EGL 247 - Studies in Modern Poets: Bob Dylan and Gary Snyder

Course Units: 1.0

This course is a study in the role of history in the ways that two poets, Bob Dylan and Gary Snyder, conceive of their work. Dylan’s fascination with the music and history of America from the run-up to the Civil War through Reconstruction and the Great Depression, shapes his sense of useful subject matter, his development of the personae that inhabit his lyrics, and his range of rhetoric, from the nostalgic to the prophetic; it also places him squarely within contemporary controversies about the political uses of history. Gary Snyder’s understanding that history extends to the natural world and our relationship to it is integral to his complex enterprise as a writer of poems and essays, as an activist and educator, and as a point of connection in a web of similarly concerned thinkers. His conception of history as a matter of bioregions rather than of nations and of tradition as a matter of wisdom rather than of identity unsettles the usual divisions between art, politics and science as well as our conventional expectations of poetry. Prerequisite(s): One 100-level English course or a score of 5 on the AP English Language or Literature and Composition test. CC: HUL, HUM, WAC, JCAD, JLIT ISP: AMS, REE