Engish 265b J. Braddock
MW 2:30-4 HU III

The Documentary Poet and Late Modernism

In 1926, the British film producer and critic John Grierson coined the term "documentary," which he identified as the "creative treatment of actuality." In this class we will study the aesthetic and political interests of late modernist writers, who, in emulation of contemporary filmmakers, photographers, and music anthropologists, adopted a documentary posture. Our readings will be centered on three American poets who attempted to obscure or erase their own authorial presence in the name of foregrounding the cultural and political situation of others: Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, and Charles Reznikoff. Yet we will also attempt to put their documentary approach into practice by exploring the broader cultural field in which they worked. We will evaluate, for instance, the ways in which the documentary technologies of film and sound recording introduced challenges and opportunities for American poets working in the decades after literary high modernism's critical and cultural watershed year of 1922. We will also read these writers in the context of an even broader literary field, gauging the role of this documentary style in the transformation of American literary audiences the Great Depression and the early 1950s. As a way of provoking a final round of questions, we will conclude the semester by looking back at arguably the first example of self-conscious "documentary writing" in English (and a book to which Hughes's Fine Clothes to the Jew was often compared) — Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads. Throughout the semester, we will keep an eye to the degree to which these works express and acknowledge their own "creativity," as they speak toward the "actuality" of an extra-literary world.
Requirements:
Two formal papers, oral presentation, and a documentary project constructed either individually or collectively.
Regular attendance and participation will be expected.