Statement From The Director

A statement from Jacqueline T. Miller, Director of 219:

219, the first English literature course required for majors, is a course with multiple goals. It should, first and foremost, introduce to students the techniques of close reading, and since the material for this course is primarily lyric poetry, it should introduce to them as well certain key critical terms and concepts (e.g., voice, versification, prosody, genre, convention, figures and tropes, the relationship between language and form, form and content). It should, as well, introduce students to the fundamental concepts and techniques of literary interpretation, to the range of questions that can be asked about literary texts (and the assumptions behind those questions and how they are answered, and how different texts may produce different questions and different answers). In doing so, it should help them develop an awareness of the multiplicity of possible interpretations, and encourage them to become self-conscious about the interpretive processes and assumptions (the Principles of Literary Study) they bring to bear on a text as readers-to become critically responsive, in short, to how texts and readers participate in the production of meaning.

The one or two longer concentrated units that focus on a unified group of poems (from a particular tradition, time, genre, or author) or a long narrative poem or poetic drama enable 219 to place poems in a variety of larger contexts (e.g., of a career, a genre, a culture) and to discuss poems in dialogue with each other and with other (sometimes "non-literary") contexts. In the case of the latter choice (narrative poem or poetic drama, or even an organized series of lyrics, as in the sonnet sequence), this also allows us to turn students, albeit slightly, in the direction of their next introductory course, 220.

In addition to being an introduction to close reading, poetry, and interpretation, 219 is also a writing course. Students should come out of 219 knowing how to write the kind of paper that will be expected from them in other English literature courses. Those with experience teaching Expository Writing should exploit the strategies used in the writing classroom and import them into 219; students are already familiar with them, and this will provide continuity between their writing and literature classes. Also don't hesitate to emphasize the connection between writing and interpretation, writing itself as part of the process of interpretation (the relationship between reading and "a reading").

Encourage students to attend poetry readings at Rutgers-announce them in class (some classes attend as a group). It is useful for students to experience poetry when it gets off the page, so to speak.

A final word: there's a myth that undergraduates either dislike or fear poetry. While this is the case for some, don't make it your general assumption when you enter the 219 classroom. Many students (these are mostly 18-21 year olds) write poetry on their own; some write song lyrics. Some just think that poetry is "hard." I sometimes have students discuss Marianne Moore's "Poetry" (the three line version-I can write it on the board) during the first class meeting of 219: "I, too, dislike it. / Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in / it, after all, a place for the genuine." There's much to talk about-formal properties, nuances of meaning and tone, etc.-and though I often am eager to get to the point about "the genuine," students frequently want only to debate fiercely about that assumption recorded in the first line. I let them.