddy, and Susan Howe, among others. The course will begin with a brief overview in order that all students are grounded in the basic critique of poetry and film. Throughout the semester students will be required to write critical essays, though the final project will include an option for creative work (poetry/prose/video) either individually or in collaboration.
Course Information from the University Catalog
Credits: 3
This course is graded on the Undergraduate Regular scale.
The University Catalog is the authoritative source for information on courses. The Schedule of Classes is the authoritative source for information on classes scheduled for this semester. See the Schedule for the most up-to-date information and see Patriot web to register for classes.