Skip to main content

September 26, 2015 – Online registration closed 9/23. Please call 919-962-1544 to register for this program.

A Distinguished Scholar Seminar featuring George Lensing, Mann Family Distinguished Professor of English

The publication of Robert Frost’s second volume, North of Boston (1914), T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), and Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” (1915) marked the triumph of Modernism in English-language poetry. Modernism radically changed the nature of the arts throughout the English-speaking world, but in poetry, one might ask what was so fundamentally different? This “active learning” seminar featuring George Lensing will introduce participants to Modernism as a movement before delving deeply into Modernist poetry. We will become familiar with key works by Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, and Seamus Heaney, three 20th century poets whose work responded to, resisted, assimilated, and redefined the movement and poetry at large in the contemporary world. This seminar’s discussion-based format will allow participants to share with and learn from one of Carolina’s most distinguished scholars of literature.

Topics

Modernism: Its Audience, Influences, and Legacy
Elizabeth Bishop: The First Generation following Modernism
John Ashbery: The Epitome of Post-Modernism?
Seamus Heaney: A Poet for his Time

Speaker

George Lensing is the Mann Family Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the author of two books on Wallace Stevens, Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth and Wallace Stevens and the Seasons as well as numerous articles on Modern poets and writers. Dr. Lensing has received a Tanner Distinguished Teaching Award, the John Sanders Award for Teaching and Service, a Bowman and Gordon Gray Professorship for Distinguished Teaching, the Thomas Jefferson Award, and the inaugural William F. Little Distinguished Service Award.

Time & Cost

9:15 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Saturday, September 26, 2015. The tuition is $125 ($110 by September 3). Tuition for teachers is $62.50 ($55 by September 3). Teachers can also receive a $75 stipend after attending (click here for more information) and 10 contact hours for 1 unit of renewal credit. The optional lunch is $15.00.

For information about lodging click here.

Co-Sponsored by the General Alumni Association.

For information about GAA discounts and other scholarships available to Humanities Program participants, click here.

Register for this seminar.