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Language, Intertextuality, and Subjectivity in the Poetry of Diane

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Language, Intertextuality, and Subjectivity in the Poetry of Diane Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2005 Sites of resistance: language, intertextuality, and subjectivity in the poetry of Diane Wakoski Cordelia Maxwell Hanemann Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Hanemann, Cordelia Maxwell, "Sites of resistance: language, intertextuality, and subjectivity in the poetry of Diane Wakoski" (2005). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 1092. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/1092 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. SITES OF RESISTANCE: LANGUAGE, INTERTEXTUALITY, AND SUBJECTIVITY IN THE POETRY OF DIANE WAKOSKI A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Cordelia Maxwell Hanemann B.A., University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1970 M.A., University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1975 May 2005 © Copyright 2005 Cordelia Maxwell Hanemann All rights reserved ii Acknowledgements The completion of this dissertation owes much to the impetus and efforts of many people. Without the support of my family, my colleagues, and my friends, I would not have persevered: I especially thank my partner, William Birmingham; my children, Louis, Benjamin, and Craig; and my good friend, Lisa Gibbs. I would also like to acknowledge Dr. Jon Thompson, my mentor at North Carolina State University, who encouraged me to work with contemporary women poets and to pursue my doctorate at Louisiana State University. Campbell University proffered me a year’s leave of absence from teaching to complete my coursework, and my colleague, Dr. Donna Waldron, read early drafts. Dr. Robin A. Roberts’s outstanding direction of my dissertation was invaluable: her numerous careful readings of my material and her determination to sharpen my prose and my ideas kept my writing clear and focused. Cordelia Maxwell Hanemann iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………..iii Abstract……………………………………………………………………………….v Introduction………..………………………………………………………………….1 Chapter One: Reel to Real: Spec(tac)ular Mythmaking……………………………21 Chapter Two: Geographies: Wresting Woman-I-fest Destiny from the Jaws of the Father………………………………………….52 Chapter Three: Which Witch Is (Wh)I(ch): Righting and Rewriting the Body…………………………….………………98 Chapter Four: Patriotism/Matriatism: Partners or Pariahs……………….………..139 Chapter Five: Women for Women Makes Morewoman………………………….179 Conclusion: Making and Being: Rose Selavy/ C’est la vie— and That’s Life…………………………………………………….210 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………….…...228 Vita……………………………………………………………………………….….235 iv Abstract This dissertation explores the interconnectedness of language and related cultural texts and women’s subjectivity. The poststructuralist feminist enterprise of examining and critiquing language and signifying practices for the ways in which they impose social values and of interrogating and undermining the fixity of meanings in cultural texts will serve as my primary frame. Concerned with the individual (gendered) consciousness, poststructuralist feminist theory of subject formation posits that while language, along with ideologically biased texts of the culture, construct subjects, language and the cultural texts also serve as sites of resistance for the deconstruction and reconception of individual and collective subjectivities. Because for many poststructuralist feminists, the language of poetry serves as the vehicle par excellence for the revisioning of language, texts, and subjectivity, a study of the way language relates to subject formation can find fertile ground in a focus on the language of poetry. I center my discussion on the role of language and cultural texts in subject formation around the poetry of Diane Wakoski, who experiments with postmodern parody, linguistic intertextualization, and remythologization. Wakoski’s intertextualization and remythologization of cultural texts enables the revisioning process of reconceiving the possibilities of women’s subjectivities. Wakoski, through recursive postmodern parody, installs, explores, undermines, and remythologizes a pastiche of texts: traditional, biblical, personal, and cultural myths; cultural icons from history and popular culture; scientific treatises and commentary on art; the architecture of the casino and the landscape of the desert; elements of personal biography, memories, and letters. I interrogate and remythologize Wakoski’s texts by recursively visiting key stories, myths, allusions, and themes to demonstrate how Wakoski’s poetic language and intertextual technique reflect the process by which women can be both victimized by cultural texts bent on determining their identities and liberated by a renovation of the defining parameters of language. I analyze Wakoski’s poetry to discern ways women have been interpellated through language to set roles, relationships, performances, self-perceptions, and even bodies. Language and the cultural texts themselves serve as sites where women can contest the ways in which their subjectivities have been conceived and where these subjectivities can be revisioned. v Introduction Diane Wakoski, poet in residence at Michigan State University since 1976, has authored a large body of published poetry spanning over four decades. A former Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellow, she has been recognized for her work by the American Academy of Poets, which bestowed upon her the coveted William Carlos Williams Award for Poetry, and by the National Endowment of the Arts fellowship. Not only is she a full-time teacher of poetry at MSU, but she has also served as visiting poet in at several prestigious universities, including the University of California at Irvine and the University of Virginia. In addition, her poetry appears in syllabi for courses in Contemporary Poetry, American Literature, Women’s Studies, Women’s Poetry, and Popular Culture across the continent. Through her many publications in theory, criticism, poetic methodology, and most importantly, her forty plus volumes of poetry, she has crafted a complex personal mythology. Avowedly a “user of stories” (Wakoski, Toward a New Poetry 291),1 Wakoski advocates writing and re-writing old stories, transpositioning them into new ones: each time we reshape a thing, it gathers power, and to make is richer than to be. (The Emerald City of Las Vegas 52)2 Through her writing/re-writing, she grapples with the on-going process of self-discovery. This process has entailed engaging those cultural, literary, and personal-life “texts” that have informed her vision of herself and of her place in the culture. Though personal, her poetry is not necessarily “confessional,” but what she likes to call “the art of personal narrative” (TNP 257). Using the metonymy of the persona-as-woman, the poetry explores some of the significant issues relating to subjectivity and positionality relevant to American women. Wakoski’s most recent series, The Archaeology of Movies and Books, especially volume three, The Emerald City of Las Vegas, presents experiments in form and content that reflect her personal mythology. The three volumes of the trilogy, Medea the Sorceress,3 Jason the Sailor,4 and, especially, The Emerald City of Las Vegas, broach serious feminist issues that warrant critical scrutiny.5 Those feminist issues in Wakoski’s poetry which I find particularly compelling cover a wide range of themes. The poet strives to discover a means of challenging the traditional ways in which women have been conceived in and through language and to refashion femininity by manipulating the language that has kept her circumscribed. She grapples with how language and 1 the cultural texts have determined what is real, true, and normal and have, thus, dictated meaning—both collective and personal. Examining how the culture has prescribed roles, she explores how women see ourselves and how we fit into the cultural matrix. The poetry indicates her concern for contemporary women who have experienced both a recognition and a misrecognition of ourselves in the roles prescribed by society. Having been interpellated, or called, to a set of gendered corporeal strictures, women in the culture have felt the call to “rewrite” the cultural texts in order to re-conceive the female body, so that new bodies can matter/materialize (Butler 4) and new modes of subjectivity can be engendered. Wakoski deals with the theme of women’s weariness at being erased or ostracized, vilified or punished when we fail to conform to the strictures and demands of those interpellations which are sanctioned within and by the cultural ideology. She analyzes the relationships that have constructed women and have defined how we perceive ourselves. These include relationships with men—the patriarchal god figure and his testaments, fathers and their “wills,” lovers and their expectations and attentions and inattentions. Further, relationships with women inform our woman’s identity: relationships with our mothers, whom
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