| dc.description.abstract | This thesis discusses the poetry published by contemporary American poet Susan
Howe over a period of almost two decades. The dissertation is chiefly concerned with
articulating the relationship between poetic form, history, and authority in this body
of' work. Howe's poetry dredges the past for the linguistic effects of patriarchy,
colonialism and war. My reading of the work is an exploration of the ways in which a
disjunctive poetics can address such historical trauma. The poems, rather than
attempting to reinstate voices lifted from what Howe has called "the dark side of
history", are a means of reflecting the resistance that the past offers to contemporary
investigation. It is the effacement, and not the recovery, of history's victims, that is
discernible in the contours of these highly opaque texts. Notions of authority are most
often addressed in the poetry through the figure of paternal absence, which has a
threefold function in the work, serving to represent social authority, an aporetic
conception of divinity and an autobiographical narrative. Alongside the antiauthoritarian
currents in the writing - critiques, for example, of the doctrine of
Manifest Destiny or of scapegoating versions of femininity - my thesis stresses Howe's
engagement with negative theology and with a strain of American Protestant
enthusiasm that has its roots in 17th century New England. The dissertation explores
the dissonance caused by the co-existence in the poetry of elements of political dissent
and religious mysticism. Finally, I consider Howe's engagement with literary history
and authors such as Shakespeare, Swift, Thoreau and Melville. The manner in which
Howe deploys the words of others in her work, I argue, allows for a mixture of textual
polyphony and a more conventional notion of authorial 'voice'. | en_US |
