A Graduate Seminar Roundtable: Introduction

Abstract

A Graduate Seminar Roundtable: Introduction Douglas Mao IN FALL 2022, I taught a graduate seminar at Johns Hopkins called “1922 and Its Neighbors.” The course aimed to situate the most famous works of English-language modernism’s annus mirabilis—Ulysses, The Waste Land, Jacob’s Room—among other texts published between 1920 and 1924 (some canonical, some scarcely read today). In keeping with its title, the seminar also featured theoretical and historical writing on the question of the neighbor. One of the students in the course was Nora Pehrson, who had just accepted an appointment as new managing editor of this journal. Nora happened to mention to Bart Eeckhout—whose extraordinary helming of The Wallace Stevens Journal we also celebrate, and thank our stars for, here—that Harmonium was one of the texts we would be reading. Bart had the thought that members of the seminar might write up, for this anniversary number, a reflection on their encounter with Harmonium on the eve of its centenary. What would a group of young scholars, some well versed in Stevens but most coming with little prior acquaintance, find most noteworthy? The duo of short essays presented here is the result of that invitation. The seminar discussion, which took place in December 2022, was not structured in advance. It was a conversation, not a curriculum. The first poem the group lingered over was “Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et les Unze Mille Vierges.” This was perhaps fitting given that “Cy Est Pourtraicte” was one of the earliest written of the poems eventually collected in Harmonium, but our seminar started with it out of an interest in the relation between storytelling and image in the volume. The subsequent discussion ranged over many poems (“The Snow Man” closed things out) and over questions of exoticism and epistemology, irony and intimacy, syntax and hypotheticals. What tied all these explorations together was a concern with how, in his first collection, this poet of solitaires attends to otherness. In the wake of the seminar meeting, six students from the course opted to sign on to the journal project. They decided to break into two groups of three, each of which would produce a short essay building up from elements of the seminar discussion. Each group drafted collaboratively, [End Page 228] received comments on its drafts from the other group and from me, and revised in response to those suggestions. One question on the table for our writers was how Harmonium ultimately engages with the idea of the neighbor—the central theme, again, of our larger seminar. Another was how to think about Harmonium a hundred years after its publication. The first of the essays inclines more to the former question, the second more to the latter. The two converge, however, on the crucial topic of Stevens’s address to everyday experience. For Julia Houser, Nora Pehrson, and Griffin Shoglow-Rubenstein, the Stevensian subject moves through a world populated with neighbors—not just people but objects, animals, events—that renew and vivify that world. For Abdul-Karim Mustapha, Jonah Shallit, and Jungmin Yoo, Harmonium not only pitches the plenitude of the ordinary against monumental linear history but also, in a kind of complementary movement, spotlights how time’s passage shapes aesthetic experience in the moment. Together, the essays illuminate some of the very specific ways in which the poems of Harmonium live in our own time, and among us. Which is to say: how they live in the time of their writing, and among the neighbors they spurn and crave. [End Page 229] Douglas Mao Johns Hopkins University Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press