Visual Retrospection: Rhyming Art with Access

This work of creative nonfiction memoir reflects on the philosophical, ethical, and creative perspectives that informed the author’s book-length lyric essay, Visual Inspection. The essay connects the practices of art-making and access-making as concomitant ethical activities.

Cross My Heart

Linked by a series of idiomatic expressions used to describe sadness, loss and love, “Cross My Heart” is a lyric essay delving into the world of journaling bad decisions and broken relationships. A deep and private self appears in diaries; intense curiosity makes resisting the off-limit contents of the confidential accounts difficult for the author. In her search for understanding her place in the life, mind and heart of another, unwanted discoveries ensue. Her father, a constant source of emotional strength and support, offers inadequate advice.

"Writing into the Rupture": Visual Selves in Mary-Kim Arnold’s Litany for the Long Moment

Multimedia texts are gaining more footing in the Asian American literary world, especially following Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s pre-eminent Dictee (1982). While lesser known, Mary-Kim Arnold’s Litany for the Long Moment (2018) is a highly referential lyric essay that employs visual elements, including personal ephemera, to consider the unrelenting complexities of Asian American identity. Analyzing Arnold’s formal intervention into Asian American literature through Francesca Woodman’s photography and Roland Barthes’ photography theory reveals that visual subjects are evasive and unknowable. Paradoxically, memorabilia has the power to rupture linear notions of time and cast into doubt what we know about past and present selves. Arnold’s engagement with the visual also extends to the body, and throughout the text she unsettles hegemonic constructions of gender and racial signification. Ultimately, an analysis of Litany for the Long Moment reveals that visual subjects rupture the concept of a stable self. Throughout this thesis, I draw from the fields of photography, poststructuralism, and critical race studies to argue that visual representation is not a sufficient mode of racial empowerment. Building off of Arnold’s claims about “writing into the rupture,” lack is not a closure, but an opening through which we can interrogate what it means to be a self.

Standing by the Mountain

A lyric essay investigating the phenomenology of modesty in the face of a mountain.

Creative Nonfiction and the Lyric Essay

This chapter is devoted to writing which falls under a recent, nearly paradoxical coinage: ‘creative nonfiction’, a phrase which raises the fundamental theoretical questions asked by Lukács and Adorno about whether the essay is better seen as art or knowledge. Stuckey-French examines both the rise of this category in creative writing programmes in universities in the United States, and the arguments of the influential theorist and anthologist of the essay John d’Agata, who rejects ‘creative nonfiction’ in favour of the ‘lyric essay’. Stuckey-French then shows how the contemporary essayists Jo Ann Beard, Eula Biss, and Claudia Rankine are both preoccupied by the boundary between fiction and reality, and often transgress it without minimizing its ethical and political significance, in respect of childhood memory, violence, or race.

Compounding the Lyric Essay Film : Towards a Theory of Poetic Counter-Narrative

Both artists and critics refer more and more to a diverse range of contemporary films as lyric or poetic essays. Lyricism is indeed acquiring increasing relevance as one of the key modes adopted by an artistic practice that is spreading fast throughout the globe. Yet, the lyric essay is still substantially undertheorized. This chapter aims to refine the theoretical and analytical tools that are at our disposal to think about the lyric essay film, and to expand our understanding of how lyricism is used by film-makers to create audiovisual spaces for thought. In doing so, it draws on a specific case study, the cinema of contemporary Italian film-maker Pietro Marcello, whose experimental essayistic work is elegiac and political all at once.