Inoperative Poetics: Lyric And Anarchy In The Era Of Financialization

Sverjensky, Tatiana

Inoperative Poetics: Lyric And Anarchy In The Era Of Financialization

Abstract

My dissertation approaches longstanding debates about the sociality of poetry and the current status of the lyric genre by looking closely at how poetry and anarchist praxis have reimagined questions of subjectivity and identity over the latter half of the past century. While poetry, especially the lyric, has long been dismissed and at times openly denounced for its inability to adequately engage in productive political discourse and action, I argue that lyric poetry's refusal to fully reproduce dominant linguistic and economic paradigms - the tendency towards inoperativity that it shares with the anarchist refusal to participate in society via the acceptable channels - allows it to open up a mode of conceptual transformation that is also central to anarchist theories of broader sociopolitical transformation. I explore generic experimentation from Elizabeth Bishop's late Romanticism to Michael Palmer's Language poetics to feminist epic at the turn of the 21st century, tracing the features of poetic language that allow poets to explore new forms of temporality and subjectivity. My project thus contributes to ongoing attempts to define the lyric genre, while articulating the challenges that poetry presents to predominant understandings of what it means to be political. The inoperative mode shared by the modern lyric and anarchism takes on particular significance in the context of the economic restructuring of the latter half of the past century. I argue that changes in the production of value - from the expansion of American global hegemony during World War II to the incorporation of emotional labor into the workplace in more recent years - have transformed the limits and possibilities of political resistance and poetic experimentation in the United States and other higher-GDP countries. This terrain is iii expanding today with the global proliferation of rioting and other forms of social unrest which, in their attempts to experiment with rather than affirm socialized identities, tend not to be recognized as "political" in a conventional sense. My analysis of the lyric alongside anarchism shows that to reimagine subjectivity and identity in terms that are relatively unintelligible to and unanswerable by the social order has in fact become one of today's most significant political paradigms. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch…………………………………………………………………………….vi Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………...vii Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………...1 Chapter I: Geographies of Power………………………………………………………………27 Chapter II: Inoperativity and Action…………………………………………………………...79 Chapter III: Phenomenology of the Dark Ages………………………………………….……108 Chapter IV: Love in the Time of the Value-Form……………………………………….……166 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………….233 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………...239 v

Date Issued

2015-05-24

Degree Discipline

Comparative Literature

Degree Name

Ph. D., Comparative Literature

Degree Level

Doctor of Philosophy

Types

dissertation or thesis