Browsing by Subject "American poetry--20th century--History and criticism"

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"A" is for "archive": a case study in the American long poem
(2007) Nelson, Thomas J. ǂq (Thomas John); Bremen, Brian A.; Heinzelman, Kurt
Long poems like Ezra Pound's The Cantos, William Carlos Williams's Paterson, and Louis Zukofsky's "A" collect and preserve cultural documents, much in the manner of archives. Long poems of the so-called "Pound tradition" are arrangements of discrete passages, including direct citations from sources such as letters, historical texts, and other often "non-poetic" documents. Acting as an archivist, the poet selects material for preservation. Critics have used various frames, notably the epic, the sequence, and the collection, to interpret twentieth-century long poems. Though similarities to archives have been noted, an archival frame has not been fully developed. This dissertation draws on the disciplinary practices of the archivists as well as critical imaginings of archives to develop a frame for interpreting long poems as archives. After establishing the parameters of the archival frame, the bulk of the dissertation concentrates on Zukofsky's archival tendencies. Zukofsky worked as an archivist for the Work Projects Administration's Index of American Design project, where he developed strategies for using an archive as a communicative form. He crafted and marketed his own literary archive as a means of establishing a literary reputation and as an alternative means of publication. But not only did he develop pragmatic uses of archives, he also applied his understanding of archival principles to the construction of his long poem "A". The difficulties of reading "A" parallel those of working the Zukofsky archive. Readers are overwhelmed with hermetic details, documents of personal and public incidents, and records that we are unable to relate readily to surrounding material. Reading "A" as an archive, we must respond to the documents that are the component parts of the poem, to each document's situated context, and to the relationships among the parts that make up Zukofsky's "poem of a life."
"Language is not a vague province": mapping and twentieth-century American poetry
(2006) Newmann, Alba Rebecca; Lesser, Wayne; Cable, Thomas, 1942-
In recent years, the terms “mapping” and “cartography” have been used with increasing frequency to describe literature engaged with place. The limitation of much of this scholarship its failure to investigate how maps themselves operate—how they establish relationships and organize knowledge. In this document, I offer a rigorous examination of the structural and epistemological parallels between the fields of poetics and cartography. I argue that William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Hass can rightly be named cartographic poets, not only because they are invested in places, nor because they write evocatively about maps, but because, while maintaining the commitments to order and analogy long associated with both poetry and mapping, they deliberately challenge the traditional sources of their poetic authority, which include an emphasis on visual mastery and the singular, “authentic” voice of the lyric poet. By offering these challenges, they participate in what J. Hillis Miller identifies as twentieth-century American poetry’s desire to “abandon the will to power over things,” or the “emerging skepticism toward all mastering discourses of vision and voice” that Barbara Page discusses. While each of these poets calls up specific geographical frames of reference— New Jersey, Brazil, Northern California—geographic presence is not, in and of itself, enough to qualify their texts as maps. Maps contain an important dual potential: to master and control what they depict, and to serve as testaments and invitations to exploration. My discussion of cartographic authority, particularly in claims to objectivity, draws on the works of J.B. Harley and Mark Monmonier. Maps, however, allow us to explore not only physical territories, but conceptual ones as well; and it is in the investigation of these potentials I turn to the works of theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Frederick Jameson, and James Corner.
Ligatures of time and space: 1920s New York as a construction site for modernist "American" narrative poetry
(2005) Sulak, Marcela Malek; Newton, Adam Zachary; Cullingford, Elizabeth
This dissertation examines spatial-temporal aspects of modernist, self-consciously “American” narrative poetry set in 1920s New York. Because many cultural considerations and languages get left out of popular theories of modernism, I fashion an alternative characterization using Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope to account for modernist poetry written in minor languages, such as Yiddish, Black dialect, and Spanish. Five poems—Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1929), Moyshe-Leyb Halpern’s In NyuYork (1919), Langston Hughes’ The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927) and Federico Garcia Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York (completed in 1929, published in 1936)—exploit the lack of a normative sense of time and a wholeness of place that characterizes modernist literary depictions of the city to establish a position in which to write with authority. Distinguishing between poetry as a “form” and poetry as a “social force” allows me to apply a theory that had been developed for prose narrative in order to discuss the chronotopic significance of such purely poetic features as rhyme, meter, and rhythm.