Wallace Stevens: Theōria and Technic

With this course you will be able to

• Consider written poetry an object which represents but does not wholly define “poetry itself”;
• Consider poetry in relation to philosophy, science, and technology;
• Evaluate poems as discrete objects and equally parts of a thinking apparatus;
• Consider theōria in distinction to philosophical or critical positions regarding poetry;
• Demonstrate an understanding of Stevens’s theōria;
• Ponder an ethics of the imagination in terms of artificial general intelligence.

Students who register for this course get:

• 9 video-taped lectures, with a total running time of more than 7 hours and 30 minutes;
• Comprehensive lecture notes;
• An indicative reading list;
• A set of optional tasks to check your learning;
• Course diploma (beta version).

• Desire to learn: participants should be familiar with basic philosophical concepts, art, and have a general understanding of artificial intelligence.

• This course is designed for graduate and post graduate level work. Advanced undergraduates are equally welcome;
• Literature, Philosophy, STEM.

Wallace Stevens never aspired to be a philosopher however he contributes several concepts to “the theory of poetry” through his prose and verse. Thus Stevens develops a theory from, within, and for “poetry itself” which he differentiates from philosophy over a span of twenty years. This session introduces a general concept for understanding Stevens’s oeuvre, his “poetry of thought,” and what we will call “contra criticism.”

In this lesson we apply our general concepts to some of Stevens’s early poems. This helps us understand how concepts are developed from Stevens’s work. Among the poems discussed are “Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb” and “Of the Surface of Things.”

While Wallace Stevens was aware of the importance of his lecture “The Irrational Element in Poetry” he decided not to publish it with other prose found in The Necessary Angel in 1951. However, “The Irrational Element in Poetry” lays the foundation for his entire prose theory. This lesson discusses sections I—IV of the lecture.

This lesson discusses Stevens’s theōria and its basic operation, the relationship between theōria and technic, as well as Stevens’s critics. We shall discuss Helen Vendler and “patriotic education,” alla Donald Trump, Stevens as a transcontinental thinker of poetry, and his juxtaposition of poets of despair with poets of fulfilment.

This lessons discusses Stevens’s concept of the “romantic,” and continue with the Contra Critic. We consider how Stevens draws lessons from William Carlos Williams, and how his framework connects to I. A. Richards’s readings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Other critics discussed in this lesson include Harold Bloom and Simon Critchley.

Here we delve deeper into the difference between philosophy and poetry in terms of its shared approach to the concept of the absolute. We examine Samuel Coleridge’s notion of “fancy” and its proximity to Stevens’s theōria.

This lessons continues our reading of Stevens’s lecture “The Irrational Element.” From a review of sections I—IV we move to discuss sections V—VI. Central to our discussion is the proposition that writing is a type of technology.

This lesson completes the reading of “The Irrational Element in Poetry.” Key to our understanding is how technic appears to be the systematic use of the irrational. What follows is a need to consider an ethics of the imagination in order to resist its reins or, alternatively, to resist its reign.

This final lesson engages “the absolute object” in a close reading of Stevens’s poem XVIII of “The Man With The Blue Guitar.” We investigate how Jean André Wahl had developed a sense of the “absolute object” from Søren Kierkegaard’s “doctrine of how” in The Philosopher’s Way and Philosophies of Existence. We conclude with a discussion of Stevens’s “Poetic Fragments” of 1948 from Adagia, where he explicitly considers “the absolute object.”