عنوان

All of Us with All of That:

TLpq2447271990

انگلیسی

All of Us with All of That:

[Thesis]

Coller, Bryan Takeshi

Militarized Life and Communal Affect in Twenty-First Century American Experimental Poetry

Ronda, Margaret

University of California, Davis

2020

181

Ph.D.

University of California, Davis

2020

Focused on the problem of the United States' unending wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, these chapters argue that global military violence deranges and disorients affects attached to citizenship, nationality, collective identity, and communality. For these authors, war effects American everyday life indirectly. Issues of stealth camouflage, state surveillance, mass troop deployments, tortured detainees, misinformation campaigns, and militarized policing conspire to produce a sense of paranoia which dissipates normative social relations. Under these conditions, these poets demonstrate how the paralipsis of military violence in day to day life centers the false appearance of an American public untroubled by the racism, sexism, and immiseration of the capitalistic world system. Works by Juliana Spahr, Rob Halpern, Myung Mi Kim, and Renee Gladman are not positioned as an antiwar poetry as such; rather they manifoldly depict the affective consequences of unending war on the citizen in terms of isolation, futility, complicity, and hopelessness through textual strategies of indeterminacy influenced by militarization. Rather than a call for change, this body of poetry expresses a set of negative affects disowned and unrecognized by normative society: this is a field of affect without future and without hope, where human togetherness in the current moment feels impossible due to the conspiracy of drone strikes, extraordinary renditions, and racist policing. By reading these works through affect theory, world systems theory, queer theory, black study, and everyday life studies, these chapters search out signs of formal and generic decay and obsolescence; where the poetic lyric, for instance, breaks down, these readings argue that the aesthetics of the current moment are ill-suited to the task of addressing global military violence in a mode that exceeds self-interest.

American literature

British & Irish literature

Military studies

Coller, Bryan Takeshi

Ronda, Margaret

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y