Browsing by Subject "Poetics"

Victorian England was the first empire in history to imagine itself as liberal, believing that its own power could bring law to the darkest and most unruly corners of the world. But despite covering nearly the entire period known as the Pax Britannica, Victoria's long reign did not include a single year without war.

The conceptual knots presented by England's global power forced some of the century's most canonical authors to confront, and attempt to solve, contradictions fundamental to their self-consciously liberal society. Because law was understood by many Victorian theorists as the opposite of violence, it was when metropolitan thinkers came up against the fringes of civilization's ordering power, in the empire, that the violence underwriting peace become most uncomfortably plain. "Out there," said jurist James Fitzjames Stephen, "you see real government." But if what Stephen called the liberal state's quiet but crushing force emerged most explicitly at the peripheries of law's reach, literary forms composed at the center of the imperial network --London-- reveal the problem of liberal violence as absence, as silence: as a problem. These problems became dilemmas of narrative and poetic form that I argue are legible across linked areas of Victorian literary production: from the realist masterpiece (The Mill on the Floss) and the philosophical treatise (A System of Logic) to works of political historicism (On Liberty), sensation fiction (Armadale), and apparently apolitical poetry about flowers (Poems and Ballads). Forms of Empire looks to show how the Victorian state's interrelated forms --literary and political, conceptual and historical-- expose the violence liberal theory could not see.

Forms of Empire builds on and seeks to advance work on the pairing of "liberalism and empire" in the broad area of cultural studies. To do so it works dialectically, placing Victorian liberalism's vision of perpetual peace in the context of the empire's endless war and tracking loose networks of London-based thinkers as they confronted the problem of how violence relates to law. This process exposes live debates, both explicit and implicit, about just what force secured Victorian England's so-called Age of Equipoise. What emerges is a particularly literary analysis of how linked coteries of Victorian writers, through the height and decline of a great world power, attempted to make sense of the uneasy links they saw (and did not see) between liberalism and empire, the forms of law and the disorder of violence --the vexed connection, that is, between peace and war.

The project's focus on literary structure and political theory is also historical, tracing Victorian global rule from its phase of hegemonic globalization at mid-century (the so-called Age of Equipoise) into its more openly war-torn, post-1870 decline, a structure that corresponds to the project's two halves. While reframing existing periodizations of empire in Victorian Studies, this genealogical procedure also particularizes what is often studied as a homogenous "imperial discourse." Forms of Empire is necessarily interdisciplinary, since it charts the conceptual cross-pollination among semi-autonomous fields of Victorian knowledge: political theory, anthropology, economics, philosophy, and literature, among others. But it is also focused on method, showing that theoretical debates among Victorians themselves --about the dilemmas of their hegemony-- can illuminate controversies about liberalism, violence, and method in a newer moment of empire, ours.

This study locates a medieval poetics of lineation in the manuscript and early print reception of fifteenth-century Middle English penitential poems. I investigate three exemplary poems of penitential devotion alongside modern theories of the poetic line, combining approaches from cultural studies, reception theory, and material poetics to show how the poetic line shaped medieval readers’ perception of reality and orientation within social networks. When played to full effect, the poetic line, I contend, is like light: both particle (complete in itself) and wave (moving toward transfer). In Lines of Relation I argue that the energetic shimmer of the poetic line presented medieval readers with a way to face their own limits as well as their ongoing responsibilities to and for others.

In my introduction chapter, I excavate Middle English discourses of line and relation in the context of penitential practice and the explosive vernacularization of Latin writings in late medieval England. I then draw on my archival research of devotional poems in fifteenth-century manuscripts and early print books to analyze the linear workings of three poems for penitential introspection and ethical sensitization: John Lydgate’s Kalendare (which I discuss in chapter 2), Thomas Brampton’s Penitential Psalm paraphrase (chapter 3), and the anonymous Passion complaint “Wyth scharpe thornes,” (chapter 4). These are rhyming Middle English prayers, psalms, and meditations that were popular enough to appear, collectively, in in approximately thirty surviving late medieval English books. Rather than viewing these texts as mere scripts or instructional aids, we can understand them first and foremost as poems inviting active interpretive engagement on the part of the reader. What unites these texts under the banner of penitential labor, I show, is their use of the poetic line as a form prompting readers to explore, at once, personal limit and limitless social responsibility. As I argue in the Coda, these considerations of line, limit, and conscience continue in poems by present-day writers of color in the United States. Like the poetic forms of penance in the medieval texts I examine, poems by Lucille Clifton and Thomas Sayers Ellis entangle the reader in linear interactions that insist on literary reception as a site for moral awareness and action.

Lines of Relation aims to increase appreciation for the basic scope for conceptual, expressive, and ethical work that medieval poetic forms made available to their audiences—and as a result to enrich and refine responses to the ethical demands these forms’ continuance make in literary reception today.

This dissertation intervenes in the fields of modernist criticism and new media studies to examine an under-appreciated reciprocity between them. I argue that this reciprocity has not yet been adequately incorporated into a critical reckoning of the modernist period, a literary age too often neglected by new media studies as an epoch of "old media" productions. Even if modernist poets did create works largely intended for traditional book-bound channels, the imaginations that produced those works were forged in the combustible mix of new media and technologies that emerged in the early 20th century.

The argument focuses on the poetics of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, innovative poets who composed some of the most prescient, insightful writings on record about the connections linking technological and poetical developments. Through an examination of these poets' speculative writings, I argue that their experimental poetic methods emerged from their understanding of the challenges posed by new media and technologies. Among these challenges were new velocities of signification that emerged with the proliferation of the telegraph, new capacities for the storage of information that arrived with the introduction of the phonograph, an altered relationship to language itself with the externalized alphabet of the typewriter, and a new feel for how meaning could be generated through the montage logic of the cinema.

Drawing on a critical perspective derived from Martin Heidegger, pragmatist philosophers, Frankfurt School theorists and new media scholars such as Friedrich Kittler and Marshall McLuhan, I examine how modernist poetry, when framed as a media event, can help us understand how technological and media shifts influence our conceptions of our own inner and outer domains.

Few symbols of 1950s-1960s America remain as central to our contemporary conception of Cold War culture as the iconic ranch-style suburban home. While the house took center stage in the Nixon/Khrushchev kitchen debates as a symbol of modern efficiency and capitalist values, its popularity depended largely upon its obvious appropriation of vernacular architecture from the 19th century, those California haciendas and Texas dogtrots that dotted the American west. Contractors like William Levitt modernized the historical common houses, hermetically sealing their porous construction, all while using the ranch-style roots of the dwelling to galvanize a myth of an indigenous American culture. At a moment of intense occupational bureaucracy, political uncertainty and atomized social life, the rancher gave a self-identifying white consumer base reason to believe they could master their own plot in the expansive frontier. Only one example of America’s mid-century love affair with commodified vernacular forms, the ranch-style home represents a broad effort on the part of corporate and governmental interest groups to transform the vernacular into a style that expresses a distinctly homogenous vision of American culture. “Other than a Citizen” begins with an anatomy of that transformation, and then turns to the work of four poets who sought to reclaim the vernacular from that process of standardization and use it to countermand the containment-era strategies of Cold War America.

In four chapters, I trace references to common speech and verbal expressivity in the poetry and poetic theory of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and Gwendolyn Brooks, against the historical backdrop of the Free-Speech Movement and the rise of mass-culture. When poets frame nonliterary speech within the literary page, they encounter the inability of writing to capture the vital ephemerality of verbal expression. Rather than treat this limitation as an impediment, the writers in my study use the poem to dramatize the fugitivity of speech, emphasizing it as a disruptive counterpoint to the technologies of capture. Where critics such as Houston Baker interpret the vernacular strictly in terms of resistance, I take a cue from the poets and argue that the vernacular, rooted etymologically at the intersection of domestic security and enslaved margin, represents a gestalt form, capable at once of establishing centralized power and sparking minor protest. My argument also expands upon Michael North’s exploration of the influence of minstrelsy and regionalism on the development of modernist literary technique in The Dialect of Modernism. As he focuses on writers from the early 20th century, I account for the next generation, whose America was not a culturally inferior collection of immigrants but an imperial power, replete with economic, political and artistic dominance. Instead of settling for an essentially American idiom, the poets in my study saw in the vernacular not phonetic misspellings, slang terminology and fragmented syntax, but the potential to provoke and thereby frame a more ethical mode of social life, straining against the regimentation of citizenship.

My attention to the vernacular argues for an alignment among writers who have been segregated by the assumption that race and aesthetics are mutually exclusive categories. In reading these writers alongside one another, “Other than a Citizen” shows how the avant-garde concepts of projective poetics and composition by field develop out of an interest in black expressivity. Conversely, I trace black radicalism and its emphasis on sociality back to the communalism practiced at the experimental arts college in Black Mountain, North Carolina, where Olson and Duncan taught. In pressing for this connection, my work reveals the racial politics embedded within the speech-based aesthetics of the postwar era, while foregrounding the aesthetic dimension of militant protest.

Not unlike today, the popular rhetoric of the Cold War insists that to be a citizen involves defending one’s status as a rightful member of an exclusionary nation. To be other than a citizen, as the poets in my study make clear, begins with eschewing the false certainty that accompanies categorical nominalization. In promoting a model of mutually dependent participation, these poets lay the groundwork for an alternative model of civic belonging, where volition and reciprocity replace compliance and self-sufficiency. In reading their lines, we become all the more aware of the cracks that run the length of our load-bearing walls.

In this dissertation, Poetics of Revelation: Communities of the Literary Oracular in Transatlantic Modernism, I study practices of cultural mediation in “visionary” poetics from Mexico (Octavio Paz), Spain (María Zambrano), and Bolivia (Jaime Saenz). I set forth a theoretical model (“the literary oracular”) which permits the conflict of poetic revelation to articulate its unity in literary modernism through a critique of instrumental reason leveled by cultural mediators who refused to accept the disintegration of tradition, which they thought had to pass through them if it was to survive. Revelation and discipleship were effects of these authors’ earlier disenchantment with revolutionary platforms that relied on mass culture constructed as a people. Their new concern that “national energy” was so volatile it could turn assemblies into mobs, convinced them of the need for a conduit through which a new transcendence could be discovered and instituted, and to believe that they had to become its custodian if a new community was to be imagined in the wake of revolutionary fatigue. As these authors were poets, they set out to imagine a new language with which to name that transcendence, one which would remain unassailable by the vociferous chatter of the political rally and the marketplace. This poetics of revelation invites us to ask how these modernist mediating agents – working as they did in vernacularizing print cultures which threatened their elite minority status – came to imagine community as a transhistorical colloquium among like-minded interpreters after the failure of politically left-leaning notions of communitarianism.

This dissertation, “Sound Matters in Poetry, Music and Arts Under Dictatorship in Brazil,” shows how experiments with sound across three different fields—poetry, popular music, and fine art—established new models for poetic, musical, and artistic interventions in which sounding and listening practices were set to destabilize traumatic experiences under the Brazilian dictatorship of 1964–1985. The cases analyzed in this dissertation are a particular iteration of the long Brazilian modernist tradition, which both responds to global aesthetic modernism and local desires for the construction of a national culture. The first chapter looks at Augusto de Campos’s late concrete poetry, arguing that it is as auditory as it is visual, and that sound is central to his engagement with politics and media in mid-1960s Brazil. The second chapter turns to João Gilberto and Caetano Veloso’s early 1970s work: I show how, prompted by concrete poetry and new media technologies, these artists tackled the trauma of exile through an unconventional and creative use of sound, expanding musical conventions. The final chapter engages with sound art and media, examining works by Antonio Dias, Cildo Meireles, Waltercio Caldas, and Paulo Bruscky: I analyze how they used vinyl records as a sculptural medium in order to combine conceptual inquiry with political critique. Ultimately, this dissertation presents a poetics of sound fostered by artists who created forms of micropolitical dissent during times of macropolitical authoritarianism and brutality.

This dissertation addresses the lack of an identifiable group of World War I soldier-poets within the French literary and cultural canon. Through a study of archival matter from the period, including a survey of trench newspapers, contemporary print media, first editions, and material objects, the author concludes that one possible factor is the phenomenon of the democratization of the figure of the poet in the French trenches. The dissertation describes the groundbreaking rejection of the romantic definition of poetry as a sacred activity in favor of the view that poetry could be written by anyone, particularly those who served as witnesses on the front lines of experience. During the First World War, these common soldier-poets, later known broadly as témoins, were validated and encouraged from diverse places in French society: from the trenches where the soldiers' newspapers actively mobilized enlisted men to pick up a pen and write, to venerable institutions such as the Académie Française and Académie Goncourt which continually validated works by soldier-writers during the war years.

However, the democratization of the poet was not always openly received by established poets. Guillaume Apollinaire, who served as a soldier during First World War, struggled with how to redefine his role once he enlisted. Through close readings of a wide variety of his wartime writings, with a particular emphasis on Calligrammes (1918), the dissertation shows how this struggle dogged him until his death on November 9, 1918.

A second case is examined in the figure of Blaise Cendrars, who served in the French Foreign Legion during the war until he was seriously wounded. Through close readings of several fundamental postwar texts like La Guerre au Luxembourg (1916) and J'ai tué (1918) as well an examination of the film J'Accuse (1919), one sees how this poet resisted the idea that soldiers should become writers and how his renunciation of this double role became a crucial part of his personal mythology, helping to explain his mythologized disappearance from poetry in 1917 following the amputation of his right hand.

Through comparing the poetic careers of Apollinaire and Cendrars, two distinct responses to the question of how to witness the war emerge. Furthermore, the social phenomenon of the democratization of the poet in the trenches provides an essential backdrop to approaching wartime texts of witness, from both Apollinaire and Cendrars, as well as lesser-known writers such as René Dalize, Lucien Linais, Marc de Larreguy de Civrieux and Pierre Reverdy.