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Doc/U/Ment: Affinities In 20th And 21st-Century Documental Poetics, Katherine Payne
Doc/U/Ment: Affinities In 20th And 21st-Century Documental Poetics, Katherine Payne
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation presents, analyzes, and builds on the existing literary genealogy of documental poetry. In 2020 Michael Leong proposed the term documental poetry to describe the turn toward source materials in 21st-century North American poetry, seen in longform research-based poems that explicitly incorporate documentation and seek to intervene in cultural memory. Using Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance, I argue that there are clear affinities between 21st-century poets and their 20th-century literary forerunners, also that an expansion of the scope of documental poetics is needed. The three nodes of connection I examine are works …
Historical Trauma: Literary And Testimonial Responses To Hiroshima, Mariam Ghonim
Historical Trauma: Literary And Testimonial Responses To Hiroshima, Mariam Ghonim
Theses and Dissertations
The concept of trauma is controversial in literature. While one may be able to come up with ways to describe trauma in fiction, representing historical trauma is a hard task for writers. Some argue that trauma can not be described through those who did not experience it, while others claim that, provided some elements are added, one can represent trauma to the reader. This thesis focuses on twentieth-century historical traumas related to a nuclear catastrophe and explores the different literary and testimonial responses to the catastrophic man-made event of Hiroshima (1945). In this thesis, Kathleen Burkinshaw’s historical fiction The Last …
Subjects Of Economy: Social Documentary Poetics And Contemporary Poetry Of Work, Michelle B. Gaffey
Subjects Of Economy: Social Documentary Poetics And Contemporary Poetry Of Work, Michelle B. Gaffey
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Although the term “documentary” originated in film and photography studies, it has been used to describe a range of compositional and research strategies in discussions of twentieth and twenty-first century poetry as well. A study of such documentary poetics, however, requires us to distinguish between documentary poetics in general and social documentary poetics in particular. To illustrate this distinction, I discuss five contemporary books of poetry and photographs: C.D. Wright’s and Deborah Luster’s One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, Cynthia Hogue’s and Rebecca Ross’s When the Water Came: Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina, Chris Llewellyn’s Fragments from the Fire: …
Muriel Rukeyser's "The Book Of The Dead": An Analytical Appreciation, Emily Cogan
Muriel Rukeyser's "The Book Of The Dead": An Analytical Appreciation, Emily Cogan
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Muriel Rukeyser’s poetry has always focused around a particular event be it something of global proportions such as the Spanish Civil War (Mediterranean) or the Japanese occupation of Korea (The Gates) or, as with The Book of the Dead, a specific disaster closer to her home, America. Her poetry, however, never exists purely in the realm of politics; she never aligned herself with any particular political party and consequently her poetry is never simply a call to arms or a manifesto in verse. Throughout the body of Rukeyser’s work there are echoes and allusions to …
How Documentary Poetry Imagines, Seunghyun Shin
How Documentary Poetry Imagines, Seunghyun Shin
English
As we face the end of the post-modern world at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the preceding decades of postmodernity can be seen to have led to a widespread underappreciation of reading and writing poetry in general. If we want to say that poetry is necessary in the world, how should literary scholars and writers defend its value? The value of reading and writing poetry owes to its socio-political efficacy. This research will highlight how poetry can be political through exploring the works of three documentary poets: Muriel Rukeyser, C.D. Wright, and Claudia Rankine. The goal is to refute …
Dark Matter: Susan Howe, Muriel Rukeyser, And The Scholar's Art, Stefania Heim
Dark Matter: Susan Howe, Muriel Rukeyser, And The Scholar's Art, Stefania Heim
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Instead of describing poetry as a set of constraints or history of practices, Muriel Rukeyser calls it "one kind of knowledge." Dark Matter heeds Rukeyser's call, theorizing a poetics of the "scholar's art," in which documentary investigation, autobiographical exploration, and formal innovation are mutual, interwoven concerns. The dissertation pairs American poets Susan Howe (b. 1937) and Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), reading their hybrid works not through the received categories of American poetry, or through common generic and disciplinary divisions, but using an inductive methodology that takes its lead from the poets. Understanding Howe and Rukeyser's literary experiments as serious interventions in …
Straight Record And The Paper Trail: From Depression Reporters To Foreign Correspondents, Magdalena Bogacka-Rode
Straight Record And The Paper Trail: From Depression Reporters To Foreign Correspondents, Magdalena Bogacka-Rode
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Straight Record and the Paper Trail: From Depression Reporters to Foreign Correspondents engages with Martha Gellhorn's The Face of War (1959), Virginia Cowles' Looking for Trouble (1941) and Josephine Herbst's The Starched Blue Sky of Spain and Other Memoirs (1991) as documentaries of struggle. Documentary as a mode of writing and image making reveals dissonance, contradictions and varied perspectives which undermine the official historical record. The three writers, I argue, by republishing their Spanish Civil War (SCW) journalism in book form intended to set their record straight. This was motivated by their commitment to the 1930s struggle and the need …
Childish Figuring: The Child As Symbol And Actor In Lillian Smith's Killers Of The Dream And James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Katherine Eveline Upton
Childish Figuring: The Child As Symbol And Actor In Lillian Smith's Killers Of The Dream And James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Katherine Eveline Upton
Theses and Dissertations
In this thesis, I examine the presentation of the child in James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Lillian Smith's Killers of the Dream as part of a rhetoric of growth. Both Agee and Smith present southerners as psychologically immature due to their traumatic childhood experiences of sexism, racism and poverty. Childhood is a recurring theme in both texts. Agee and Smith present childhood as a biological, developmental stage and a metaphor for growth in their texts. The child is a real, contextually-specific figure, drawn from Agee's and Smith's observations of children in Depression-era society. Images of children's …