Browsing by Subject "Poetic form"
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Item After rupture : innovative identities and the formalist poetry of Akilah Oliver, Sharon Bridgforth, and Alice Notley(2010-08) Smith, Laura Trantham; Jones, Meta DuEwa; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne); Cvetkovich, Ann; Hutchison, Coleman; Tejada, RobertoThis dissertation reveals a twentieth-century tradition of poetic formalism that positions race, gender, and sexuality as formal concerns, and further, as key factors in the development of contemporary formal poetics. My readings of three contemporary poets, Akilah Oliver, Sharon Bridgforth, and Alice Notley, combine formalist analysis with cultural approaches, including critical race theory and queer theory, to show how contemporary poets use form to confront racist, sexist, and homophobic representational traditions and to reshape identity discourse. This project intervenes in a critical tradition that divorces poetic form from political context and neglects formal aspects of poetries that engage with social identities, especially African American poetry. As Notley, Oliver, and Bridgforth portray racial, gender, and sexual diversity—including gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered bodies—they invent and remake forms, genres, and textual strategies, from the feminist epic to the performance novel. These new forms exceed the strategies of rupture, fracture, and fragmentation that marked many modern and postmodern experiments and, in fact, reveal the limitations of rupture as a means of political critique. Instead, they widen the field of formalism, incorporating performance genres (epic, storytelling, blues) and new textual strategies to call attention to the histories of bodies and their representations, assert interdependent identities, promote pluralism, and insist on the interrelationship of literature, orality, and bodily experience.Item Forg[ing] chains for others : Hannah More's poetics and rhetoric of control(2012-05) Thaler, Joanna Leigh; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne); Hutchison, ColemanWhile scholars have carefully and rightly noted the profound influence that More’s abolitionist writings had on both the abolition movement and the developing women’s rights movement, they omit what is an essential examination of her poetics, particularly the self-conscious poetic form that she develops in her poem, “Slavery, A Poem” (1788). In conjunction with noting the rhetorical and textual devices that More implements in “Slavery” to illustrate the art of self-conscious poetics, this paper explores these same devices in a later satirical essay of More’s entitled Hints towards forming a Bill for the Abolition of the White Female Slave Trade, in the Cities of London and Westminster (1804), arguing that, by comparing the rhetorical points of overlap in these two pieces, we can identify that More’s contribution to her contemporary literary culture transcended mere female participation and publication. More importantly, through “Slavery” and Hints, More develops a unique rhetoric – a poetics of control – with which to discuss the physical constraints of slavery, the trope of the individual versus the collective, and the essential poetic and rhetorical practice of blending authorial creativity with conventional constraint.Item “Woven alike with meaning” : sovereignty and form in Native North American poetry, 1800-1910(2017-07-20) Grewe, Lauren Marie; Cohen, Matt, 1970-; Cox, James H. (James Howard), 1968-; Winship, Michael; Bennett, Chad; Fitzgerald, StephanieThe story of American poetry has developed alongside the idea of America itself, becoming almost synonymous with national sovereignty projects in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this time the figure of the Indian was, in poetry, customarily depicted as melancholy and moribund, a noble savage making way for a supposedly superior civilization and race. Yet indigenous North American poets also composed and published poetry and participated in reading communities during this time. Examining this poetry reveals how indigenous writers manipulated poetic genres to contest U.S. hegemony and assert sovereignties from the sexual to the tribal to the national. Indeed, understanding early indigenous poets’ formal choices and poetic communities challenges critical narratives of American poetry’s history as having been linear and progressive, demanding a new way of organizing the study of American poetry. In this dissertation, I argue that early Native North American poets chose to write in specific poetic genres in response to local, national, and international publishing worlds. Each chapter examines how indigenous poets comment on the practice and form of poetry, thus speaking to a diverse community of poets and readers through a variety of verse traditions. Jane Johnston Schoolcraft draws from multiple cultural traditions as she manipulates time and genre through her mourning poems, ballads, and lyrics in the Anishinaabe world of the Great Lakes. In the Chicago area, Simon Pokagon uses insurgent practices of appropriation to criticize and revise colonialist American poetry through cross-racial citations and borrowings in his birchbark pamphlets and novel. As public literary tastes shift from poems to legends at the turn of the twentieth century, E. Pauline Johnson helps invent a different kind of modernist poetry that challenges representations of indigenous peoples as pre-modern. Alex Posey composes skeptical elegies, dialect poems, and political newspaper verse from western and Creek literary forms in Indian Territory to heal a divided Creek Nation, practicing poetic appropriations that offered ways of relating to genre that remain powerful for Native American poets today.