The media unconscious of confessional poetry

This dissertation attends to the media technologies through which confessional poets like W.D. Snodgrass, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Kamau Brathwaite sounded out, recorded, and aired their traumatic experiences in the latter half of the twentieth century. Records, tapes, broadcasts, and other sound media offered these confessional poets the technical and imaginative means by which their traumas could be worked through. As confessional poetry’s acoustics afforded audible access to the interior of their traumatized minds, many cultural and philosophical understandings of the unconscious and the traumatic shifted accordingly in the likeness of the sound media infrastructure.

Nevertheless, the sound-saturated forms of traumatic expression that circulated the postwar global media ecology demand new modes of listening, as dominant interpretive frameworks for trauma continue to privilege vision and image over listening and sound, muting and marginalizing the sonic trauma features so integral to confessional poetry and to autobiographical lyric poetry more broadly. To meet the demands trauma poetry places on our ears, this dissertation forwards an ear sighted approach to trauma that parses the enmeshment of trauma aesthetics in underlying sound media technologies and practices. Time and again, these sound media devices provide the logics by which the lyric sound structures of confessional poems are organized, underscoring their central importance in postwar literary conceptualizations of trauma and the unconscious. Drawing from a sampling of circum-Atlantic confessional poems, this dissertation pursues this genre of traumatic expression beyond the problematic national, cultural, and racial lines that have heretofore defined it. I argue that intercultural media practices like recording and broadcasting and corresponding traumatosonic poetic features account for the genre’s coherence instead, unifying various forms of confessional poetry across continents, cultures, and diverse intersectional identities.