For Who the River Carries: Marginalised Perspectives on Twentieth-Century Literature

<p>This thesis examines the representation of rivers from marginalised American authors of the twentieth-century. American rivers are notably diverse and variable natural features, and as symbols they offer extensive metaphorical potential. Rivers also hold a rich literary history in America, notably in the work of canonical nineteenth-century writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry D. Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain. The idealised depictions found in the work of these four authors act as a foundation which the marginalised writers of the following century both develop and subvert. The selected marginalised writers fall into three overlapping categories, to each of which is devoted a chapter. To examine those marginalised by economy and class, I have turned to Cormac McCarthy’s 1979 novel Suttree and the poetry of James Wright. Both concern themselves with poverty, river pollution, theology, suicide, and the desolation of American idealism. In my chapter on African American writing, Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved and selected poems by Sterling A Brown, Audre Lorde, and Margaret Walker are the central texts. These works look to the river and find racial history within its current, evoking varied responses surrounding memory, trauma, creative expression, and recontextualisation. The final chapter explores William S. Burroughs’s 1987 novel The Western Lands and the work of Minnie Bruce Pratt. By “queering nature,” the river becomes both a bitter reminder of their marginalisation and a hopeful symbol of utopia and unity. Together, these texts and the rivers they represent demonstrate the disjuncture between the privileged and marginalised in America, calling for greater consideration of what we deem “American” and why.</p>

For Who the River Carries: Marginalised Perspectives on Twentieth-Century Literature

<p>This thesis examines the representation of rivers from marginalised American authors of the twentieth-century. American rivers are notably diverse and variable natural features, and as symbols they offer extensive metaphorical potential. Rivers also hold a rich literary history in America, notably in the work of canonical nineteenth-century writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry D. Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain. The idealised depictions found in the work of these four authors act as a foundation which the marginalised writers of the following century both develop and subvert. The selected marginalised writers fall into three overlapping categories, to each of which is devoted a chapter. To examine those marginalised by economy and class, I have turned to Cormac McCarthy’s 1979 novel Suttree and the poetry of James Wright. Both concern themselves with poverty, river pollution, theology, suicide, and the desolation of American idealism. In my chapter on African American writing, Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved and selected poems by Sterling A Brown, Audre Lorde, and Margaret Walker are the central texts. These works look to the river and find racial history within its current, evoking varied responses surrounding memory, trauma, creative expression, and recontextualisation. The final chapter explores William S. Burroughs’s 1987 novel The Western Lands and the work of Minnie Bruce Pratt. By “queering nature,” the river becomes both a bitter reminder of their marginalisation and a hopeful symbol of utopia and unity. Together, these texts and the rivers they represent demonstrate the disjuncture between the privileged and marginalised in America, calling for greater consideration of what we deem “American” and why.</p>

Learning to Be a Failure

Challenged by personal suffering and new influences, American poet James Wright dramatically changed the character of his poetry during the years between the respective publications of Saint Judas (1959) and The Branch Will Not Break (1963). The nature of this poetic evolution can be traced in Wright’s treatment of a few frequently employed images of transformation, specifically those involving blossoms and jewels—the energies of which are alternatingly embodied by the poet or found to be unavailable to him.

‘You know all them things’: Nostalgia, Idealization, and Speech in Working-Class Poems by Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lucille Clifton

This essay examines nostalgia, idealization, and speech in poems from the latter half of the twentieth century in the US and the UK that convey working-class experience, identifying nostalgia as a binding feature of such poems and tracing it to the 18th -century ‘nostalgia poem.’ I will first establish briefly how nostalgia in poems by Philip Levine, James Wright, and Robert Hayden results in idealizations that resist sentimentality and then demonstrate that the various forms of local speech employed in some other post1945 poems about working-class life by Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lucille Clifton act as a stay against such idealization, effectively transforming them into more explicitly anticlassist –and, in the case of Brooks and Clifton, antiracist and antisexist –forms of social critique and defiance. Their poems interrupt and complicate the idealization of the familiar working-class surroundings they seek to reenter, familiar and familial realms that are not just temporal and spatial but linguistic. They honor their characters’ fortitude in the face of working-class encumbrances not by idealizing them but by concentrating on their working-class characters’ linguistic origins. Manifestations of local speech in these nostalgic poems amount to a poetic resource that disrupts idealizations of working-class experience, critiquing, in that process, classism and, in Brooks and Clifton, revealing classism’s intersections with racism and sexism. These poems don’t just desire to go back to earlier worlds but do go back linguistically to working-class, nonstandard languages – their particular forms of original local speech–that refuse the conditions that would subordinate those languages and the people who speak them.