DOCSLIB.ORG

Excuses for Emotion

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Excuses for Emotion Excuses for Emotion A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences January 2013 by Joe DeLong M.A., University of Cincinnati, 2006 B.A., The Ohio State University, 2004 Committee Chair: Lisa Hogeland, Ph.D. Abstract: Excuses for Emotion analyzes representations of emotion in recent American poetry on the subject of parents and gay and lesbian icons. Much of this poetry demonstrates affection for and attachment to those figures, but those positive emotions are seldom without complications, whether ambivalence, resentment, doubt, or self- questioning. Moreover, even poems with a primarily negative emotional register tend to have similar complications. The standard explanation for these complications would be that human emotions are indeed complex, and that the engagement with complexity gives poetry its value as a genre. In practice, though, this complication has become less an achievement than a requirement. If it is to be taken seriously from an institutional perspective, contemporary American poetry requires what I call an excuse for emotion, a rhetorical cue that makes emotional “acceptable” by complicating it, calling its authenticity or accuracy into question, or allying it with a political cause taken more seriously than the emotion itself. My major argument is that one should not unquestioningly accept these conventions constraining the emotional content of poetry, which arise from a set of relatively unexamined assumptions about quality and significance, both in the field of literary scholarship and in the community of American poetry. I see this project as related to a recent interest in emotion within literary studies that has been called emotion theory, which considers the ways in which expressions of emotion and emotional norms carry cultural meaning. Chapter One, “Sympathetic Sons,” looks at the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and Robert Hass. Both poets write about mothers suffering from significant mental illness, which creates distance between them and their sons, even as the sons retain a strong sense of affection for them. Chapter Two, “Incomplete Daughters,” looks at the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Sharon Olds. Both poets write about parents whom the speaker admires and desires affection from but who ultimately deny them that affection, which sends them looking for it elsewhere. Chapter Three, “Displaced Children,” looks at the poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye, Rafael Campo, and Li-Young Lee. They write about parents whose experience as immigrants influences the ways in which their children understand, relate to, and interact with them, with the relationship both complicated and enriched by cultural difference. Chapter Four, “Women of Power,” looks at the poetry of lesbian feminist poets Adrienne Rich, Judy Grahn, and June Jordan. Focusing on building optimism and determination while preventing complacency, they write about women throughout history who have had forms of power, but who also, for various reasons, have experienced failures of that power. Chapter Five, “The Promise of Whitman,” looks at the poetry of gay poets Allen Ginsberg, Richard Howard, Timothy Liu, and Mark Doty. They express attachment to Walt Whitman’s idealistic vision, even as they call it into question, especially insofar as it contrasts with the actual experiences of gay life. ii iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to Professors Lisa Hogeland, Jon Kamholtz, and John Drury for their insight and encouragement during my time at the University of Cincinnati. I want to thank my mother Rebecca and my sister Lisa for their love and support. iv CONTENTS Introduction 1 1. Sympathetic Sons 30 Allen Ginsberg 34 Robert Hass 58 Conclusion 81 2. Incomplete Daughters 87 Sylvia Plath 93 Sharon Olds 114 Conclusion 148 3. Displaced Children 156 Naomi Shihab Nye 161 Rafael Campo 173 Li-Young Lee 189 Conclusion 201 4. Women of Power 209 Adrienne Rich 213 Judy Grahn 226 June Jordan 233 Conclusion 243 5. The Promise of Whitman 250 Allen Ginsberg 255 Richard Howard 262 Timothy Liu 280 Mark Doty 285 Conclusion 292 Conclusion 297 Works Cited 308 v INTRODUCTION In American poetry from roughly the 1960s onward, parents have become one of the foremost subjects. For many people, the relationship with their parents forms a cornerstone of their life experiences and their own sense of self. Certainly that is the cultural narrative, and it is quite possibly a fundamental part of human experience. Many commentators, particularly on the right, have lamented the breakdown of the “traditional” family, by which they mean a heterosexual couple who have produced biological children in the context of legally recognized marriage. Of course, that family structure, never having been entirely the norm, is now even less so, and the stigma of alternative family structures has decreased. On the other hand, numerous factors such as increased life expectancy, smaller family size, longer periods of education, later marriage and childbirth, increased housing costs, and increasing connectedness through technology have led to new and, in some ways, stronger bonds between many parents and their adult children.1 Now, even in good circumstances the relationship between parent and child can be fraught with guilt, blame, differences in expectations, and differences in worldview. In other situations, the relationship can be non-existent or pathological. Still, to the consternation of cultural commentators who lament the rise of “helicopter parents” and other forms of perceived excess in closeness between parent and adult child, this shift has occurred, and it has been embraced by many. 1 As for the time parents spend with their younger children, Garey and Valerie Ramey write, “After three decades of decline, the amount of time spent by parents on childcare in the United States began to rise dramatically in the mid- 1990s” (129). I would speculate that this increased involvement would persist through at least early adulthood, which, anecdotally, is supported by the frequent mention in major news outlets of “helicopter parents” heavily involved in their children’s extracurricular activities in preparation for college and their actual lives in college. Interestingly, Ramey and Ramey add, “Finding no empirical support for standard explanations, such as selection or income effects, we argue instead that increased competition for college admissions may be an important factor” (129). This college-related focus suggests that this increased level of parent involvement has class-related dimensions. That said, it is precisely class strata containing a high proportion of college-educated individuals from which poets, tied as they are to the academy, tend to emerge. 1 Other factors—aesthetic, intellectual, and academic—have also played a role in the proliferation of poetry about parents. One has been a reaction against the New Critical2 privileging of “impersonality,” a dubious concept advocated by T.S. Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”3 This change brought a general expansion of subject matter, with an increase in emphasis on personal experience as exemplified most famously by the so-called Confessional poets,4 but also by the Beat poets, Black Arts poets, feminist poets, and others. These writers challenged assumptions about what was appropriate subject matter and tone, which was part of a broader challenge to assumptions about whose experiences mattered and were worthy of attention from “serious” people. In its simplest terms, this shift reflected awareness that the personal was political, and vice versa.5 So-called domestic concerns, long associated with female experience, began to be taken more seriously, and their reflexive dismissal began to become more suspect. When I spoke to Rita Dove during a question and answer session in 2010, she said that she saw another factor being the mid-century rise of the writing workshop, along with the 2 Samuel Maio writes, “The New Criticism, of which [James E. B.] Breslin and [Ralph J.] Mills wrote, espoused the view that ‘a work of art is an object in itself,’ and some of the criteria of this ‘objective poem’ theory were the autonomy of every poem, verbal ingenuity and wit, sustained objectivity, complex strains of irony, and aesthetic distance. The revolt against such New Critical ideas of verse—including also regular meter counts and rhymed stanzas, allusions to literature or other arts, subjects of ideation and philosophy (but not of one’s subjective experience, which resulted in the poem being considered ‘a neutral object’)—informed the basis of contemporary personal poetry and its voices. This ‘revolution in poetic taste’ (to borrow a phrase of Louis Simpson) manifests itself in verse that is markedly different in subject and style from New Critical poetry, but which retains some remnants of the modernists’ personae” (8-9). 3 Eliot writes, “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things” (10-11). 4 I understand the “Confessional poets” to be Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman. This term refers to their at-times taboo and sensational subject matter—such as depression, substance abuse, tempestuous relationships, and sexuality—described from the perspective of a speaker whom one might read as the poet him or herself, despite stylized language and the occasional use of persona. 5 Even the Confessional poets, less explicitly political than feminists and Black Arts poets, challenged social norms, especially gender norms, in politically significant ways; as Diane Middlebrook puts it, “Confessional poetry was not overtly political, but it participated in the protest against Impersonality as a poetic value by reinstating an insistently autobiographical first person engaged in resistance to the pressure to conform.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Honorary Degree Recipients 1977 – Present
    Board of Trustees HONORARY DEGREE RECIPIENTS 1977 – PRESENT Name Year Awarded Name Year Awarded Claire Collins Harvey, C‘37 Harry Belafonte 1977 Patricia Roberts Harris Katherine Dunham 1990 Toni Morrison 1978 Nelson Mandela Marian Anderson Marguerite Ross Barnett Ruby Dee Mattiwilda Dobbs, C‘46 1979 1991 Constance Baker Motley Miriam Makeba Sarah Sage McAlpin Audrey Forbes Manley, C‘55 Mary French Rockefeller 1980 Jesse Norman 1992 Mabel Murphy Smythe* Louis Rawls 1993 Cardiss Collins Oprah Winfrey Effie O’Neal Ellis, C‘33 Margaret Walker Alexander Dorothy I. Height 1981 Oran W. Eagleson Albert E. Manley Carol Moseley Braun 1994 Mary Brookins Ross, C‘28 Donna Shalala Shirley Chisholm Susan Taylor Eleanor Holmes Norton 1982 Elizabeth Catlett James Robinson Alice Walker* 1995 Maya Angelou Elie Wiesel Etta Moten Barnett Rita Dove Anne Cox Chambers 1983 Myrlie Evers-Williams Grace L. Hewell, C‘40 Damon Keith 1996 Sam Nunn Pinkie Gordon Lane, C‘49 Clara Stanton Jones, C‘34 Levi Watkins, Jr. Coretta Scott King Patricia Roberts Harris 1984 Jeanne Spurlock* Claire Collins Harvey, C’37 1997 Cicely Tyson Bernice Johnson Reagan, C‘70 Mary Hatwood Futrell Margaret Taylor Burroughs Charles Merrill Jewel Plummer Cobb 1985 Romae Turner Powell, C‘47 Ruth Davis, C‘66 Maxine Waters Lani Guinier 1998 Gwendolyn Brooks Alexine Clement Jackson, C‘56 William H. Cosby 1986 Jackie Joyner Kersee Faye Wattleton Louis Stokes Lena Horne Aurelia E. Brazeal, C‘65 Jacob Lawrence Johnnetta Betsch Cole 1987 Leontyne Price Dorothy Cotton Earl Graves Donald M. Stewart 1999 Selma Burke Marcelite Jordan Harris, C‘64 1988 Pearl Primus Lee Lorch Dame Ruth Nita Barrow Jewel Limar Prestage 1989 Camille Hanks Cosby Deborah Prothrow-Stith, C‘75 * Former Student As of November 2019 Board of Trustees HONORARY DEGREE RECIPIENTS 1977 – PRESENT Name Year Awarded Name Year Awarded Max Cleland Herschelle Sullivan Challenor, C’61 Maxine D.
    [Show full text]
  • Modernist Aesthetic in the Case of Lord Alfred Douglas and Marie Carmichael Stopes
    33 The Poetry That Dare Not Speak Its Name: Modernist Aesthetic in the Case of Lord Alfred Douglas and Marie Carmichael Stopes Christina Hauck Kansas State University An improbable friendship sprang up in 1938 when one “Mrs Carmi- chael,” representing herself as a young mother, wrote Lord Alfred Douglas to show him a sonnet and ask his advice about publishing it. Little realizing that he was entering into correspondence with the notorious birth control advocate, Marie Carmichael Stopes, the staunchly Catholic Douglas wrote back kindly, calling Mrs. Carmichael a “pleasant poet” and lamenting his own difficulties publishing (Hall 282). If Douglas didn’t understand quite whom he was writing to, Stopes herself, rabidly homophobic and anti-Catholic, must have: Douglas’s claim to fame lay less in his poetry, whose quality critics debated fiercely when they bothered to read it at all, but in his having been a central actor in the events leading up to Oscar Wilde’s trial and imprisonment.1 By the time the correspondence had be- gun, Douglas had long converted to Catholicism and was admitting only to limited homosexual activities over a limited period, with Wilde or any- one else; Stopes apparently believed him.2 After several months, Stopes revealed her “true” identity. Douglas, understandably, was nervous. In a letter to George Bernard Shaw, he writes: I am fated to make friends with my enemies. For the last three months I have been corresponding with a lady who wrote about my poetry and poetry in general. She expressed great admira- tion for me as a poet.
    [Show full text]
  • Of Gay Studies in Poland
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Jagiellonian Univeristy Repository Teksty Drugie 2013, 1, s. 118-134 Special Issue – English Edition Why I Do Not Want to Write about Old-Polish Male-Gedders: A Contribution to the “Archeology” of Gay Studies in Poland. Piotr Oczko Przeł. Krystyna Mazur http://rcin.org.pl Piotr OCZKO Why I Do Not Want to Write about Old-Polish Male-bedders: A Contribution to the ‘Archeology” of Gay Studies in Poland Honi soit qui mal y pense Feminist researchers tracing the signs of creativity and activity ofwomen in past centuries often metaphorically refer to their predecessors as mothers, grandmothers, and great­ grandmothers. Wanting to write about homosexuality in historical Poland, 1 encounter from the start a terminological dilemma. What would 1 call the potential heroes of my article, those “Old Polish gays,” my “ancestors"? After all, they cannot be fathers to me for the very use of this term would legitimize patriarchal discourse. Anyway, more often than not they have probably left no offspring. Perhaps 1 should provocatively address them as aunts and uncles? 1n Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century,^ John Boswell writes about the complex problem of terminology, arguing, however, for the use of the terms “lesbian” and “gay” even in reference to past epochs. Yet 1 will not follow that sugges­ tion, because, especially in Poland, those are usually affirmative terms and one of the definitions of a gay man describes him as a homosexual who accepts and affirms his psychosexual identity.
    [Show full text]
  • Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre Collection
    LIBRARY Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre Collection This collection was set up in collaboration with the Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre to promote contemporary poetry from the UK, Ireland, United States and beyond. It comprises books that have been shortlisted for 6 poetry prizes from the UK, Ireland, USA and beyond. The books are housed in the Headington Library (Level 4, Zone D) and they can all be borrowed. Find out more about the collection and the Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre on our web pages TS Eliot Prize for Poetry The TS Eliot Prize for Poetry is presented annually by The Poetry Book Society. The Collection covers the books shortlisted for the prize since 2012. TS Eliot Prize shortlist 2018 Winner: Hannah Sullivan, Three poems Phoebe Power, Shrines of Upper Austria Tracy K. Smith, Wade in the water + Ailbhe Darcy – Insistence Terrance Hayes – American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins Zaffar Kunial – Us Nick Laird – Feel Free Fiona Moore – The Distal Point Sean O'Brien – Europa Richard Scott – Soho TS Eliot Prize shortlist 2017 Winner: Ocean Vuong, Night sky with exit wounds Tara Bergin, The tragic death of Eleanor Marx Caroline Bird, In these days of prohibition Douglas Dunn, The noise of a fly Leontia Flynn, The radio Roddy Lumsden, So glad I'm me Robert Minhinnick, Diary of the last man Michael Symmons Roberts, Mancunia Jacqueline Saphra, All my mad mothers James Sheard, The abandoned settlements TS Eliot Prize shortlist 2016 Winner: Jacob Polley, Jackself Rachael Boast, Void Studies Vahni Capildeo, Measures of Expatriation Ian Duhig, The Blind Roadmaker J O Morgan, Interference Pattern WWW.BROOKES.AC.UK/LIBRARY Bernard O’Donoghue, The Seasons of Cullen Church Alice Oswald, Falling Awake Denise Riley, Say Something Back Ruby Robinson, Every Little Sound Katharine Towers, The Remedies TS Eliot Prize shortlist 2015 Winner: Sarah Howe, Loop of Jade Mark Doty, Deep Lane Tracey Herd, Not in this World Selima Hill, Jutland Tim Liardet, The World before Snow Les A.
    [Show full text]
  • By Joseph Christopher
    RACE, IDENTITY AND PERSPECTIVES OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN IN THE SELECTED WORKS OF TONI MORRISON AND RITA DOVE BY JOSEPH CHRISTOPHER MA/ARTS/5043/2010-2011 BEING A RESEARCH SUBMITTED TO THE POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL, AHMADU BELLO UNIVERSITY, ZARIA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE AWARD OF MASTER OF ARTS (M.A) IN ENGLISH LITERATURE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND LITERARY STUDIES, FACULTY OF ARTS AHMADU BELLO UNIVERSITY, ZARIA 2014 i DECLARATION I hereby declare that the work in the thesis titled “Race, Identity and Perspectives of African American Women in the Selected Works of Toni Morrison and Rita Dove” has been written by me in the Department of English and Literary Studies under the supervision of Dr. Edward Abah Ochigbo and Dr. Suleiman Jaji. The information derived from the literature has been duly acknowledged in the text and a list of references provided. No part of this thesis was previously presented for another degree or diploma at any university. …………………………… …………………………. …………………………. Name of student Signature Date ii CERTIFICATION This thesis entitled “Race Identity and Perspectives of African American Women in the Selected Works of Toni Morrison and Rita Dove” by Joseph Christopher meets the regulations governing the award of Masters of Arts Degree in Literature of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, is approved for its contribution to knowledge and Literary Presentation. ………………………………………………………… ………………… Chairman, Supervisory Committee Date ……………………………………………………….. ……………………. Member, Supervisory Committee Date ……………………………………………………… ………………….. Head of Department Date ……………………………………………………... …………………… Dean, Postgraduate School Date iii DEDICATION This work is deservedly dedicated to the memory of my father, Late Mr. Amobi C. Christopher (Igwe), the one who kick-started this dream.
    [Show full text]
  • Sharon Olds : the Poetry Foundation 12/5/12 11:55 AM
    Sharon Olds : The Poetry Foundation 12/5/12 11:55 AM Home > Poems & Poets > Sharon Olds Sharon Olds b. 1942 Sharon Olds is one of contemporary poetry’s leading voices. Winner of several prestigious awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, Olds is known for writing intensely personal, emotionally scathing poetry which graphically depicts family life as well as global political events. “Sharon Olds is David Bartolomi enormously self-aware,” wrote David Leavitt in the Voice Literary Supplement. “Her poetry is remarkable for its candor, its eroticism, and its power to move.” Olds’s candor has led to both high praise and condemnation. Her work is often built out of intimate details concerning her children, her fraught relationship with her parents and, most controversially, her sex life. Critic Helen Vendler publically disparaged Olds’s work as self-indulgent, sensationalist and even pornographic. However, Olds has just as many supporters who praise her poetry for its sensitive portrayal of emotional states, as well as its bold depiction of “unpoetic” life events. Discussing Olds in Poetry, Lisel Mueller noted: “By far the greater number of her poems are believable and touching, and their intensity does not interfere with craftsmanship. Listening to Olds, we hear a proud, urgent, human voice.” And the poet Billy Collins has called her “a poet of sex and the psyche,” adding that “Sharon Olds is infamous for her subject matter alone…but her closer readers know her as a poet of constant linguistic surprise.” Olds’s poetry is known for its accessible and direct free verse style.
    [Show full text]
  • The Poetry of Rita Dove
    University of New Hampshire University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository Doctoral Dissertations Student Scholarship Winter 1999 Language's "bliss of unfolding" in and through history, autobiography and myth: The poetry of Rita Dove Carol Keyes University of New Hampshire, Durham Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation Recommended Citation Keyes, Carol, "Language's "bliss of unfolding" in and through history, autobiography and myth: The poetry of Rita Dove" (1999). Doctoral Dissertations. 2107. https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation/2107 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Scholarship at University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMi films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps.
    [Show full text]
  • Sephardic Jews, an Article in the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality
    Article from the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, ed. Wayne Dynes (New York: Garland, 1990). Note: no footnotes could be published with this encyclopedia article. Also, the diacritics needed for accurate transliteration from Arabic were not available. The asterisk indicates a reference to another article in the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality. Jews, Sephardic. The splendor of the Jewish culture of medieval Spain (“Sepharad,” in Hebrew) would be hard to exaggerate. In a symbiotic relationship with Muslim and then Christian rulers, Jews enjoyed from the eighth through the tenth centuries (in al- Ándalus) and from the eleventh through the four- teenth centuries (in Christian Spain) as much stabil- ity and legal protection as they had ever had. They prospered economically and demographically, and made up a larger proportion of the population than in any other European country. During some periods Jews considered Spain a historically Jewish country, and their new homeland. Jewish intellectual life and the Hebrew language were reborn in Spain. There was the greatest flower- ing of Hebrew poetry since Biblical times, and Hebrew was used for the first time for secular poetry. Pioneering work was done in Hebrew grammar, lexicography, and comparative Semitic linguistics; Spanish Jewry produced philosophers and scientists; Jews participated in government as nowhere else in Europe. Except for the Ashkenazi Jews of central Europe, Spain was quickly recognized by all but the most isolated Jews as their intellectual and religious leader. Although the history is complicated, and during the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries most of the Jewish population lived in Christian rather than Islamic territory, the fate of the Jews in the Iberian peninsula was linked with that of Islam.
    [Show full text]
  • My Children, Teaching, and Nimrod the Word
    XIV Passions: My Children, Teaching, and Nimrod The word passion has most often been associated with strong sexual desire or lust. I have felt a good deal of that kind of passion in my life but I prefer not to speak of it at this moment. Instead, it is the appetite for life in a broader sense that seems to have driven most of my actions. Moreover, the former craving is focused on an individual (unless the sexual drive is indiscriminant) and depends upon that individual for a response in order to intensify or even maintain. Fixating on my first husband—sticking to him no matter what his response, not being able to say goodbye to him —almost killed me. I had to shift the focus of my sexual passion to another and another and another in order to receive the spark that would rekindle and sustain me. That could have been dangerous; I was lucky. But with the urge to create, the intense passion to “make something,” there was always another outlet, another fulfillment just within reach. My children, teaching, and Nimrod, the journal I edited for so many years, eased my hunger, provided a way to participate and delight in something always changing and growing. from The passion to give birth to and grow with my children has, I believe, been expressed in previous chapters. I loved every aspect of having children conception, to the four births, three of which I watched in a carefully placed mirror at the foot of the hospital delivery room bed: May 6, 1957, birth of Leslie Ringold; November 8, 1959, birth of John Ringold; August 2, 1961: birth of Jim Ringold; July 27, 1964: birth of Suzanne Ringold (Harman).
    [Show full text]
  • The Poetry of Rita Dove
    Georgia Southern University Digital Commons@Georgia Southern Honors College Theses 2020 Breaking Black Boundaries: The Poetry of Rita Dove LaVonna D. Wright Georgia Southern University Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/honors-theses Part of the Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons Recommended Citation Wright, LaVonna D., "Breaking Black Boundaries: The Poetry of Rita Dove" (2020). Honors College Theses. 549. https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/honors-theses/549 This thesis (open access) is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons@Georgia Southern. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors College Theses by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons@Georgia Southern. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Breaking Black Boundaries: The Poetry of Rita Dove An Honors Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Honors in the Department of Literature. By LaVonna D. Wright Under the mentorship of Joe Pellegrino ABSTRACT By tracing the motifs of domestic space, classical and popular music, and ballroom dancing within Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah, Grace Notes, Sonata Mulattica, and American Smooth, I assert that she both challenges and expands Black poetic culture by exploring topics previously considered outside of the purview of Black poets. This analysis allows me to demonstrate her ability as a poet to move beyond simplistic, derivative, and ultimately constraining cultural expectations. Dove uses these motifs to expand the critically and culturally-imposed constrictions of Black poetry. Thesis Mentor:________________________ Dr. Joe Pellegrino Honors Director:_______________________ Dr. Steven Engel April 2020 Department of Literature University Honors Program Georgia Southern University 1 Acknowledgements I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Dr.
    [Show full text]
  • Personae, Same-Sex Desire, and Salvation in the Poetry of Marbod of Rennes, Baudri of Bourgueil, and Hildebert of Lavardin
    PERSONAE, SAME-SEX DESIRE, AND SALVATION IN THE POETRY OF MARBOD OF RENNES, BAUDRI OF BOURGUEIL, AND HILDEBERT OF LAVARDIN by Tison Pugh “Luxuriae vitio castissimus en ego fio, Quod duros mollit, hoc molitiem mihi tollit.” Marbod of Rennes (“Lo, I am made completely chaste by the sin of lechery. / [The vice] which makes hard men soft takes away my softness.”) In the Christian milieu of the western European medieval world, poets adopted a wide-range of stances—from the laudatory to the condem- natory—towards same-sex relations.1 Some monastic writers, however, appear to conflate the two oppositional views, both praising male beauty in highly eroticized terms and damning men who fall to the pleasures of homoerotic desire. How is one to understand this apparent contradiction in which the right hand of the poet seems to praise what the left hand proscribes, in which the writer anathematizes what appear to be his own sexual predilections?2 In this paper, I examine the para- dox of holy men expressing unholy desire in reference to three Franco- Latin writers of the early twelfth century: Marbod of Rennes, Baudri of Bourgueil, and Hildebert of Lavardin. Playing at the boundaries be- tween licit and illicit identities, these men speak taboo desire by creat- ing a safe space for themselves through the alternative performances of sinful and of saved personae. The performance of same-sex desire 1A note on vocabulary: I refrain from using terms—including gay, homosexual, and queer—which some scholars consider anachronistic in a study of medieval sexuality. Instead, I employ a lexicon including same-sex and homoerotic, which I consider to be descriptive of the behaviors in question, though not presumptive of modern ideas about identity.
    [Show full text]
  • The Normal and the Abnormal: Treading a Moral Sexual Path in a Postcolonial Context
    The normal and the abnormal: treading a moral sexual path in a postcolonial context Nadeem Mahomed MnM Working Paper No 10 The normal and the abnormal: treading a moral sexual path in a postcolonial context Nadeem Mahomed1 MnM Working Paper No 10 Introduction The purpose of this paper is to offer a brief analysis and some insights into sexual diversity in contemporary Muslim discourse.2 I will focus on the nexus between sexual diversity, secularism and empire as sites of contestation and collaboration that continue to influence articulations and constructions of how to be Muslim and be part of a sexual minority. My purpose is not to provide a comprehensive or exhaustive examination of the issues at hand but rather I hope to demonstrate some of the challenges facing contemporary sexual ethics and its relationship to power as well as to initiate some pertinent questions about the colonial and postcolonial legacies of our current sexual economy. In doing so, my aim is not to delve into theological and religious debates and pronouncements on the permissibility and appropriateness of same-sex sexual desire and conduct; rather my intention is to think 1 Nadeem Mahomed obtained BA and LLB degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He was admitted as an attorney of the High Court of South Africa and is currently a MA candidate in Religion Studies at the University of Johannesburg. 2 This is part of a larger project that analyses three other focal points in the discussion on sexual diversity and Islam: the evolution and representation of sexual acts and identities; Islamic law and same-sex sexual conduct; and alternatives to religious legal legitimisation.
    [Show full text]