Covenantal Poetics: Jewish, Irish, and African American Modernisms Beyond the Lyric

Modernism;Poetry and Poetics;American and Canadian Studies;General and Comparative Literature;Judaic Studies;Humanities;English Language & Literature

Wall, JoshuaWhite, Gillian Cahill ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Modernism;    Poetry and Poetics;    American and Canadian Studies;    General and Comparative Literature;    Judaic Studies;    Humanities;    English Language & Literature;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/143965/jlwall_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Over the past two decades scholarship has recovered the works of writers ignored or forgotten due to their race, politics, or gender, restoring the largely unknown history of early-20th century American poetry beyond an Anglo-American canon. Yet a new problem has emerged: conventions of poetic reading and scholarship developed around canonical high modernism and postwar lyric continue to obscure the poetic self-theorizing of ethnic and immigrant modernists. Recovering texts alone is not enough. We no longer know how to read this poetry.Covenantal Poetics: Jewish, Irish, and African American Modernisms Beyond the Lyric develops reading practices that can account for the communally-oriented verse forms of immigrant and ethnic modernists.In doing so, it suggests one alternative to practices of lyric reading.This research explores the ways in which a quartet of ethnic modernists enjoin their readers to engage in solidarity with other outsiders by forming mutually-obligated communities.To do so, they look beyond the lyric to recover abandoned forms, conventions, and experimental strategies from within the histories of English and American verse.Drawing on historical approaches to prosody and lyric theory and recent work in post-secular studies, Covenantal Poetics examines archival materials, publication histories, and multilingual intertexts in order to account for their poetic self-theorization. They draw on the biblical and prophetic rhetoric of 19th-century America not only to critique visions of the United States as a ;;promised land” or ;;new Jerusalem,” but also to call out readers as members of a shared, covenantal community.By taking a comparative, multiethnic approach, Covenantal Poetics reveals that the shared interest among African American, Jewish American, and Irish American poets in prophetic texts establish them as some of the most creative explorers of new forms in a period of formal innovation. Extensive archival research demonstrates that James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones (1927) addresses Americans as members of a shared, racially-mixed congregation.By ;;scoring” the voice of the African American preacher to the King James Bible, he revises the covenantal discourse of American civil religion while allowing us to re-imagine the genealogy of modernist experiment. The avant-garde works of Louis Zukofsky re-imagine the Passover seder and transform poetry into an act of moral pedagogy. Only through modernist experiment, his poetry insists, can readers translate the ;;Israelite” identity of Puritan rhetoric and the American imagination into the experience of having been a slave in Egypt—of standing in solidarity with the contemporary oppressed.Lola Ridge produces a similar aesthetics of labor solidarity—but by challenging avant-garde aesthetics.Alongside her editorial work at the influential modernist magazine Broom, her many retellings of the crucifixion upend expectations of lyric and epic, creating poetry intended for use in labor rallies and awareness campaigns.Whether read on broadside posters in public or at home from a book, her works join readers together in solidarity with the cause of labor. The themes of biblical typology, documentary poetics, prosodic experiment and convention, and the history of immigrant and ethnic American life come together in Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony. Shaped by Reznikoff’s legal training and biblical translations of the 1920s, Testimony positions the poet as a prosecutor who engages readers in an act of covenantal community by demanding that they act as jury in the trial of the United States. Testimony establishes community through shared acts of witness, advocacy, and judgment.