Open Yale Lectures

Hello!

Last week during our presentation on Marianne Moore we mentioned that we used the Open Yale lecture series on Modern Poetry as part of our research. There are over 20 lectures in the series and many are about poets on our course including Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost. You can access and download the lectures in several formats, including transcripts, audio files and videos - the audio is great for something to listen to on the metro.

Check out the course here. We hope it is useful!

Trinity Library, Dublin.

Eleanor Weinel
Francisca Portugal

Wallace Stevens

Hello everyone,

Next Friday we will be presenting “The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain”, by Wallace Stevens.

We ask that you read it and think of the following topics:

- Reflections about the poet’s life in the poem;

- The connection between God/mankind;

- What is real and what is imagined.

Have a nice weekend!

Alice Silva, Ana Almeida, Mariana Durão 

The Blind Men and the Elephant

http://wordinfo.info/words/images/elephant-blind-compo.gif

Hi everyone! Tomorrow we're going to present "Black Earth", by Marianne Moore and to help you understanding the poem we will be using the Eastern parable of the blind men and the elephant. This poem by John Godfrey Saxe summarizes the story nicely, so take a look.

Júlia Rodrigues
Francisca Portugal
Eleanor Weinel

Amy Lowell

Like Ezra Pound and H.D., Amy Lowell was into the Imagist movement. Next class (Wednesday) we will be presenting one of her poems "Madonna of the Evenings Flowers" (here) and leave some topics for discussion:

• religious symbols 
• spiritual experience
•  the majestic beloved

Y'all shall not miss class!!!

Bruna Mateus; Francisco Baranda; Marco Amado

Gertrude Stein

Portrait of Gertrude Stein, by Carl Van Vechten (1880-1864), literary executor of the artist

Quoting from Wikipedia (that you should always check, though you cannot cite as an academic source, as we have already commented in class), "Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector." Nowadays considered one of the most important artistic figures in modernism whose influence goes well beyond the literary world, Stein gathered at her home in Paris not only many seminal writers (from two generations of US Expatriates), but also painters, actors, and musicians. Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), one of the artists who was an habitué of her salon at 27 Rue de Fleurus, painted Stein's portrait (which you can find at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, here), and the writer dedicated him a poem, "If I Told Him : A Completed Portrait of Picasso”(1923) that you can hear read by her here.

Probably, Stein's most famous work is The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), which pretends to adopt the autobiographical mode in the name of her life-long companion, Alice B. Toklas (1877-1967). Her most well-known line is "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose," from the poem "Sacred Emily," that you can find here.

For more information on Stein, go the Poetry Foundation page here, where you can also find some of her more iconic poems. You can also listen to some more of the artist's readings and operas and watch her experimental films at Ubu Web (a valuable source of avant-garde art works also mentioned in our class), here.

Marianne Moore_'Black Earth'

Marianne Moore at the Bronx Zoo, 1953

© Esther Bubley/Pix Inc./The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

On Friday we'll be presenting on Marianne Moore's 'Black Earth' (1921). Closely linked to many other writers on this module, including Ezra Pound and H.D., Moore also worked as editor of the magazine The Dial (1840-1929), and proved to be an infleuntial poet of intense precision and complexity.

Here are 3 reading topics for you to think about:

The image of the elephant;
Space and environment;
The multiple voices and figures in the poem.

Moore was well-known for her use of animal imagery and her interest in Biology throughout her work: click here for more pictures of Marianne Moore at the Bronx zoo, taken by Esther Bubley for a feature in Life magazine, in 1953.

Enjoy the pictures and the poem - looking forward to hearing about what you think next week!

Júlia Rodrigues
Francisca Portugal
Eleanor Weinel

Intersectionality

Dear classmates,

On our last lesson we briefly discussed the concepet of intersectionality, while talking about how modernist writers use different points of view in their works, rather than just focusing on the "neutral" subject's (i.e. the WASP's) perspective. I invite you to see this TED talk and maybe also read one of Kimberlé Crenshaw's articles called ''Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color'', because although it's not directly related to this subject, I believe that it's very important to be aware of these issues. You can find it online here.

-Alice Silva 

Narrativa & Medicina

Welty's photographs

Eudora Welty was also a photographer and that practice has influenced her fiction and essay writing (actually, that is one of the main arguments of my PhD thesis on Welty!). Take a look at some of her works here.

A Woman of the Thirties / Hinds County / 1935

'Blueprints'

I invite you to visit Blueprints, Savia Viegas' exhibition, presenting dozens of images from her new graphic novel (to be published soon). Here's one of them!

At FLUL's Library till October 18!

Contemporary Hindi Film *

Tim Burton's fans *

H.D._"Eurydice"

Dear classmates,

H.D. had a deep interest in Ancient Greek literature, and her poetry was often inspired by Greek mythology. Next Friday, we will be discussing one of her poems, "Eurydice". If you would like to know more about the poem before we look at it, you might want to read about the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice (here, for instance: http://www.mythweb.com/encyc/entries/orpheus.html).

  Ary Shefer, Orpheus Mourning the Death of Eurydice (1814)

 

Here are the three questions for you to think about: 

- How is Eurydice portrayed in this poem, in comparison to the traditional myth?

- What symbols does the poet use to make the contrast between life and death?

- How does the voice of the poetic subject change throughout the poem? 

This is a really interesting and powerful poem. Enjoy!

Daniela Cabrita
Inês Guedes
Rita Silva

Ezra Pound_Imagism

In the next session, we will see how Ezra Pound defined himself as an Imagist in the text "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste". Here we have a video where it is explained this concept in a concise way:

In this fragment of Pound's text "A Retrospect", the author explains this new poetic school.

"This school [Imagism] has since been “joined” or “followed” by numerous people who, whatever their merits, do not show any signs of agreeing with the second specification. Indeed vers libre has become as prolix and as verbose as any of the flaccid varieties that preceded it. It has brought faults of its own. The actual language and phrasing is often as bad as that of our elders without even the excuse that the words are shoveled in to fill a metric pattern or to complete the noise of a rhyme-sound. Whether or no the phrases followed by the followers are musical must be left to the reader's decision. At times I can find a marked metre in vers libres, as stale and hackneyed as any pseudo-Swinburnian, at times the writers seem to follow no musical structure whatever. But it is, on the whole, good that the field should be ploughed. Perhaps a few good poems have come from the new method, and if so it is justified."

Retrieved from here

I hope this would be useful for you to better understand the author.

Raquel Garcia

Ezra Pound's “In a Station of the Metro”

Tokyo Metro by Shteuf on DevianArt

In light of next class' presentation on Ezra Pound's poem “In a Station of the Metro”, we would like to share some topics for you to reflect upon and then discuss with us:

• Firstly, What do you see in this poem? What image strikes you the most?
• How does this poem manage to capture a moment, an “apparition”?
• How can this poem connect with the dichotomy individual/collective brought up by P. Howarth in “Why Write like This?”

Until then, have a nice weekend!

(Bianca Burlacchini, Francisca Matos e Pedro Noronha)

AIESEC

Dear classmates,

I had the opportunity to quickly presenting AIESEC to you in class, but there was no visual support at the time. In this post I leave you the link to the presentation we use in our info sessions. It has all the basic information, but please feel free to talk to me if you have any doubts or curiosities.

Check the presentation here

If doing an exchange abroad is not something possible for you right now, but you'd still like to be part of this work, please know that we will be recruiting new members in December. If you are interested please send an email with your information and motivations to: youth.talent@iscte.aiesec.pt

Thank you!

- Catarina Pereira
catarina.pereira@aiesec.net

TS Eliot's - "The Waste Land" Presentation

For Friday's class, we will be presenting "The Burial of the Dead", T.S. Eliot's first section of The Waste Land. Taking in account the poem's extension -and as advised by the teacher- we will mostly consider the first two stanzas.

However, analyzing such a complex poem, even the first two stanzas do require a longer discussion; therefore, if you want to prepare for our presentation, we suggest you to focus (mostly) on these three themes that tend to occur often in The Waste Land:

• Life-Death(-Rebirth?);
• Sense of decay;
• Critical view of the modern culture.

P.S. If, for some reason, you forgot to watch or write down the title of the video mentioned in class, here you have it.  

- Ivo Rolo

  Caio Ishikawa

  Rafael Galrão

T.S.Eliot - The poetic process

Reading T.S. Eliot might be difficult, especially when he expresses himself throughout metaphors. Regarding this aspect I have investigated the metaphor he uses in the text "Tradition and the individual Talent", that is to say:

"The action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide". 

 Here's a platinum nugget (Russian Federation)

What I have found is a presentation about this chemical process as a creative process and also a comment made by a retired writer living in Vancouver (Barry Shell).

The following link belongs to the website www.slideshare.net and it is a presentation about the analogy between the creative process and the chemical reaction of the aforementioned elements in the text:

Wish you a good reading!

Fabrizio Consiglio

Ana Hatherly_Exhibition

After reading Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent", I thought it would be relevant to share this FCGulbenkian's exhibition about the Portuguese artist and author Ana Hatherly (1929-2015) and the correlation between her works and the baroque era.

Indeed, the main idea of the exhibition explores exactly T.S. Eliot concept of tradition and the importance of the past. Here is the link for the museum description. Tickets cost 3€ (and possibly we have student discount!)

 Ana Hatherly, The Suspended Angels (1998)

Also, the curator organizes a series of activities surrounding the theme (including some guided tours and some workshops). There is particularly one that I think it is relevant, the open class "What sort of relationship can an artist have with a period that has passed or is now 'historical'?" (Which is part of the Master’s Aesthetics course programme at the Department of Philosophy, FCSH, UNL). Saturday, 25 November, 14:30 – Founder’s Collection. In Portuguese only

-Francisca Portugal

'Logan'

Although it's not directly related to the topic of US Literature, I found Logan to be a very interesting film that dwells on the themes of enclosure, both physical and symbolical walls, and the relationship between the individual and nature. Here is a video essay (spoiler alert) where some of these themes are analysed, that also shows us what Logan takes from older films and what it says about modern society. I find it funny that there are a lot of similarities between this film and Trump's America, almost like it was a prediction. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the film and check this analysis when you've seen it!

Vítor Dutta Gomes

You´re Probably Misreading Robert Frost´s Most Famous Poem

Here is an article on how people have been misreading Robert Frost´s "The Road Not Taken", which we studied in class. It´s very interesting and it might be of some value for our studies.

-Francisca Matos