Date of Award

2019

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

English

First Advisor

Major Jackson

Abstract

This thesis examines the use of the body in avant-garde poetics, relating it to both theory and contemporary culture. An outline of how the body has been depicted, represented, and formalized in modernism is made, and contemporary issues involving the body, from what Meredith M. Render calls the “alienability” of the body to posthuman hybridity and technological transcendence. Language poetry, including the works of M. SourbeSe Philip, Clark Coolidge, Steve McCaffery, Charles Bernstein, Karen Mac Cormack, Lyn Hejinian, and Bruce Andrews is then examined for the body’s fraught usage in a generally non-referential poetics. The body’s place in conceptual writing combines contemporary technologies with a look back at Antonin Artaud’s corps sans organes.

Language

en

Number of Pages

71 p.

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