Monuments of Culture and the Cult of the Monument

Open Access
- Author:
- Mitchell, Renae Lea
- Graduate Program:
- Comparative Literature
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- February 18, 2013
- Committee Members:
- Djelal Kadir, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Thomas Oliver Beebee, Committee Member
Julia Cuervo Hewitt, Committee Member
Sean X Goudie, Special Member - Keywords:
- monumentalism
latin america
american
american literature
monuments
phenomenology
visual art
visual culture
epic
poetry - Abstract:
- Abstract By evaluating instances of creative critiques and interrogations of the monument, this study seeks to demonstrate how commemorations of a valorized European past are constructions of an originary moment that elide the complexities of Conquest and its attendant legacy of transculturation and miscegenation in the Americas. This project explores the ways in which the American monument subverts popular resistance by embodying master narratives for a people, and focuses on the ideological manifestations of the monument through the works of writers who figure prominently, one could say, monumentally, in the Americas. I trace this phenomenon of alienating monumentalism in various cultural productions—not only books, but sculpture, earthworks, and other artifacts — examining the formation of asymmetrical cultural relations embodied by these products, especially as they continue to influence contemporary American narrative and art. The examination of certain American poets as they confront or exemplify possibilities and limitations of monuments provides a means to observe how these “culturalizations” of memory function within contemporary America. This thesis examines the role of the monument in Saint-John Perse’s Anabase (1924), Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990), Octavio Paz’s Piedra de Sol (1957), and Pablo Neruda’s Canto general (1950). These writers, as international figures, present their artwork as “documents” of American reality, making them particularly apposite for this project. Each of these poets has written in a form that may be considered “monumental,” whether in the form of epic, agoric or Anacreontic (as opposed to lyrical) cantos, or by the appropriation of mythological subjects. These writers also happen to be winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, significant because such Nobel selections not infrequently prove to be monumental and monumentalizing of their laureates.