Graduate Exam Reading List
History and Theory of Poetics
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Abraham, Nicolas. “Rhythmizing Consciousness” (1948-1962)
Adorno, Theodor. “On Lyric Poetry and Society” (1957)
Agamben, Giorgio. La Fine del Poema (1996)/The End of the Poem (1999)
Aristotle. Poetics (ca. 335 b.c.e.)
Auerbach, Erich. “Figura” (1944)
Baudelaire, Charles. “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863)
Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939)
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1936)
Bernstein, Charles. “Artifice of Absorption” (1987)
Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973)
Culler, Jonathan. The Pursuit of Signs (1981) Ch. 7
Dante. La Vita Nuova (1295)
De Campos, Haroldo. “Anthropophagous Reason: Dialogue and Difference in Brazilian Culture”
De Campos, Haroldo. “Poetic Function and Ideogram/The Sinological Argument”
DeMan, Paul. “The Rhetoric of Temporality” (1969)
Derrida, Jacques. “The Double Session” (1970)
Eliot, T.S. “On the Metaphysical Poets” (1921)
Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919)
Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) Ch. 1 and 8
Fenollosa, Ernest. The Chinese Written Character as Medium for Poetry (1916)
Glissant, Édouard. Poétique de la Relation (1990) Poetics of Relation (1997)]
Greene, Roland. Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (1991) Pgs. 3-22
Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926)
Jackson, Virginia. Dickinson’s Misery (2005) Ch. 2 and 5
Jakobson, Roman. “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles” (1956)
Jakobson, Roman. “What is Poetry?” (193?)
Johnson, Barbara. “Apostrophe, Animation, Abortion” (1986)
Longinus. On the Sublime (ca. 1st century)
McGann, Jerome. The Romantic Ideology (1983) (Selections)
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy (1872) §§ 1-15
Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lying in the Extra-Moral Sense” (1873)
Paz, Octavio. Children of the Mire (1974)
Perloff, Marjorie. The Poetics of Indeterminacy (1981) Ch. 1
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Poetic Principle” (1850)
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846)
Pope, Alexander. “An Essay on Criticism” (1711)
Pound, Ezra. “A Retrospect” (1918)
Ramazani, Jahan. A Transnational Poetics (2009) Ch. 1 and 2
Riffatterre, Michael. “Prosopopeia” (1985)
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Sedgwick, Eve. “A Poem Is Being Written” (1987)
Sidney, Phillip. “Defence of Poesie” (1581)
Stewart, Susan. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (2002) Ch. 1, 3
Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution (1924) Ch. 1 “The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism”
Watkins, Calvert. How to Kill a Dragon (1995) Pgs. 3-93
Wordsworth, William. Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1798)