[NOISE] Greetings, I'm Cary Nelson, from the English Department of the University of Illinois, at Urbana-Champaign and I'm here to introduce you to two online video courses that I have organized, and that the staff on campus here has produced. The first course is Modern American Poetry. And the second is Contemporary American Poetry. The rough dividing line between the 2 is 1950. The first course begins with the 2 most innovative poets of the 19th century, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, and then switches to the very end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. The second half of the course will continue up to the present day. Modern American Poetry is recognized collectively throughout the world as one of the most remarkable and influential bodies of literary work in human history. Its remarkable range of literary styles, subject matter, and formal variety continues to surprise and inspire readers and writers everywhere. But surprisingly no comprehensive and up to date series of video lectures about the literary movements that shaped and energized this body of work has produced to date. That's what we have tried to do. Because the poetry itself is so diverse and the interpretations of it so many, we wanted the course to reflect and embody that diversity. So instead of delivering a standard, single lecturer course, we invited a series of faculty members to record lectures in their areas of greatest interest and expertise. The two courses, that is 32 lectures, include 20 different and very accomplished instructors and readers from 16 different institutions. First of all the U of I then Oregon, Penn State, Kansas, Maryland, Southern Illinois, Florida, Stanford in southern California, Northern Illinois, Smith, Western Carolina, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Ohio Wesleyan. It's quite a list. Our aim has been to produce both the highest quality intellectual and visual caliber work and I think we've succeeded. The lectures are illustrated with photos and videos that bring to life some of the historical events and context of the poems refer to. And we will include manuscripts, images of poets, book clubbers, a lot of different illustrations that will help give some visual life to the poems that they'll be needing. And of course, to the lectures themselves. Sometimes we do something additional, visually, which is unusual. We produce analogs to the poems themselves, not always, but there are quite a number of them throughout the course that sort of create a visual version of the poem itself. This course, of course, required a lot more, then just the faculty members who give the lectures. It's also required a rather large number of staff here at the University of Illinois to produce it. So in addition to the lecturers themselves, it of course employees a production staff of 20. All this year in the middle of Illinois, videographers, film editors, researchers, copy right specialists, education specialists, and production coordinators, I've probably forgotten some of the categories. But it's a whole team of people that's been working on this. Sometimes there are four monitors with people editing four different lectures at the same time. A little bit about how the course will work, people who take the courses will have the opportunity to participate in on-line discussion groups and they'll have the opportunity to share essays and videos with one another. So it's also a very participatory course and not just in terms of words, but like the lectures themselves in terms of images. We expect a multi country community to participate in this. And look forward to have a conversations with people from through out the world who are interested in the subject. You're going to here detailed analysis of individual poems by people from T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost, to Marianne Moore and H.D. along with a lot of more recent poets. And you're going to hear lectures about groups, and movements from the Harlem Renaissance to Asian American poets to Chicano American poets. Whole series of presentations that give you a chance to see both the work that individual writers did and also so the collective communities that reinforced one another and sometimes collaborated with one another. And there are going to be, I think, some quite dramatic readings of the poems, that is, performances of the poems that accompany the lectures. So they're up to four lectures a week, and we encourage you to watch all of them. That's the only way to get perhaps the full value that the courses offer. And there will be a total of 32 lectures, once both halves of the course are available. So welcome to the course. And let us know your reactions as the course progresses. Thank you very much. [MUSIC]. [SOUND]
