Dissertation
Writing that reads: collage poetics and aesthetic techniques as media literacies
University of Iowa
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
Autumn 2020
DOI: 10.17077/etd.005727
Abstract
Modernist poetry is often criticized as “difficult” and “unreadable,” and critics have responded to this difficulty by implementing methods from distant reading to material analysis. Scholarship in media studies and new modernist studies applies the media capabilities of the digital era to modernist texts, but critics have yet to fully explore modernist poets as readers of media. By approaching poetic “difficulty” not as a challenge to reading but instead as a critical reading of media environments, I argue that avant-garde poetry explored the effects of experimental media forms—both in terms of writing and reading them—several decades prior to Marshall McLuhan’s formative work in media studies. Though art historians regard collage as a paradigmatic avant-garde visual practice, I show how poets used collage-based writing as a technique of reading to critically integrate and remediate their media ecology. The primary texts I examine share a common thread of difficulty, opacity, or even implied failure—one poet mars her own manuscript with the instruction to destroy it. This categorization I attribute to limited methods that exclude or ignore the poem’s simultaneous provocation as art. I bring close reading into contact with media history in order to rethink its method as a rigorous excavation of processes, both those of the poem and those examined by the poem. Using this media-historical close reading, I attend to the aesthetic techniques of four poets. Gertrude Stein’s animation, Mina Loy’s decomposition, H.D.’s tracking, and Marianne Moore’s citation serve as critical models of writing practices that demystify media-enabled structures of illusion, records, invisibility, and authority. I show how these techniques offer readers new means to decode their world. Moreover, a series of chapter codas address the “new media” topos of the digital era in order to examine remediations of these print-based techniques as readings of a contemporary media culture. In the twenty-first century, passive and uncritical media literacies pose intensified threats to human connection and responsiveness. These readings emphasize the persistent usefulness of poetry for thinking through—and reading through—the cultural and societal networks of the media moment. Thus, I demonstrate that the examined aesthetic techniques relate approaches to writing and reading and establish a generative framework for approaching the analysis of media through poetry. This project builds on print culture studies, new media poetics, and feminist criticisms that have associated the visual practices of the avant-garde with experimental aesthetics, examining writing through studies of design, material, or production. To these approaches, I add attention to media process. Attending to methods and poetics of four women—an underrepresented group in the discourse on media innovation—Writing That Reads contributes to both literary history and media archaeology. By examining the interactions between critical readings of media and creative writing, this study offers a thorough analysis of writing that reads the technologized world—that is, a technologically facilitated matrix of human connection.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Writing that reads: collage poetics and aesthetic techniques as media literacies
- Creators
- Haley A. Larson
- Contributors
- Jennifer Buckley (Advisor)Stephen Voyce (Advisor)Loren Glass (Committee Member)Harry Stecopoulos (Committee Member)Garrett Stewart (Committee Member)
- Resource Type
- Dissertation
- Degree Awarded
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
- Degree in
- English
- Date degree season
- Autumn 2020
- DOI
- 10.17077/etd.005727
- Publisher
- University of Iowa
- Number of pages
- ix, 384 pages
- Copyright
- Copyright 2020 Haley A. Larson
- Language
- English
- Description bibliographic
- Includes bibliographical references (page 337-362).
- Public Abstract (ETD)
Modernist poets were preoccupied with media innovations of the day. To read the “difficult” poems of the early twentieth-century, readers have used machines to analyze word patterns, scoured manuscripts for lost intentions, and even claimed they were never meant to be read, at least not closely. I suggest that some of these poems and their challenging textures, from highly repetitive and fragmented surfaces to obsessive connections and references, are readings themselves and, furthermore, analyses of new media technologies. This dissertation examines how reading and media overlapped for modernist poets and suggests the aesthetic techniques of their difficult writing exposes a reading and analysis of new media. I show how the four women featured—Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, H.D., and Marianne Moore—worked as early architects of media studies, a field in which women’s contributions are underexamined. Because new media technologies display varying degrees of visibility, their processes and productions can seem automatic, objective, and even authoritative. These media concerns persist in the twenty-first century; therefore, I briefly examine how contemporary poets Anne Carson, Tracie Morris, Caroline Bergvall, and Claudia Rankine apply similar techniques to scrutinize current technologies. Ultimately, these aesthetic techniques of writing disclose the processes and protocols of media and provide reading paths attuned to their discovery. These poets demand readers who will critically attend to their media culture and question its unobserved influence on their responsiveness.
- Academic Unit
- English
- Record Identifier
- 9984035990302771
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