English 240. Gender, Genre and Poetry
Poets are male. Muses are female. But what happens when the conventions get reversed? This course introduces you to the study of poetry by focusing on how gender gets associated with types of poetry and what individual poets do to subvert or refuse those associations. We will also ask what gender has to do with categories such as race, class and sexuality in the writing of poetry. You will read poems from different periods and cultures with an emphasis on the relationship between works that have come to exemplify a particular genre, such as Homer’s epic poem The Illiad or sonnets by Shakespeare and later works that revise those models.