Poetics of Interruption: Media and Form in Twentieth-Century Literature
Open Access
- Author:
- Weeber, Susan Cooke
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 04, 2016
- Committee Members:
- Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Kevin Michael Bell, Committee Member
Benjamin Jared Schreier, Committee Member
Nergis Erturk Lennon, Outside Member
Linda Furgerson Selzer, Committee Member - Keywords:
- American literature; African American literature; critical race theory; aesthetics; media
- Abstract:
- Poetics of Interruption: Media and Form in Twentieth-Century American Literature examines twentieth-century literature’s engagement with other media. The texts studied here use the sonic/aural to “cut” the visual, the image to disturb language. These other media—jazz, photography, cinema—exert an interruptive force in the texts, jolting, slowing down, and distorting the reading process, estranging and disorienting readers. This estrangement of form works to disrupt historiography and identity more generally. In examining these multimedia and intermedia texts, my project interrogates the relationship between aesthetics, radical politics, and identity and imagines the political possibilities of experimental literature. The first chapter examines jazz aesthetics, improvisation, and pragmatism in Claude McKay’s Banjo: A Story without a Plot (1929), the second develops a genealogy of photographic poetics from Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes to contemporary Dark Room Collective poets, and the third chapter investigates CLR James’ and Maya Deren’s use of cinematic aesthetics in constructing a radical new kind of cultural studies. Ultimately this project not only suggests an alternative literary genealogy of twentieth-century African American and American literature, but it also illuminates and offers alternatives to shallow engagements with minority literature. Poetics of Interruption suggests that the disciplines of literary and cultural studies are hampered by our expectations that African American literatures (and minority literatures more generally) operate as vessels or data storage containers for information about black American subjects. Recently, a growing number of scholars have highlighted this tendency to evaluate minority literature for its accurate representation of minority communities as symptomatic of the narrow ways in which we yoke aesthetics and racial politics. Minority literature in particular bears the burden of racial-political representation, often conceived of as or yoked to uplift politics and the demand for positive portrayals of black characters and communities, leading to a curious obsession with authenticity policing. Such readings instrumentalize and flatten minority literature. While this instrumentalization is in many ways unique to the ways we read minority literature, the problem of flattening critical methodologies is in many ways extrapolatable to our profession more generally. Recent critical trends in humanities scholarship increasingly rely on positivism—which favors the gloss or paraphrase rather than the elements of literature that cannot be paraphrased—denying that literary texts are necessarily any different from historical or sociological artifacts. These positivistic approaches ignore what is specific about literary form, what exceeds the paraphrase. A commitment to what Tom Eyers calls “poetic unevenness” exposes the gaps between literary and political forms, creating a productive dissonance. Rather than evaluating texts for their mimetic or representational ability and viewing them as closed, fixed objects, my project views these engagements with other media as necessarily experimental, and, therefore, rough, uneven, marked by failures, inconsistent, unfinished, open. Most projects on media and literature trace literature’s obsession with, desire for, or anxiety about technology and mediation. This project is not interested in developing a programmatic politics or viewing media writ large as either liberatory or enslaving. Instead, I trace texts’ attempts to think through other media in order to estrange these forms and media, estranging us from and then reorienting us toward our assumptions, the givens of our disciplines. I want to focus on how such cross-media or multimedia experimental works are well equipped to interrupt, disrupt, and shift our reading practices and interpretive categories. They don’t simply register our responses to technology, but they attempt to think through other media. They ask, What is the thought enabled by different media? How does temporarily inhabiting or playing with the techniques of other media open up new avenues and forms of thought? Poetics of Interruption explores the techniques of different media and the othering that occurs when literature thinks through the apparatus or uses the techniques of other media. Mediums’ techniques produce or tend toward certain approaches to the form, movement, and development of thought. Literature that seriously engages with the thought of other media is able to other itself—to make the literary strange, to alter the ways that we read, and, by extension, the ways that we read history, identity, and political thought.