Text

theses

“Extending the Document” investigates the twenty-first century long poem in the context of the “archival turn” within the humanities. I argue that writers of what I call “archival long poems” are powerfully responding to a common cultural condition—to the disorienting fact that we have both too much and not enough archive. Such diverse writers as Amiri Baraka, Kenneth Goldsmith, Mark Nowak, Brenda Coultas, C.D. Wright, Anna Rabinowitz, and M. NourbeSe Philip are locating new representational values within the textual excess of proliferating documentation as well as within archival omissions that represent undocumented heritages. If the ultimate horizon of the modernist long poem was the breadth of the comprehensive collection, then the contemporary archival long poem aspires to the depth of the specialized monograph. Such monographic long poems detail accounts of marginalized subjects—from industrial laborers to incarcerated prisoners to the victims of hegemonic violence and genocide. In this way, poets become not just fabricators of aesthetically-pleasing language but also instigators of conceptual interventions; they become historians, archaeologists, data managers, sociologists, ethicists, and advocates. “Extending the Document” refutes poetry’s alleged isolation and inwardness by studying contemporary poets who are pushing poetry beyond its disciplinary bounds in order to interrogate the politics of memory and historical knowledge in an age of digital reproduction.

ETD_4392

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Michael Leong

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.1/rucore10001600001.ETD.000067794

doi:10.7282/T32R3QC2

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.