watch further discussion on Kennedy's "Nude Descending a Staircase"

Loading...

来自 University of Pennsylvania 的课程

Modern & Contemporary American Poetry (“ModPo”)

157 个评分

University of Pennsylvania

Modern & Contemporary American Poetry (“ModPo”)

157 个评分

ModPo is a fast-paced introduction to modern and contemporary U.S. poetry, with an emphasis on experimental verse, from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman to the present. Participants (who need no prior experience with poetry) will learn how to read poems that are supposedly "difficult." We encounter and discuss the poems one at a time. It's much easier than it seems! Join us and try it! Even though we are currently in our offseason ("SloPo"), you are welcome to enroll now. You will have access to the entire ModPo site. Explore; meet some ModPo'ers who are conversing in the site year-round; read poems and watch videos. Then join us again when the intense "symposium mode" starts up again in September. Yes, the next live, interactive 10-week session of ModPo will begin on September 8, 2018, and will conclude on November 19, 2018. Al Filreis will be in touch with you by email before the September 8 start of the course with all the information you'll need to participate. If you have questions, you can email the ModPo team at modpo@writing.upenn.edu. During the 10 weeks of the course, you will be guided through poems, video discussions of each poem, and community discussions of each poem. And (unique among open online courses) we offer weekly, interactive live webcasts. Our famed TAs also offer office hours throughout the week. We help arrange meet-ups and in-site study groups. If you are curious about the ModPo team, type "ModPo YouTube introduction" into Google or your favorite search engine, and watch the 20-minute introductory video. You will get an overview of the course and will meet the brilliant TAs, who will be encountering the poems with you all the way to the end. If you use Facebook, join the always-thriving ModPo group: from inside Facebook, search for "Modern & Contemporary American Poetry" and then request to be added as a member. If you have any questions about ModPo, you can post a question to the FB group and you'll receive an almost instant reply. We tweet all year long at @ModPoPenn and you can also find ModPo colleagues using the hashtag #ModPoLive. ModPo is hosted by—and is housed at—the Kelly Writers House at 3805 Locust Walk on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia USA. All ModPo'ers are welcome to visit the Writers House when they are in our area. Our discussions are filmed there. Our live webcasts take place in the famed "Arts Cafe" of the House. To find out what's going on at the Writers House any time, just dial 215-746-POEM.

从本节课中

chapter 6 (week 5 cont.)—formalism of the 1950s

We conclude ModPo week 5 with chapter 6. There are several ways of looking generally at U.S. poetry in the postwar (post-World War II) period, 1945-60. No single generalization will do, but our course implies two main trends. First, there was a retrenchment, a “coming home,” a consolidation — a mainstreaming of modernism and for some, a new formalist (or "neo-formalist") reaction against what was deemed to be modernist experimental excess. This consolidation coincided with a general renewed cultural conservatism or quietism, generally understood as caused or aided by several factors: fears of communism, concerns about women who had entered the wartime workplace and were now expected to resume domestic life, the apparent ease of daily life during a time of economic growth, the "massification" of university education, the flight from cities, and the suburbanization of values and lifestyle. For some, this meant assuming modernist gains — free verse, wide choice of subject matter, everyday diction — while suppressing radical experiment. For others, it meant an outright antimodernism, though it was now more conservative than the antimodernism of poets in chapters 3 and 5. The latter impulse expressed itself in a neo-classicist use of satire and irony — a kind of new Augustan poetics. Chapter 6 gives us a very brief look at this postwar neo-formalism. [] A second, very different, trend was the explosion of a new poetic radicalism fueled by a sometimes ecstatic and often antic negative response to the above-mentioned quietism and poetic conservatism. Drawing on the experimental spirit of modernism and sometimes celebrating the influence of individual modernist poets, this trend generally came to be known as the “New American” poetry. The Beats of chapter 7 and the New York School poets of chapter 8 are instances of this trend. There are other New American approaches and groupings, to be sure, but we will not have time to consider them except in passing references. First, let us quickly end week 5 — our rapid tour through the doubters and troublers of chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6 — with a glance at two neo-formalists: Richard Wilbur and X. J. Kennedy.

watch video on Wilbur's "The Death of a Toad"18:39

watch further discussion of Wilbur's "The Death of a Toad"5:33

watch video on Kennedy’s “Nude Descending a Staircase”18:42

watch further discussion on Kennedy's "Nude Descending a Staircase"10:36

与讲师见面

Al Filreis
Kelly Professor, Dir. Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, Faculty Dir. Kelly Writers House

Let's go to Ina from the Netherlands, and she's going to ask us about,

I think she's going to ask about XJ Kennedy's Nude Descending a Staircase.

>> Can I interrupt her one second?

Anthony Risser is the [INAUDIBLE] [CROSSTALK].

>> Anthony, of course.

Anthony, hello, Anthony.

Here we go.

>> Hello.

This is Ina, [INAUDIBLE] from the Netherlands.

I have a question about the poem, Nude Descending a Staircase.

I was wondering if Duchamps, Duchamp.

His painting wasn't already a satire and so

this poem would be a satire on a satire.

And, therefore, perhaps not understood very well,

as it might be a bit too much to ask for a reader to understand

why he was using this form and not a more free form.

And I was also wondering if the perspective of the poem

from the landing upstairs in the poem instead of downstairs

because the speaker is looking through the bannister and

when you are downstairs, and you are in front of the staircase,

you don't see through the bannister.

You see, as we've seen, coming down.

My English is not very well but I hope I made it clear what I was wondering about.

And I also want to say I'm really enjoying the course, it is very nice and

very professionally done.

Thank you and bye.

>> That was great.

I'll read the poem and then we can talk about it.

This has probably been more of a cause for

controversy in ModPo over the years than I expected when I put it in there.

Partly because it's a response to Duchamp and it's, and we, in our video,

we go after it as a satire that's like a pro neoformalist satire.

And people take exception to that.

And maybe we can rehearse that argument here.

So I'll just read the Kennedy.

Nude Descending a Staircase is obviously coming after Duchamp's painting.

Toe after toe, a snowing flesh, a gold of lemon root and rind.

She sifts in sunlight down the stairs with nothing on, nor on her mind.

We spy beneath the bannister a constant thresh of thigh on thigh,

her lips imprint the swinging air that parts to let her parts go by.

One woman waterfall she wears her slow decent like a long cape and

pausing on the final stare collects her motions into shape.

Anna Strong is making up a mad face and so

what I want to do is go to Anna first and you're going to stir it up I'm sure.

And then we'll go to Molly and Erica for a follow-up response.

Okay, Anna.

Why are you so angry at X.J. Kennedy?

>> Because [LAUGH] I guess the thing that has always

really deeply bugged me about this poem is that,

what did Duchamp painting does is actually a radical

un-objectification of the female nude form,

that almost every painting pre-Duchamp was a highly objectified,

very male gaze-y version of a female artistic nude.

And what Duchamp actually does by doing this radically fractured,

cubist version of that female nude descending the staircase

is he actually takes away the sexual male gaze quality of it, and instead makes it

this incredible painting about motion and movement and dynamic form.

The Kennedy poem actually just undoes all of that categorically and

remakes the radical ground breaking,

paradigm shifting painting into an incredibly traditional

objectified version of the Nude Descending a Staircase.

>> And it could have been a poem, it would simply new formalist poem about

a painter's, an artist's rendering of a woman coming down the stairs.

But didn't have the title of the previous work, it would be hard to argue,

or a little harder to argue that it's a satire but because it uses the same,

it's clearly a counter argument of some kind.

Lily?

Let's go to Molly and Erica and then Lily, you can add something.

Molly, your thoughts on this?

Are you as up in arms as Anna Strong?

>> I'm not.

My reading of the poem is that, actually Kennedy is saying

Duchamp is not exempt from this male gaze issue, and

that he sees Duchamp's attempts to fracture this traditional view,

this traditional objectification, may be ineffective,

just because he's so explicit about the lips and the parts.

And I guess, I can't bring myself to think that he's not being ironic.

XJ Kennedy is.

>> Yeah, right, so

we spy beneath the banister a constant thrush of thigh on thigh.

That, what I would consider to be awful looking,

I'm adding the editorial awful there.

You're saying he's ironizing, that he is not that speaker,

he's not in favor of such spying, he's satirizing it.

That's what you're saying?

>> That's my reading, yeah.

>> Okay, Erica what do you do with this thing?

>> [COUGH] I think I might be on Anna's team.

The thing that I think a lot.

>> You can't see it but Anna is celebrating that you're on her team

because she likes you and wants you to be on her team.

>> I agree.

The painting was huge and hugely important and

what Duchamp accomplished in the painting was something that was pretty radical

and I feel like, the thing that gets me about the poem

is how rhythmically

contained it is, like how dependent it is on the rhyme scheme and the meter.

And it just seems like the form of the poem, in a lot of ways,

devalues any possible satire to make.

>> Lilly?

>> I think for me, I like and understand Molly's reading,

but I think for me, the part where he says nothing on not on her mind.

>> He's insulting her?

>> Yeah, but it just puts me a little more an honest camp that even if

he was saying Duchamp wasn't as radical as people think he was,

he didn't really do his critique with his poem because he's still

only talking about her in an objectified way.

Whereas, what I think is radical about Duchamp's work is that he

doesn't let us see enough of the women to, or

even tell us that it is a women, to let us make those kinds of assumptions.

Like, she's dumb or she's,

[INAUDIBLE] thing you would think about a naked woman walking around here.

So Duchamp doesn't,

something like a radical intervention, he doesn't let you do that.

He doesn't let you see this beautiful woman reclining on

a couch eating grapes and think, she must be so rich and she's still beautiful.

But like a traditional nude world whereas the poem makes all of those

assumptions right away and doesn't, yeah, it doesn't do any of the radical.

>> What I had intended in putting this in ModPo was to take the modernist,

earnest, and sincerity which you get in the Duchamp.

Duchamp is a gag guy.

He makes a lot of jokes but

in that piece, I think he is being very serious about the innovation.

And Kennedy later in this Augustan period,

this period of satire, the 50s, where there's a rolling back of modernism,

deliberate rolling back of modernism, is making a wise crack here.

Saying that because she wears nothing, she's got nothing on,

she's nude, nude descending a staircase.

Chris can you bring me up in the room just a little?

Nude descending a stair case, she's got nothing on and

then he goes ahead and says, nothing on her mind, ha ha ha, because she's naked,

she must be a bimbo, she must be stupid.

So this doesn't really respect the tradition of women in portraiture.

But, the participation of women who are the object of artists' renderings,

just leaving that aside.

But, it also just makes a joke.

I don't think it's like, I think it's, it is a satire.

It's a satire of modernism's attempt to break down the subject object dominance.

>> It's just saying like let her be a hot lady.

She's a hot lady.

>> She's beautiful and

Ina from the Netherlands said she's challenging our idea that,

the subject position of Kennedy here is looking up, right?

Looking up.

And she's wondering well maybe you could, she thought about it, Ina did.

Maybe you can see her from the banister.

I mean, I don't really ultimately care.

I think Ina's probably got a reasonable case there.

But, there's a constant thresh of thigh on thigh beneath banisters,

so it strikes me as a looking up, which is a very.

When someone's coming down the stairs and you're below,

you would think that higher has dominance over lower, but actually lower because

it's looking up as a kind of dominance, and the poem thinks that's hilarious.

探索我们的目录

免费加入并获得个性化推荐、更新和优惠。

Coursera 致力于普及全世界最好的教育，它与全球一流大学和机构合作提供在线课程。

© 2018 Coursera Inc. 保留所有权利。

通过 App Store 下载

通过 Google Play 获取