THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL SELF: 19th CENTURY POETS AND OTHERS

I propose to bring some of the great Self proponents among 20th century poets (Yeats, T. S. Eliot) into the conversation by way of a course pack and would like, in addition, to add to the mix one or possibly two sessions on Darwin as a Self Maker, focussing on his writings as adjunct to his life. Who besides Emily Dickinson represents women asserting and defining selfdom as a poet? In prose, surely we would need to pay some attention to Virginia Woolf as well as Mary Ann Evans, Austen and the Brontë sisters.

In this course students will have a chance to present for a session either a poet OR another literary artist (that is how I am considering both Freud and Darwin in this context) such as Charles Dickens or Harriet Beecher Stowe who sit squarely in the 19th century.

Some attention will be given to the idea of the Self as over against the “Soul” and the development away from religious dogma that goes along with the the rise of the “illusion of the individual Self.” Insofar as religion dictated marriage, family, and social norms as the expression of the fullness of individual character, how do figures like Proust, Tchaikovsky, Whitman, and Oscar Wilde who were not heterosexually given, emerge as proponents of individual selfhood as well as revolutionaries against received “norms”?

The idea of the individual and its partner, individual self expression, so fertile in the humanistic side of things, has also broadened our notion of the science of human life, just as Darwin’s science and its writing is so deeply an expression of his individual consciousness and its pursuit of an understanding of nature.

           Leader: Liz Socolow is an award-winning poet and writer.

          Tuesday: 10.00 a.m. to noon, 8 weeks beginning September 28.