What is the connection between poetry and where and when it’s produced?  How does this genre, which we often think of today as so far from the social fray, embody and speak precisely of its social, political and historical moment?  This course explores poetry as a site of literary and cultural experimentation, a space that both articulates socio-cultural issues and, at the same time, speaks more broadly of its own relationship to society.  More specifically, the course looks at the way poets have confronted these issues in the context of modernization and modernity, and focuses our horizons on a set of crucial turning points in the conceptualization of the power and relevance of literature.  Within this frame, some of the issues we will discuss are poetry as a space for exploring gender, sexuality, race and national identity, and issues of censorship and subversion through poetic discourse.

The first section of the course offers a workshop in theory and praxis:  in what ways do we currently think about poetry and how does that shape the way we read it?  What tools allow for deeper textual analysis and help us create more interesting and complex readings?  Moving from this background, the second section of the course questions the place of the poet and poetry in Hispanic society as we trace the shifts this relationship has undergone from about the mid-19th century to the first third of the 20th.  We will discuss changes in the formulation of the poet as marginal, bohemian, philosopher, activist, and intellectual elite, at times approaching particular writers more intensely as case studies.
 

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