COMPLIT 269: Modernist Poetry and the Crisis of Knowledge

Course Description

Modernist poetry was born in a period of acute epistemic crisis. The era of modernism (roughly 1880-1945) saw the overturning of major scientific paradigms, the development of new methods of observation and experiment, the flourishing of new forms of spirituality and mysticism, and philosophical investigations into perception and epistemology, from phenomenology to logical positivism. This seminar will examine how modernist poets navigated this problematic terrain. We will ask: how do poems make sense of their own epistemic status? What kinds of knowledge does poetry register or produce? How did modernist poetry engage with or contribute to philosophical debates about skepticism, empiricism, or perspectivism? How did poetic form adapt under pressure from documentary technologies and the epistemic regime of scientific objectivity? Readings will include texts by Charles Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Lyn Hejinian as well as William James, Edmund Husserl, Henri Bergson, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.