• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

OUR KIND OF SERIOUSNESS: THE REINTEGRATION OF JUDGMENT IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CULTURE By Andrea Camille Actis B.A., Simon Fraser University, 2007 A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Program of English at Brown University Providence, Rhode Island May 2017 © Andrea Camille Actis 2017 This dissertation by Andrea Camille Actis is accepted in its present form by the Department of English as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date:____________________ __________________________________ Jacques Khalip, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date:____________________ __________________________________ Deak Nabers, Reader Date:____________________ __________________________________ Ada Smailbegović, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date:____________________ __________________________________ Andrew G. Campbell, Dean of the Graduate School iii VITA Andrea Camille Actis lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. She teaches writing and literature courses at Capilano University and Emily Carr University of Art + Design. From 2015–17 she edited the triannual literary and visual arts journal The Capilano Review while overseeing its extensive community programming. Andrea obtained her B.A. (Honors) in English and Humanities from Simon Fraser University in 2007 and received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Doctoral Award upon beginning her graduate work at Brown University. In 2012 she received a Tuition Fellowship Award from Brown’s Cogut Center for the Humanities to attend the School for Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, where much of her initial research and thinking toward this dissertation took shape. Her criticism and poetry has been published in World Picture, Pelt, The Poetic Front, and Fence. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS On December 13, 2007, I woke up at 5:00am to put the finishing touches on my applications to Ph.D. programs. My father, Jeffrey, a brilliant cook and heavy drinker recently evicted from his one-room apartment above a car dealership at the bottom of the mountain on top of which I’d completed my B.A., had been living with me since the beginning of November. He’d been sober since moving in and had just started working as a delivery driver for a print shop down the street. In the month and a half he’d been around, he and I had done many normal and weird things together: invented soups, sung along at the top of our lungs to Something Else by The Kinks, gotten each other caught up on our favourite conspiracy theories, and watched a twenty-minute real-life autopsy video on YouTube, aghast yet full of cackles at the absurdity of everyone becoming just meat eventually. My dad struggled with insomnia and hadn’t yet been to bed when my alarm went off that morning, so he made me a coffee and we sat together at the kitchen table. I had my A4 envelopes scattered all over the place and a list of addresses I still needed to transcribe to them. “You’re applying to Brown University?” he asked, looking over my list. “Yep,” I said, “but I barely know why.” “But Rhode Island,” my dad chirped, “is the likeliest of any of these places to get me on an airplane!” The man had refused to travel by anything except automobile since the last time he’d been flown back on a tiny jet from his oil-rig job in northern Alberta, which had been, if I remember correctly (and if he remembered correctly), in 1975. There was also the fact that, for at least as long as I’d been alive, my dad had never been able to afford something like airfare. With my applications v not even sent off into the world yet, I was already nervous of what it would mean and how it would feel to leave my dad behind. “I have no idea why you feel that way about Rhode Island,” I said to him, finishing off my coffee, “but I’ll keep it in mind! You’re definitely coming to my graduation and to visit me a bunch, wherever the hell I end up.” I had my day, and my dad had his day. I went to the post office and then went to the dentist. It was a Thursday. It was strangely mild out for the middle of December, gray but with hints of purple and even a bit of green in the clouds. I felt good about getting to relax and breathe a bit now that my applications to grad school were signed, sealed, and out of my hands. I got home around 6:00 that evening and found my dad at his computer, writing an email to his new boss to thank him for the holiday steakhouse-gift-card he’d just received with his first paycheck. My dad hadn’t been used to that sort of gesture at work and was touched. We headed to the bank to deposit his check. He dropped me off at a book launch, and I told him I loved him and that I’d be home in a few hours. A few hours later my friend drove me home and I entered the apartment to discover my dad facedown on his bed, sunken deep into his red wool blanket in a way that no living person sinks into a wool blanket. I dedicate this first, long attempt of mine to write about seriousness not only to my sweet, smart, sneaky dead dad, but to everyone who has helped me stay alive over the last nine years. I thank my mother, Katalin, one of the most resilient, spirited, selfless women that anyone I know has ever met. (I’m excited to stop being cranky and start having fun with her again.) I thank my hilarious and angelic grandmother, Marta Horvath, who passed away unexpectedly only a month after my return to Vancouver in 2014, devastating about six different communities in the Lower Mainland and several more across the globe. I also thank my talented and humble grandfather, vi Stefan Horvath, for showing me how little choice there is in life but to love books, help neighbors, work hard on your projects, and be a communist. For the unconditional support and all the many kinds of generosity they’ve shown me and my family over these last few years, I thank Patricia and Colin Godwin. And I thank Dylan Godwin, my driver and my very funny and forgiving partner, for his singular power to rescue me from my own kind of seriousness in all the ways and moments I most need rescuing. It scares me to think what varieties of nonsense this dissertation would be if it weren’t for the friendship and conversation of a few people in particular: Timothy Terhaar, John Mac Kilgore, and Natalie Knight. At the heart of my project are the energies, visions, and senses of justice I share with these three humans, and I’m grateful to each of them for the kinds of connections they help me see and for the being-better-in-general they make me strive for. To all my other beloveds here at home and in many elsewheres—there are too many of you for me to try to name without having an anxiety attack—I hereby renew my vow to being a good and present friend to you. Finally, I’m grateful to my dissertation committee—Jacques Khalip, Deak Nabers, and Ada Smailbegović—for trusting me to follow every hunch I’ve ever had and for pushing me to complete a project that at many turns threatened to run me over. I can’t imagine having written a dissertation like this one under any other conditions or with any different kind of permission. I’m also grateful to Professor Meghan Sutherland, editor of the journal World Picture: we still haven’t met but it was thanks to her encouragement and patience over many emails that I was able to finish a version of my first and most challenging-to-pull-off chapter. And a thank you, lastly, to Elizabeth Friedmann, for taking me through Laura (Riding) Jackson’s house in Florida a couple of years ago and for always taking my work on her so seriously. vii CONTENTS Vita………….…………………………………………………………………………………………………..iv Acknowledgments………….………………………………………………………………………………….v Introduction Beyond the Boundaries of Limited Seriousness……………………….……………………….…………. .1 Chapter One Notes on Seriousness: Laura (Riding) Jackson and the Refeminization of Judgment………………. .14 Chapter Two Candor Has Whiteness: Audre Lorde and the Racialization of Difference…………………………… .62 Chapter Three Unrevolutionary Suicide: David Foster Wallace and the Problem with Dead Hypotheses…………102 Volta One Poem……………………….……………………….…………………………………………………. .145 Coda Experimentalism Was Never Enough………………………………………………….…………………151 Bibliography………….…………………………………………………………..………………………… .168 viii The old fortune teller lies dead on the floor Nobody needs fortunes told anymore The trainer of insects is crouched on his knees And frantically looking for runaway fleas —The Kinks, “Death of a Clown” INTRODUCTION Beyond the Boundaries of Limited Seriousness My kind of seriousness, in my looking to poetry for the rescue of human life from the indignities it was capable of visiting upon itself, led me to an eventual turning away from it as failing my kind of seriousness. —Laura (Riding) Jackson1 I loved poetry and I loved words. But what was beautiful had to serve the purpose of changing my life, or I would have died. 2 —Audre Lorde Poetry and the other arts must return to a place of being useful. —CAConrad3 In 1980, some forty years after having “reached the limit,” as she put it, “in what the poetic way of using words could provide for the saying of what needed saying with truthfulness,” Laura (Riding) Jackson was asked by publisher Herb Yellin at Lord John Press for a recent poem he might include in a limited-edition broadside series.4 Taken aback by the request—“feeling some surprise 1 Laura (Riding) Jackson, introduction to The Poems of Laura Riding (New York: Persea Books, 1980), xl, emphasis added.

Load more

  188

Copy Link