Description
- Abstract:
- This project grapples with two questions broad and familiar in American literary studies: the difference that writing and speech make to language’s attributions—especially as these differences implicate voice in address—and the importance of context (history, identity, time and place) to close reading. Reading nonwhite, gendered, contemporary American poetics in relation to scholarship on poetry, race, gender, and aesthetics, this dissertation contributes to existing and emergent conversations around American poetry with the understanding that antiblackness affects all American discourse. Unanswerable questions and indeterminable differences problematize, and ultimately hold my thinking between, questions of subject and form in poetics and reading. To register without determining subjectivity and form, I focus my thinking on the paradoxical ‘forms’ of address in the context of contemporary American poetics. In Mercedes Eng's Prison Industrial Complex Explodes (2017), Layli Long Soldier's WHEREAS (2017), and Cameron Awkward-Rich’s Sympathetic Little Monster (2016), poetics of address answer, respond, question, and turn from the given with aesthetics of grammar and tone, of appropriation and figuration, of cause and (non)equivalence, and of indeterminacies of subjectivity and place.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2025
Citation
Preston, Katherine E. A.,
"“What, Then, Is The Question?”—Contemporary American Poetics Of Address"
(2025).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:dtxr6y8e/
