Stephen Tapscott

Stephen Tapscott
Professor

14N-416
tapscott@mit.edu
617-253-4148


Faculty Research
Contemporary Art | Contemporary Literature | Gender and Sexuality | Irish Literature | Latin American Literature | Literature and the Visual Arts | Modern Drama and Performance | Modernism | Nineteenth-Century American Literature | Poetry and Poetics | Psychoanalysis | Translation | Twentieth-Century American Literature | Visual Culture and Iconography

Stephen Tapscott is a poet whose fields of interest include poetry as a literary genre, creative writing (poetry, experimental prose), and translation. His academic interests include North American writing [especially Walt Whitman, Anglo-American Modernists, writers since WWII], Latin American poetry, world poetries in Russian, German, and Polish; autobiography; gender studies and queer studies; photography and other visual arts.

He’s published five books of poems and a book of criticism (on Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams). In recent years he’s edited an anthology of Latin American Poetry, and translated books by Pablo Neruda (One Hundred Love Sonnets), Jan Twardowski (God Asks for Love), Wislawa Szymborska (The End and the Beginning), Gabriela Mistral (Selected Prose and Prose Poems), Attila Boa, and Georg Trakl (German).

Poetry and poetics; 20th-century American literature and culture; Modernism; Theory and practice of translation; 20th-century Central European and Latin American poetry; creative writing

Selected Publications

Another Body [poems] Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1989
http://www.amazon.com/Another-Body-Poetry-No-Xxvii/dp/0914946757/

From the Book of Changes [poems] Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2002
http://www.amazon.com/Book-Changes-Stephen-Tapscott/dp/0887483690/

Pablo Neruda, Cien sonetos de amor / 100 Love Sonnets [translation] University of Texas Press, 1996
http://www.amazon.com/100-Love-Sonnets-sonetos-American/dp/0292760280/

Selected Prose and Prose Poems of Gabriela Mistral [edition/translation] University of Texas Press, 2004
http://www.amazon.com/Selected-American-Literature-Translation-Anderson/dp/0292752660/

20th Century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology
University of Texas Press, 1996
http://www.amazon.com/Twentieth-Century-Latin-American-Poetry-Anthology/dp/0292781407/

…and recent essays on the short poems of A. R. Ammons; T.S. Eliot’s use of Dante; Pablo Neruda and the diaries of Christopher Columbus; and the stop-action photographs of Eadweard Muybridge.

Subjects taught the current academic year:

21L.004 Reading Poetry (Fall 2022)

21L.310 Bestsellers: American Icons (Fall 2022)

21L.310 Bestsellers: Detective Fiction (Spring 2023)

21L.487 Modern Poetry (Spring 2023)

 

Subjects taught in recent years:

21L.004 Reading Poetry (Fall 2022)

21L.310 Bestsellers: American Icons (Fall 2022)

21L.310 Bestsellers: Detective Fiction (Spring 2023)

21L.487 Modern Poetry (Spring 2023)

21L.704 Studies in Poetry: Walt Whitman Goes Global (Fall 2021)