The Milling Rooms
| dc.contributor.author | Lee, Michael | |
| dc.contributor.chair | Hutchinson, Ishion | en_US |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Van Clief-Stefanon, Lyrae | en_US |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Mort, Valzhyna | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2023-03-30T18:48:46Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2022-12 | |
| dc.description | 101 pages | en_US |
| dc.description | MFA theses in English Language and Literature are not available for direct download. Users wishing to access an MFA thesis in this collection may request access by clicking the link to the restricted file(s) and completing the request form. If we have contact information for the author, we will contact them and request permission to provide access. If we do not have contact information or the author denies or does not respond to our inquiry, we will not be able to provide access. | |
| dc.description.abstract | In his Eulogy for Franz Ferdinand in July 1914, Karl Kraus wrote that Austria was a “laboratory of the apocalypse”. A month later, Europe erupted into total war on an industrial scale yet unseen: poison gas, concentration camps, machine guns, flamethrowers, and aerial bombardments. Yet nearly all of these new weapons of mass slaughter had already been used in Europe's colonies. The Maxim gun was first used by the British against the Matabele, the Germans innovated the concentration camp in the genocide of the Herrero and Nama people, and Italy carried out the first recorded aerial and chemical attacks in Ethiopia. If Kraus was right that the heart of one of Europe’s “great” empires was a laboratory for apocalypse, then it was doubly the case that the colonial periphery beyond Europe’s metropoles were also laboratories of apocalypse, without which World War One would not have been possible. The psychological and material framework required to enact colonial genocides were the same required to enact similar violences against one’s neighbors. Where geographical distance was minimal, the imagined and narrative distances became nearly as vast. This collection of poetry, The Milling Rooms racks interrelated projects of Western colonialism, Nation-building and industrialization as vectors of apocalypse, positioning apocalypse not as a future possibility but as a present condition, historical precedent and policy position. From the advent of the guillotine, the machine gun, and cast-steel to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, American Westward Expansion, the industrial slaughterhouse and Nazi death camps, the poems within this book illuminate and indict these networks of terror less as perfectly linear processes with clear beginnings and endings, and more a genealogical constellation of events and ideas. Beyond simply identifying these relationships, The Milling Rooms examines how these apocalyptic logics have shaped race, place, memory/imagination, the idea of the human, and relationships to violence and nature in the 20th and 21st centuries. How has the evolution of State sanctioned executions shaped our understanding of citizenship and public/private space? How did railroads and industrial slaughterhouses map a blueprint for modern war and the Holocaust? Where in our daily lives can we witness (and apprehend) these legacies of horror? | en_US |
| dc.description.embargo | 10000-01-01 | |
| dc.identifier.other | Lee_cornell_0058_11602 | |
| dc.identifier.other | http://dissertations.umi.com/cornell:11602 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1813/112885 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.title | The Milling Rooms | en_US |
| dc.type | dissertation or thesis | en_US |
| dcterms.license | https://hdl.handle.net/1813/59810.2 | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | English Language and Literature | |
| thesis.degree.grantor | Cornell University | |
| thesis.degree.level | Master of Fine Arts | |
| thesis.degree.name | M.F.A., English Language and Literature |
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