Erin

Yanota

Courses Taught

• Composition
• Introduction to Literature
• Multiethnic Literatures
• Modern & Contemporary Poetry
• Survey of US Literature II
• 20^th c. Queer Literature: Queer Spiritualities at the End of the World (listed as Studies in American Literature)

Research & Teaching Interests 

My research interests include twentieth-century (modernist) Anglophone poetry and poetics, religion and spirituality in literature (with a focus on Western occultism and esotericism), as well as “middlebrow” and classical reception studies. My teaching emphasizes the collaborative dimensions of learning and covers a range of genres and historical periods; student autonomy is a major priority in my classroom, and I take seriously the role of students as co-creators of knowledge. 

My current book project (tentatively titled: Cosmos and Politics in the Modern Epic) is driven by the question: what could a modern apocalyptic epic offer to twenty-first century readers, when many today are consumed by a renewed sense of the coming “end times”? Reading primarily the late, long, and mystical poems of W.B. Yeats, H.D., Jean Toomer, and Hart Crane, this project situates the early twentieth-century popularity of Western occultism in relation to the proliferation of Anglophone epic poetry during the same period; in doing so, it shows how these poets seek to recuperate apocalyptic omens–in war, the rise of fascism, nuclear armament, racial terror–as part of a larger divine order moving the universe through cycles of destruction and creation. Cosmos and Politics aims to complicate widely held assumptions within the field of Anglophone modernism that poets’ engagement with Western occultism necessarily signals a reactionary ideology. As the recent resurgence of New Religious Movements shows, however, the mystical impulse–both within and without the realm of literature, traditionally defined–has been, and continues to be, ideologically ambiguous. 

Selected Recent Publications

Review of Situating Poetry: Covenant and Genre in American Modernism by Joshua Logan Wall, The Modernist Review, no. 52, 2024

“Cultural Nationalism in Women’s Lyrical Ballads of the Harlem Renaissance,” Modernism/modernity, vol. 31, no. 1, 2024, pp. 147-67

“E.E. Cummings’s Shakespeare and the Modernist Middlebrow Sonnet,” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 47, no. 1, 2023, pp. 77-97