In this seminar, we will explore the poetry and art of visionary experiences from many cultures.
From contemporary American poetry to the sages of Vedic India, from Sufi mystics to medieval Christian visionaries, from the great Romantic and Metaphysical poets of Europe to the ancient Taoist masters of China: poetry has been used through the ages to convey personal visionary experiences that are hard to express in any other way.
Explore these poetic works along with visual art from their cultures.
Visit the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art and the Knight Library Special Collections
to view and handle artifacts related to poetry and related spiritual traditions.
Please visit our course webpage for more details about the class! http://blogs.uoregon.edu/engl199brinkley/
Course Details:
- TR 12-1:20pm
- CRN 36850
- 3 Credits
- Location: 101 VOL
As a First Year Programs instructor since 2005, I have been teaching and making improvements to some version of a First Year Seminar for a number of years first through the Art History department (ARH 199: Buddhism Through Art) and more recently through English (ENGL 199: Visionary Poetry East and West).
My academic background is in comparative religion and the study of Buddhist literature in Sanskrit and Tibetan. I have found that students engage with these seminars best when we examine many different types of cultural materials, and when we try out a range of academic approaches.
The most effective hands-on techniques I have found for teaching First Year Seminars come from my career as a museum educator. As Associate Director of Education and Interpretation at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan, I developed a group-discussion-based education program for the museum, working with many age groups.
In the First Year Seminar classroom, I assemble a multidisciplinary curriculum of materials that the students and I will work as a group to explore; I train the students in techniques to moderate group discussions of a work of art or passage of text (experience shows that the level and quality of participation are much better when these discussions are moderated by one of the students’ peers); I supply context and background for the materials in brief lectures, and I assign and assist students through writing assignments that build concretely on these structured conversations.