English 9232
"Words are Victims": Poetry, Decreation, and the Ruins of Language
Instructor: Professor Allan Pero.
Winter Half Course.
"Allegory is in the realm of thought what ruins are in the realm of things"—Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama
"Of poetry, I will now say that it is, I believe, the sacrifice in which words are victims"— Georges Bataille, Inner Experience
"We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves"—Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
This course will explore the poetic and theoretical ways in which several poets grapple with what Wallace Stevens calls "metaphor as degeneration." What does it mean to think of poetry as an allegorical space in which language is fragmented, broken, or lying in ruins? How might poets "decreate" language? How does poetry express or conjure such spaces into being—or conversely, mourn their collapse? How do poetic obsessions with precision and concentration victimize language in the guises of suspicion and skepticism, of nostalgia or novelty, to rescue concepts like truth or beauty? Or are they beyond rescue? How are such fraught spaces--of memory, gender, the city, the body, the interior, the metaphoric and metonymic, even death itself--examples of what Maurice Blanchot describes as the fragmentation which "denounces thought as experience...no less than thought as the realization of the whole"? We will work to situate these questions in the work of Wallace Stevens, Mina Loy, H.D., T. S. Eliot. Li-Young Lee, and Anne Carson. We will read the works of these poets together with such thinkers as Maurice Blanchot, Martin Heidegger, Simone Weil, Judith Butler, Cathy Caruth, and Bifo Berardi.
