Topic: Birmingham to Belfast: Reading American and Irish Civil Rights Poetry
| Time | Days | Location | Instructor | GER | Credit | OPUS Class Number | Syllabus (Tentative) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
2:30pm-3:45pm | TuTh | Callaway Center N204 | Hildreth, Amy. | FWRT. | 4 | 4217 | TBA. |
"Those corpses of young men, Those martyrs that hang from the gibbets... those hearts pierced by the gray lead, Cold and motionless as they seem... live elsewhere with unslaughter'd vitality.
They live in other young men, O kings, They live in brothers, again ready to defy you"
Walt Whitman
Content: By tracing the history of the American Civil Rights movement through poetic discourse, this class will be able to take a voyage across the Atlantic to see how writers in Ulster Unionist and Nationalist communities in Northern Ireland respond to and expand on work done in the United States. In the process, we will interrogate how political movements translate across international borders and the role of literature in social documentary. Possible American poets include Walt Whitman, Yusef Komunyakaa, Robert Hayden, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Natasha Trethewey. Sinéad Morrissey, Seamus Heaney, Cierán Carson, Derek Mahon, and Michael Longley are likely to be our writers from Northern Ireland. Our perspective on the poets will be supplemented by occasional film screenings.
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