Poetry and Other Public Writing: or, Literary Genre Theory Today

Charles LaPorte (in partnership with Anis Bawarshi) will re-design his course on literary genre theory in an attempt to better acknowledge and reflect the public-facing nature of much literature and literary scholarship. In literary studies, scholars sometimes fail to consider the public instances of their pet subjects, or they emphasize private experience à la John Stuart Mill’s famous description of poetry as emotion “confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude.” (Ideas like this one don’t help us much with poems like Amanda Gorman’s 2021 contribution to President Biden’s inauguration ceremony: “The Hill We Climb.”) Then, too, much of today’s best literary criticism is found not in scholarly journals but in high-end journalism, both in paper and online. The liveliest parts of the literary world may often be found beyond the walls of the academy.