Photo-Poetics: Documentary Forms from William Wordsworth to Robin Coste Lewis

Grandy, Claire

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Year:: 2021
Contributor:: Grandy, Claire (creator); Rooney, Ellen (Advisor); Khalip, Jacques (Reader); Smailbegović, Ada (Reader); Brown University. Department of English (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: American poetry; Photography; Romanticism; documentary
Extent:: viii, 266 p.

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Abstract:: Photo-Poetics brings together the study of photography and poetry that works in and theorizes the documentary mode. It intervenes in the genre of documentary poetry, non-fiction longform poetic texts that repurpose fragments of archival documents to expose issues of social justice. Though most critics date the genre’s inception to American modernism, I track a longer literary genealogy that responds to the rise of photographic ways of seeing, beginning with British romanticism and extending through nineteenth century taxonomy, depression era reportage, and contemporary reckonings with racializing western archives. Each chapter develops the concept of photo-poetics as it manifests in different eras, not to suggest straight historical continuity, but to trace a constellation of methods that adapt photographic forms to poetry. This project studies poetic texts by William Wordsworth, Charles Reznikoff, Muriel Rukeyser, Bernadette Mayer, Dionne Brand, and Robin Coste Lewis. I argue that their work examines the complex interplay of discursive and visual signification in various contexts, and thus operates against the critical tendency that I call “empathetic vitalism,” a desire to find individuated life in the projections of readerly affect. This project reads photographic forms in poetic texts to offer a new framework by which to interpret poetry that cites directly from other sources, distinguished from both conceptualism’s interest in procedural constraints and “unoriginal genius,” and the critical tendency to read the recuperation of lost or injured subjects into documentary poems. Photo-Poetics, in contrast, considers how people, particularly through gendering and racialization, come to signify as discursive sites, analyzing the implied frames, ethical implications, and complex mediations that various scenes of reading entail. The poets I study furnish evidence not to expose a lost story or revive a voice, but to force a rereading of the collective frameworks of visibility and interpretability that function at the expense of particularity.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2021

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Citation

Grandy, Claire, "Photo-Poetics: Documentary Forms from William Wordsworth to Robin Coste Lewis" (2021). English Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:f4affrx5/

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English Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the English department.
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