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Mapping and Twentieth-Century American Poetry

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Mapping and Twentieth-Century American Poetry The Dissertation Committee for Alba Rebecca Newmann certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: “Language is not a vague province”: Mapping and Twentieth -Century American Poetry Committee: ________________________ ______ Wayne Lesser, Supervisor ______________________________ Thomas Cable, Co -Supervisor ______________________________ Brian Bremen ______________________________ Mia Carter ______________________________ Nichole Wiedemann “Language is not a vague province”: Mapping and Twentieth -Century American Poetry by Alba Rebecca Newmann, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2006 Acknowledgements I wish to express my appreciation to each of my dissertation committee members, Wayne, Tom, Mia, Brian, and Nichole, for their insight and encouragement throughout the writing of this document. My family has my heartfelt thanks as well , for their unflagging support in this, and all my endeavors. To my lovely friends and colleagues at the University of Texas —I am grateful to have found myself in such a vibrant and collegial community ; it surely facilitated my completion of this project . And, finally, to The Flightpath, without which, many things would be different. iii “Language is not a vague province”: Mapping and Twentieth -Century American Poetry Publication No. _________ Alba Rebecca Newmann, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2006 Supervisors: Wayne Lesser and Thomas Cable In recent years, the terms “mapping” and “cartography” have been used with increasing frequency to describe literature engaged with place. The limitation of much of this scholarship its failure to investigate how maps themselves operate —how they establish relationships and organize knowledge. In this document, I offer a rigorous examination of the structural and epistemological parallels between the fields of poetics and cartography. I argue that William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Hass can rightly be named cartographic poets, not only because they are invested in iv places, nor because they write evocatively about maps, but because, while maintaining the commitments to order and analogy long associated with both poetry and mapping, they deliberately challenge the traditional sources of their poetic authority, which include an emphasis on visual mas tery and the singular, “authentic” voice of the lyric poet. By offering these challenges, they participate in what J. Hillis Miller identifies as twentieth - century American poetry’s desire to “abandon the will to power over things,” or the “emerging skepti cism toward all mastering discourses of vision and voice” that Barbara Page discusses. While each of these poets calls up specific geographical frames of reference — New Jersey, Brazil, Northern California —geographic presence is not, in and of itself, enough to qualify their texts as maps. Maps contain an important dual potential: to master and control what they depict, and to serve as testaments and invitations to exploration. My discussion of cartographic authority, particularly in claims to objectivity, draws on the works of J.B. Harley and Mark Monmonier. Maps, however, allow us to explore not only physical territories, but conceptual ones as well; and it is in the investigation of these potentials I turn to the works of theorists such as Gilles Deleuze an d Félix Guattari, Frederick Jameson, and James Corner. v Table of Contents Introduction..............................................................................................................1 Chapter 1 Telling It Slant......................................................................................11 Chapter 2 Mapping Paterson................................................................................38 Chapter 3 The Coast is Never Clear .....................................................................75 Chapter 4 Archipelago Poems ............................................................................125 Epilogue Reading Map s, Reading Poems ...........................................................163 Bibliography ........................................................................................................176 Vita ....................................................................................................................184 vi Introduction References to mapping and comparisons between literary works and cartographic ones have played an increasing role within literary studies in recent years. 1 The map now makes appearances not only in the discussion of works typically characterized as travel literature, but as an explanatory metaphor for multiple forms of textual representation. This proliferation of cartography -inflected discourse is not limited to the study of literature —maps are called on to explain the representational and epistemological activities of many fields, including comparative education, cultural studies, sociology , and ethnography, as well as Marxist economic discourse, to name only a few —leading prominent geograp her Denis Cosgrove to comment, the “fashionable fascination with the map within the humanities and cultural studies is widespread; the ‘cartographic trope’ is seemingly ubiquitous in intellectual enquiry” (Mappings 3). While some comparative work is being done within literary study — looking at synchronic textual and cartographic production and the cultural contexts these collectively reflect —the majority of references draw upon a more generalized or abstracted sense of what mapping means. Within literary cr iticism, the seductions of the terms associated with cartography —map, mapping, itinerary, travelogue, guide, discovery, exploration, power, representation—are palpable. In part, the lure of the map can be attributed to the breadth 1 The MLA online bibliography currently lists 2 73 articles published between 2000 and 2005 alone containing the word “mapping” in their title. One hundred and sixty three articles published during this same time period include the words “map” or “maps” in their titles (exclusive of those that use the t erm mapping). Forty -four entries include the words “cartography” or “cartographies” in their titles. This same trend is evident in the number of professional conferences and panel sessions that have been dedicated to topics related to mapping and cartograp hy in recent years. 1 and richness of the field s of inquiry to which mapping gives us access: nationalism (and with it, colonial and post -colonial histories) ; studies of landscape and environment; urban studies ; aesthetics ; the intersections of science, rhetoric, and art ; systems theory ; cognitive theo ry ; and, of course, geography and travel. Unfortunately, well -versed as we are with simile, analogy, and metaphor, it is almost too easy for literary critics and scholars to say “This maps X onto Y,” or “This text is a map of that culture or that experien ce.” The limitation of much of this literary scholarship is its failure to investigate how maps themselves operate—not only what they describe, but how they establish relationships and organize knowledge. The familiarity of the map as a tool may lend itsel f to this vague approach —the assumption being that we all know what a map is, how it works. But because literary scholars so rarely offer a clear or thorough definition of how they are using their cartographic terms, they remain unaccountable for their cla ims that specific work s should be considered act s of cartographic literature. If, as the preponderance of mapping metaphors and references suggests, we are already using terms pertinent to other fields of inquiry , we would do well to investigate those ter ms, and their usages further, to determine the scope, and possible limitations of their applications to our own field. This is my project in the following pages. I examine both the structural and epistemological parallels between the fie lds of poetics and cartography, arguing that, within American poetry from the post -war era to the present, we see poets negotiat ing the authority of their medium in ways that can be productively compared to negotiations of cartographic authority in various twentieth -century mapping 2 practices. Both poets and map makers are creators of and subjects to tradition and authority. And the works they produce contain an important dual potential: to master and control what they depict and to serve as testaments and invitations to explo ration. I argue, specifically, that the American poets William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Hass can rightly be named cartographic poets, not only because they call up specific geographical frames of reference —New Jersey, Brazil, Northern California —nor because they write evocatively about maps, but because, while maintaining commitments to image, order , and analogy long associated with both poetry and mapping, they deliberately challenge the traditional sources of their poetic authority, which include an emphasis on visual mastery and the singular, “authentic” voice of the lyric poet. Many of the works I discuss here share in the radical philosophical and political commitments of early and mid -twentieth century Europe and America —ways of thinking and acting that seek to challenge traditional social and epistemological hierarchies, to emphasize movement and multiplicity, while disrupting
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