Hearing/S: Will In The Carceral Archive, Kayla Morse

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This long-form poetry project follows the human will — in this case the “criminal,” or captive will — as it is manhandled through an archive of reverends, wardens and superintendents narrating the future of prison reform. Drawing primarily from National Prison Association Conference archives between the years 1874 and 1895, these documents saturate the work with a will resistant but compelled towards subjugation by the state — as it appears within the text across forced labor economies, eugenic prison science that dictates starvation, classification, and isolation as the rule, the dehumanization of banal bureaucratic processes, the visceral and spectacular violence …

Dirty Modernism: Ecological Objects In American Poetry, Michael D. Sloane

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines how early-to-mid twentieth century American poetry is preoccupied with objects that unsettle the divide between nature and culture. Given the entanglement of these two domains, I argue that American modernism is “dirty.” This designation leads me to sketch what I call “dirty modernism,” which includes the registers of waste, energy, animality, raciality, and the sensual. Reading these registers, I turn to what I call “ecological objects,” or representations of how nature and culture come together, which includes trash, natural resources, inanimals, and tools. Through an ecocritical mode of analysis, I introduce dirty modernism with the Baroness Elsa …