1. Sometimes, by taking up the problems of the Other, it is possible to find oneself. (..). That is very much the image of the rhizome, prompting the knowledge that identity is no longer completely within the root but also in Relation. Because the thought of errantry is also the thought of what is relative, the thing relayed as well as the thing related. The thought of errantry is a poetics…The tale of errantry is the tale of Relation  (Edouard Glissan, Poetics of Relation , trans. Betsy Wing, 1997 [1990],   18) Both Sylvia Plath's "The Elm" and Adrienne Rich's "Shattered Head" are complicated poems. They seem to aim at reaching "an-other's language", or speaking "through the other", but they also preclude the possibility of easy/direct relations. In what ways does the use of language in these poems thwart identitary representation? What effort do they place on the reader? 2.   How can Steve Mentz's theoretical approach to the O...

  Choose one (or more, if you really feel like it :))  1. Provide a literary text analysis (slow reading / close reading) of Dickinson's poem "Before I got my eye put out". 2. Compare the relations of writing (forms), nature, and possibly womanhood, in Dickinson's "The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants" and Sylvia Plath's "Mushrooms". 3. Can you relate, either critically or creatively, any of the poems you read with Val Plumwood's discussion of "ecofeminsms"? (image by former student Laura Strazzabosco for Sylvia Plath's poem, "Mushrooms")