Sharon Cameron William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English, The Johns Hopkins University
	Sharon Cameron has published six books of literary criticism and one novel, Beautiful Work: A Meditation on Pain. Her most recent critical books are Thinking in Henry James; Choosing Not Choosing: Emily Dickinson’s Fascicles; and Impersonality: Seven Essays. She has been a fellow of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

When Emily Dickinson died she left behind an astonishing group of poems. One way to think of them is in relation to the writing of her contemporary Walt Whitman. For example, one could consider the relation between the public and the private poet; the tropes of body in Whitman’s poetry and the tropes of mind in Dickinson’s; the forms through which a reader is engaged by Whitman and ignored by Dickinson. With such general comparisons as background, this seminar will bear down on certain topics that emerge from closely scrutinizing Dickinson’s poems.

The seminar will consider the formal, conceptual, and philosophical innovations in Dickinson’s writing. It will examine the problem of naming in Dickinson’s poetry—a difficulty that arises locally in poems of definition, which may seem like simple riddles in that they specify an elusive “it” without an antecedent. But such evasiveness radiates outward to include Dickinson’s radical reinvention of the poetic subject and even her reimagining of subjectivity—something that cannot be named or directly specified because it is “inner than the bone.” Participants will explore the violence manifested in the disruptions in prosody and syntax of certain poems. They will investigate the scenelessness through which Dickinson represents what she calls “reportless places.” In addition, the seminar will focus on the temporality of Dickinson’s poems. Finally, it will consider a selection from Dickinson’s fascicles (the manuscript notebooks in which Dickinson collected her poems into sequences) to examine narrative and variant principles of order.

“To imagine a language,” Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “means to imagine a form of life.” In the topics specified above, this seminar will press on the question: what are the “forms of life” Dickinson’s language asks us to imagine? Discussions will be guided by the interests of the seminar members, who will help determine how our explorations unfold.