Lootens, Tricia
R 3 :55 PM
Park Hall 0061
Histories, Poetics, "Dramatic Monologues"
In most literature classrooms, no poetic form says “Victorian” like the dramatic monologue. In this graduate seminar, we will ask how and why that came to be: a project that will take form, for us, as a study of contingent histories rather than inevitabilities. We will revisit “classic” dramatic monologues, then, beginning with the likes of Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess’ and Alfred Tennyson’s “Ulysses”; and we’ll explore both these poems’ critical rise and their continued, albeit radically altered, definitional status within a pedagogical canon now expanded to include, say, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” and Augusta Webster’s “Xanthippe.” Yet we’ll do so in response to these questions: How do we know what we’re talking about when we invoke “the dramatic monologue”? What might Victorian poetry—not to mention Victorian poetry teaching— not to mention these particular Victorian poems-- look like, if we read the character, and indeed, the very existence, of this form as radically open to debate? At base, then, we will be taking the dramatic monologue as our starting point for an experiment in historical poetics: a transformative exploration of how nineteenth-century verse culture, literary pedagogy, and critical histories intersect.