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The tragic protagonist is a person pushed to the breaking point- dealing with disaster, fate, suffering, unspeakable loss, and often the consequences of their own bad decisions. Greek tragedy shows human beings struggling in a world that often seems brutal, senseless, and beyond their control, where contingency is a hard fact of life. As such, tragedy raises significant philosophical questions: Does human life have purpose? How should we respond to trauma and suffering? How does one live an ethical life in a deeply flawed world?

This course will track the development of the long poem and extended poetic sequence as a poetic form in 20th and 21st century poetry. While the long poem does not have a narrow, succinct definition and can refer to many types (and lengths) of writing from sonnet cycle to verse novel, long poems are often associated with the ambition to write an iconic, all-encompassing, be-all end-all lyric or iconic text, allowing a writer to be encyclopedic and maximalist in how they see the world, to communicate a world view or indulge in obsessive world-building.

“It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his epitaph to the Jazz Age in 1931. It was something else too: a social and literary revolution fueled by new communications technology, mass popular entertainment, Jazz and the Blues, and a bold “collaborative energy” (Ann Douglas) between the Black artists of the Harlem Renaissance and the predominantly white figures who were grouped together as the Lost Generation.

In this course we will undertake a comprehensive survey of American Transcendentalism through a close examination of the major writings from this tumultuous period. We will read the major figures (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau), as well as a host of lesser known members of the Transcendental Club (Orestes Brownson, Ellery Channing, poet Jones Very). We will also read some of the most withering critiques that the movement inspired, including Nathaniel Hawthorne’s satiric novel of the Utopian Brook Farm community, The Blithedale Romance.