Instructor: V. Di Palma and T. Smoliarova
This graduate seminar explores the complex and persistent interrelationship between poetry and architecture within European culture from Antiquity to Modern times. How do poems and buildings reflect different cultures, epochs, and styles? When and why do poets turn to architectural metaphors, similes, or descriptions? What do architectural analogies do for literature and literary theories, and what do poetic analogies bring to architecture and its theory? Do we “read” buildings? Can buildings “speak”? Why might one want a building not merely to conform to functional requirements but also to move the soul?
This seminar investigates and interrogates points of intersection between poetic and architectural traditions by focusing on a particular set of literary concepts or strategies, including genre, decorum, rhetoric, ornament, grammar, and style, and architectural “places” such as the villa, garden, ruin or fragment, city, and utopia. Readings will range from ancient to contemporary, and will be drawn from different ancient and modern European traditions–Greek, Roman, English, French, Russian, and German. By examining poems from an architectural point of view, and buildings from a poetic point of view, the seminar hopes to shed new and perhaps unexpected light on the long association between poetry and architecture within European culture.
