“Is an Archive Enough?”: Megatextual Debris in the Work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis

In the twenty-first century, digital technologies have made it possible for writers and artists to create massively unreadable works through computational and collaborative composition, what the author has elsewhere called megatexts. The ubiquity of texts appearing across media that are quite literally too big to read—from experimental novels to television, film, and video games—signals that the megatext is an emergent form native to the era of neoliberalism. But what happens to other long forms, such as the twentieth-century long poem, when written in an era of megatextuality? Rachel Blau DuPlessis's work, including Drafts (1987–2013) and Traces, with Days (2017–), readily suggests itself as a case study for thinking through a megatextual impulse in the twenty-first-century long poem. Though her work is plainly indebted to its modernist precursors (H.D., Pound, Williams, etc.) while disavowing at every level of its composition a patriarchal will toward totality, DuPlessis's various experiments in the long poem are also thoroughly contemporary and respond to the economic, military, political, and environmental transformations of the neoliberal era by drawing upon and producing fragmentary, megatextual debris. This essay positions DuPlessis's work amidst a larger twenty-first-century media ecology, which includes both the megatext and the big, ambitious novel, and argues that rather than simply (and futilely) resist the neoliberal cultural logic of accumulation without end, DuPlessis hypertrophically uses the megatext's phallogocentric form against itself in order to interrogate more broadly what it means—socially, culturally, economically—to write a long poem in the age of hyperarchival accumulation.

"Encounter before imagination": a more-than-human poetics from the Moss Valley

This hybrid creative/critical work of poetry and prose is laid out in three columns so that open form poetry, literary criticism and theoretical reflection can share the same page space. This enables the writing to embody tensions and entanglements in response to the following research questions: 1. How can avant-garde and experimental writing techniques be used to encounter the more-than-human? 2. Can experimental writing techniques enable a writer to point beyond language? 3. Does an open form poem enable writing about the more-than-human to be more ecologically minded? 4. What boundaries are crossed when trying to write about the more-than-human? The work argues for the importance of writing from a particular place or site as a way of exploring contemporary environmental issues by being based upon fieldwork in the Moss Valley, which is located on the border between South Yorkshire and Derbyshire. The poems are based upon particular encounters; criticism and theoretical reflections act as a poetics, enabling further thinking, research and contextualisation. It shows that avant-garde and experimental writing techniques can be used to encounter the morethan-human using the concept of chora to explore how writing can point beyond language, crossing disciplinary and cultural boundaries. Open form poems enable a more ecologically-aware approach to the more-than-human, situating the writer as part of a dynamic system. Chapter 1 explores characterisations of the Moss Valley as an edgeland. Chapter 2 engages with the Moss ValAbstract ley’s ancient woodlands whilst tracking various creatures. Chapter 3 is based at Troway Hall which is the home of a longstanding beekeeping concern. Chapter 4 considers the writer’s phobia of and encounters with horses to explore issues of classification and projection. Chapter 5 records an attempt to trace the Moss Brook from source to confluence. Chapter 6 is based upon mushroom recording walks in the Moss Valley and tries to write from the perspective of fungi. The writers Colin Simms, Maggie O’Sullivan and Helen Macdonald are considered as poets who model ways of entangling human and natural history when writing about the more-than-human. Rachel Blau DuPlessis long poem Drafts gives a model of hybrid writing

Experimentalism In Hilda Doolittle's HERmione

Hilda Doolittle (1886-1946) is an American poet, novelist and translator, generally called H.D. In her Autobiographical novel, HERmione unpublished until 1981, Hilda presents her experimental work in which she imposes a narrative form upon her fictionalized accounts of her tangled personal relations. It is a novel about well-known literary people and a story of forbidden desires, it invokes the patterns of the genre to examine the interpretation of sexuality and textuality in a narrative of development. HER is a literary suppressed, figuratively repressed story of origins whose private telling was essential to public retellings of how Hilda Doolittle became H.D. Hilda Doolittle's novel is characterized by being revolutionary , experimenting through repetition of names of people , disguised through specific literary language attacking the patriarchal mode of a stern father and a passive , submissive mother. Lights are shed through a psychological approach on the writers traumatic experiences as a result of war consequences on one hand and personal , agonic experiences due to her doubt about her Sexuality being torn between lesbian desire and heterosexual feeling towards a man she loved but was not able to marry. H.D.'s aim is to create a change in women's state from the conventional treatment of women as an "object" to a new "subject" worthy of description getting benefit from Sigmund Freud's psychological analysis of Hilda Doolittle's character when she was sick. Being an effective imagist and a lover of Arts, she creates a new literary movement depending on common speech and freedom in choosing subjects in a daring style. Since the subject of the novel is about the psychological issues of women's identity problems , feminist critics views like Susan Stanford Friedman , Rachel Blau Duplessis and Helen Cixous's theory of Psychology are taken into consideration in this research

A narratological perspective on Douglas Livingstone’s A littoral zone (1991)

This article explores aspects of the contemporary South African poet Douglas Livingstone’s “A littoral zone” (1991) from a narratological point of view, leaning largely on Peter Hühn’s narratological concept of the event and Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ “hypothesis of poetry as segmentivity” as formulated by Brian McHale (2009:18). A discussion of two juxtaposed poems from the said volume explores how the poems’ respective anecdotes and events are segmented, then arranged and sequenced into specific narratives to highlight the speaker’s conviction of the necessity of a biological and spiritual connection with the natural environment. In the larger context of the volume there are numerous other narrative lines (in the form of poems about specific experiences the poet had) that are juxtaposed in a similar fashion. Collectively these juxtaposed narrative lines then constitute on the level of the volume as a whole the autobiographical narrative of the poet’s development as self-ironic individual. The various anecdotes also contribute to the formation and development of the theme of symbiosis, a theme that has a direct bearing on how the poet sees the gap between humankind’s current and supposed connection with nature. The main event of the volume is to be found in the reader’s mind: the realisation that bridging this gap is absolutely necessary and that it starts with the individual.