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Experimental Poetics and Materialities in the Works of Susan Howe, Stephanie Strickland, and Caitlin Fisher

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Experimental Poetics and Materialities in the Works of Susan Howe, Stephanie Strickland, and Caitlin Fisher EXPERIMENTAL POETICS AND MATERIALITIES IN THE WORKS OF SUSAN HOWE, STEPHANIE STRICKLAND, AND CAITLIN FISHER By Elissavet Pournara A Dissertation Submitted to the Department of American Literature and Culture, School of English, Faculty of Philosophy In Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece 2018 This research has been co-financed – via a programme of the State Scholarships Foundation (IKY)- by the European Union (European Social Fund - ESF) and Greek national funds through the action entitled “Scholarships programme for postgraduates studies -2nd Study Cycle” in the framework of the Operational Programme “Human Resources Development Program, Education and Lifelong Learning” of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) 2014 – 2020. Elissavet Pournara Experimental Poetics and Materialities in the Works of Susan Howe, Stephanie Strickland, and Caitlin Fisher Doctoral Dissertation Submitted to the Departement of American Literature and Culture, School of English, Faculty of Philosophy, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Date of Oral Defense: 9 July 2018 Dissertation Committee: Assoc. Prof. Tatiani Rapatzikou, Supervisor Assist. Prof. Amaranth Borsuk, Co-Adviser Prof. Manuel Portela, Co-Adviser Assoc. Prof. Dimitris Kargiotis, Examiner Assist. Prof. Stamatina Dimakopoulou, Examiner Prof. Dimitrios Tryphonopoulos, Examiner Prof. Vasilis Papageorgiou, Examiner To my mother Eftychia, who is always there Pournara 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………….…6 ABSTRACT..............................................................................................8 INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………9 CHAPTER ONE: Experimental Poetry and Female Avant-Garde……………………..23 CHAPTER TWO: The Materiality of the Printed Page: The Books of Susan Howe 2. Susan Howe’s Visual Poetics…………..……………………..46 2.1 The Art of the Book: The Midnight……………………...…..55 2.2 Shadows and Light: That This………..………………...……63 2.3 A Portable Library: Spontaneous Particulars……………….80 2.4 Crescendo: Debths………..………………………....…….…88 CHAPTER THREE: Stephanie Strickland’s Print and Digital Poetics 3. Transition to the Digital………………………………………97 3.1 Between Codes and Palimpsest: Dragon Logic….....…….…99 3.2 Chasing after Stars and Poetic Constellations: Vniverse……119 CHAPTER FOUR: Poetry in Augmented Reality: The Case of Caitlin Fisher 4. In Search of the Poetic…………………..……………..…….142 4.1 Theorizing Augmented Reality in Spatial Narratives…..…..148 4.2 A Treasure Chest of Stories: Circle………..……………….165 4.3 A Castle within the Pages of a Book: 200 Castles….…...….174 EPILOGUE……………………………..…………………………….184 WORKS CITED…………………………………….………………..190 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE……………………………………...…….203 Pournara 6 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would first of all like to thank my main supervisor, Dr. Tatiani Rapatzikou, whose support and advice have been invaluable throughout this long journey. She has encouraged and inspired me since my first year as an undergraduate student at the School of English all the way through finishing this doctoral dissertation. Above all, I wish to thank her for providing me these last ten years with so much kindness, warmth and support, and for boosting my confidence at critical moments. I am indebted to the two members of my advisory committee, Dr. Amaranth Borsuk and Dr. Manuel Portela, for their excellent cooperation since the first day of this project, their valuable feedback on my work and their insightful and thorough commentary on my chapters. I would also like to thank additionally Dr. Portela for hosting me in Materialities of Literature doctoral program at the University of Coimbra, in Portugal. My thanks go to New Directions, Stephanie Strickland and Caitlin Fisher for granting me permission to use copyright material. I would like to thank the Greek State’s Scholarship Foundation for funding the last year of my Ph.D. I am also grateful to the Reasearch Committee of Aristotle University for the scholarship of excellence of doctoral students that has awarded to me in 2015, as well as the Stavros Niarchos Foundation that enabled my research at York University, in Toronto, Canada. I am especially thankful to Caitlin Fisher whom I interviewed for hosting me at the Augmented Reality Lab and for sharing archival material from her work. My thank you also goes to all the members of the Multimodal Research and Reading group at School of English – Tzeni Kleidona, Cathy Marazi, Despoina Pournara 7 Feleki, Thomas Matzaris, and Vassilis Delioglanis – for all their support and feedback during the various stages of maturity of this research and for always being there. A very warm and special thanks goes to the librarians Maria José Carvalho, Inês Lima, and Acácio Machado for all their help in the Centro de Estoudos Sociais Library at the University of Coimbra, as well as providing me with the best reading spots. This dissertation owes much to the architect and visual artist Tomasz Dzieduszyński, whose scientific and artistic sensitivity, as well as his wonderful insights into the dragon of probability has shed different light on Dragon Logic. Not only well-read in Lem’s ouvre, he has provided valuable readings to my own work. I feel deeply grateful to my mum Eftychia and my sisters Titina and Silia. The love, warmth and support I have received from them has made everything brighter. My mum’s persistence in finishing her own doctoral dissertation almost twenty years ago under difficult circumstances has fueled my own determination to bring this project into completion. This Ph.D. is dedicated to her. Pournara 8 ABSTRACT This doctoral dissertation explores the experimental poetics of the North American poets Susan Howe, Stephanie Strickland, and Caitlin Fisher, focusing on the different materialities that their works manifest in the print book, the computer, the iPad, and augmented reality. Specifically, it sheds light on the capabilities as well as the limits of print and digital tools when put into the service of literary and, in particular, poetic production. Focusing on the ways that these poets advance the audiences’ literacies, I explore how concepts such as interactivity, machine reading, programming languages, and immersion enrich the discussion of poetry writing. This doctoral dissertation draws on theories by Johanna Drucker, N. Katherine Hayles, Lev Manovich, and Marie Laure Ryan with regard to materiality, visuality, programming and natural languages, narrative vs. database, immersion and interactivity. The main question this dissertation attempts to answer is how such experimental poetic practices can be read; this is achieved by adopting a flexible approach towards poetic practice, while underlining the literariness and poetic elements of the works. The first chapter focuses on the development of innovative American poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, whereas the second chapter discusses Howe’s print material poetics in her books The Midnight (2003), That This (2010), Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives (2014), and Debths (2017). The third chapter focuses on the transition form print to digital poetics as seen in Strickland’s print book Dragon Logic (2013), and her intermedia project Vniverse (2002, 2014). The last chapter explores poetry in augmented reality as seen through Fisher’s Circle (2010) and 200 Castles (2012). This dissertation attempts to provide a close reading of experimental pieces of poetry across media in an effort to highlight the impact of inscription technologies on poetry writing and reading. Pournara 9 INTRODUCTION This dissertation examines the experimental poetics of the North American poets Susan Howe, Stephanie Strickland, and Caitlin Fisher. Since currently we are historically witnessing a very interesting turn in the intersection of both analog and digital technologies, these three writers are trying to reconfigure what these technologies and their capabilities are as well as the limits of print and digital tools when put into the service of literary and, in particular, poetic production. As examined through the work of these three poets, the essence of poetry is constantly reconfigured through the different media of its production that draw attention to the etymology and initial meaning of poetry connecting poetry-writing with poetry- making. Studying the work of Howe, Strickland, and Fisher, the readers’ attention shifts to the poetics of each writer, highlighting through her work a different aspect of poesis. This doctoral dissertation will be analyzing the interdisciplinary potential of each one of these poets that is brought forward with their writing while studying their works as nodal points within a network of innovation and experimentation that is constantly evolving and expanding. To begin with, the volume #WomenTechLit (2017) constitutes the most recent publication in women’s innovative writing edited by María Mencía with contributions from North and South America, Europe and Australia. In this book, Mencía takes an important step towards the study and mapping of the territory of the work of women practitioners of electronic literature. My contribution with the present dissertation is to discuss the cases of Stephanie Strickland and Caitlin Fisher that are briefly mentioned in the volume,1 and provide an in-depth analysis of their work as well as 1 It should be mentioned that Strickland contributes an essay to the collection with the title “The Death and Re-Distribution of V” in which she describes the process of adapting
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