Gregory Dowling, Università Ca' Foscari di Venezia

Description
In this course we will study the different ways that British and American poets have reacted to the great spectacle of Venice over the last two centuries. We will begin with Canto IV from Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, in which the poet, drawing on the tradition of the anti-myth of the city, established for future generations the "romantic" view of the city. However, this will be contrasted with his other great Venetian poem, "Beppo", in which he presents a lighter but far more complex picture of a living city, rather than a stately mausoleum. This double view of the city will act as a stimulus for our appraisal of contemporary poems by Shelley and works by poets of the Victorian age, such as Browning, Clough, Melville and Longfellow. We will examine the re-interpretation of the myth of Venice by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot's darker vision of the city in "Burbank with a Baedeker". Other 20th-century poets considered will be James Merrill and William Logan. The course will conclude with a study of Anthony Hecht's narrative poem, "Venetian Vespers", in which the poet brilliantly exploits the tradition of the double-vision of the city, making it serve as an instrument for the exploration of the lacerated consciousness of the poem's protagonist.

The aim of the course will be to explore how major poets, prevalently from northern Protestant backgrounds, have reacted to the stimulus not only of Catholic Italy but of a city that has long been associated with commercial intrigue, sexual laxity and ambiguous morality. Students will be encouraged to observe how these writers have in some cases accepted traditional views of the city, but used them for their own specific purposes, or in other cases have overturned the conventions, helping to complicate our view of Venice and the Venetians. The students will be able to see how some of these writers react directly or indirectly to the works of their predecessors, in some cases showing all the classic symptoms of the "anxiety of influence". In addition, the course will stimulate the students to think beyond the simplified categories of standard literary histories, inviting them to question what we mean by "Romanticism", "Victorianism" or "Modernism".

Required Reading:
Lord Byron: from "Canto IU" of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Beppo;
Percy Bysshe Shelley: from "Julian and Maddalo" and "Lines Written in the Euganean Hills";
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: "Venice";
Robert Browning: "In a Gondola", "A Toccata of Galuppi's", from Fifine at the Fair;
Herman Melville: "Venice", "In a Bye-Canal";
Arthur Hugh Clough: from Dipsychus;
Ezra Pound: selected Cantos;
T.S. Eliot: "Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar";
James Merrill: from The Book of Ephraim;
Anthony Hecht: "Venetian Vespers"
William Logan: from Macbeth in Venice.

Criticism:
A detailed critical bibliography will be provided at the beginning of the course. A key text that students can start reading is Tony Tanner, Venice Desired (Oxford: Blackwells 1992).

Evaluation:
One short analytical paper; final exam.
Gregory Dowling teaches in the Department of American Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, His publications include Someone’s Road Home: Questions of Home and Exile in American Narrative Poetry (2003), Giovane Poesia Inglese (1996), an anthology of British poetry, A Study of the English Verb (1994). He has also published four thrillers set in Italy and England and has translated widely from Italian, including the novels of Fruttero and Lucentini. His recent research has been in three main areas: environmental literature (from Thoreau to Wendell Berry), narrative poetry and the image of Italy in American and British poetry. He is one of the main contributors to the Time Out guide to Venice.