The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry

Transgression is a complex construction which varies in definitions, meanings and
techniques. It is a social and cultural expression, usually related to violation and
deviation, presented nearly in all genres of ancient and present literature. Although
the study of transgression is now vast and emerging, literature of transgression
remains a blind spot and only a little concern is given to its dimensions of identity
formation and resistance. Moreover, Martin Amis, as a postmodern English writer,
is widely recognized as transgressive in his writings. His works are widely labeled
with ‘sexuality’ and ‘pornography’ in the past researches. Thus, the present study
examines the social transgression in Martin Amis' selected novels in terms of Michel
Foucault's theory of Transgression. Accordingly, the first objective is to examine the
aspects of transgression in Amis’ selected novels by explaining the acts of crossing
and going beyond Limits in order to liberate his discourse from labels of ‘sexuality’
and ‘pornography’. The second objective is to explore the role of transgression in the
creation of counter-discourses via examining the characters’ Problematization of the
common discourses that helps the characters to seek new definitions. The third
objective is to explore the function of transgression as a mode of resistance in light
of Discontinuity in the selected novels. The study is significant in the sense that it
introduces a new perspective of reading social transgression in Amis' selected novels
in an attempt to extend the definition and function of transgression in these novels.
The contribution of the study lies in examining the non-traditional aspects of
transgression which are essential in resisting common discourses and reconstituting
subjectivity. Moreover, the study provides a valuable insight into how transgressive
characters of the selected novels constitute themselves as resistant subjects out of the
deeply- established norms of the society. Such trial may bridge the gap of the
resistant dimension of transgression to provide a new perspective to transgressive
literature in general and the selected novels in particular. The study conducted a
detailed textual analysis of Amis' novels; Money (1984), London Fields (1989),
Time's Arrow (1991), and The Pregnant Widow (2010). It concludes that social transgression in Amis' novels is not a simple violation of rules but rather an intended
strategy of resisting the common discourses for the sake of circulating new ones of
identity reconstitution. It liberates Amis' characters from restraining definitions of
the self and transforms them from 'alienated', 'lost-identity', subjugated' and 'silenced'
into 'empowered', 'self-defined', 'liberated' and 'voiced' subjects. Finally, the study
contributes to the understanding of Amis' transgressive style via clearing up the
labels of 'sexuality' and 'pornography' from his creative writings. It also contributes
to the understanding of the role of transgression as a mode of resistance to common
discourses of the society.

Foucauldian transgression as a mode of resistance in selected novels by Martin Amis

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Desire and Agency in the Modern Women's Sonnet

Author(s): Keith, Melissa Dawn | Advisor(s): O'Brien, Geoffrey G. | Abstract: In this dissertation, the introduction defines the erotic-mystical mode, using the poetry and prose of the five feminist writers that I argue constitute a core poetic movement. Based on their shared understandings of the centrality of this disruptive new paradigm--with important influences from English Romanticism--these poets create both lyric and prose works that position them as major leaders in feminist thought in the seventies. Collapsing conventional binaries, their works offer examples of how to live, on the deepest level, as life-affirming beings, regardless of gender, race, class, or sexuality, on a damaged, yet still vibrant, planet. They never deny difference, embracing all that is living, yet still grounded in faith in possibilities of collective communication. No one style best expresses the erotic mystical mode; yet it occupies a place, in the seventies, I argue, linked with memoir-poems, paving the way for the contemporary surge of women's memoirs. The first chapter concerns itself with selectively surveying the erotic mystical mode transnationally and across periods, while dipping into recent American examples, creating a kind of ground for the sustained individual author readings of H.D.'s Sea Garden, chapter three, and the poetry of Adrienne Rich, 1951-1984, chapters five and seven. The second chapter tells the stories of how this dissertation is constructed and why this particular methodology. It defines and justifies its hybrid methodology, attaching it to a history of genre-crossing writing by feminist critics. In order to do so, I draw from the fairly recent formation of an innovative, hybrid literary criticism by a vigorous diaspora of scholars, consisting of both second wave and contemporary feminist critics. A number of feminist literary critics have written about these four poets in the past three decades. The feminist critical attention, of course, has gone largely to the poet, most famous and most lauded by the literary establishment, Adrienne Rich, whose first published book of verse predates the publications of the other three by at least fifteen years. In chapter one, I discuss a number of critics relevant to this dissertation, figures such as Francine DuPlessis, Susan Friedman, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Wendy Martin, and Jan Montefiore. Their works inspired me to juxtapose creative memoir writing, comprising chapters four and six, with the more traditional chapters of literary criticism, chapters three and five. This personal memoir sprang up in response to years of immersion in the life-altering poetry this dissertation explores and celebrates.

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Cantatas of the Wild: Memoir, Mysticism, and Modern Feminist Poetry

Deborah Cohn's book outlines a new geography in Inter-American literature, one which transcends linguistic boundaries between the English and Spanish languages to link the modern literature of the South of the United States with the writers of the Latin-American contemporary renaissance. The unwitting conquistador of this new territory, Cohn claims, was William Faulkner. To major Hispanic American writers he introduced a South that shared with Latin America a plantation system whose decline led to rural backwardness; a condition that brought about a sense of defeat and dispossession and a trail of political and cultural strife. Cohn, who teaches Hispanic studies at McGill University, begins her study by discussing Faulkner's legacy to the new, post-WWII narrative in Latin America. But beyond Faulkner her aim is to "examine convergences, similar features and strategies that have developed as responses to analogous social and political circumstances" in writers from both language communities. In the middle-twentieth-century South, as in Hispanic America one generation later, literature has retained its importance in contributing to the construction of national identity. By comparing AngloAmerican and Spanish-American novelists, Cohn defines the features of Southern strategies of literature: the redefinition of history, the role and stylistic treatment of memory, the attitude to realism and magic realism. She also identifies a set of common subjects of interest-political and social unrest, the double consciousness of belonging in a dominant tradition as well as one's own culture, the foregrounding of the process of telling through dialogue. Like Faulkner, a modernist, but also a regionalist who reached universal status, the authors Cohn studies find ways to replace chronological order with alternative modes of representing time. The core of Cohn's book is a careful and provocative comparison of three pairs of classic books: Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Mario Vargas Llosa's Real Life of Alejandro Mayta; Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits; Katherine Ann Porter's Miranda stories and Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo. In Faulkner and Vargas Llosa, Cohn explores "a curious dialectic between the concealment of information and the imaginative creation of "facts" to compensate for a gap in verifiable knowledge." The narrative strategies of both authors in Absalom, Absalom!-- with its connection to the Caribbean South-and The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta are thoughtfully analyzed, their effects compared and contrasted, with complementary comments on other works by these authors, to show how both novelists reterritorialize historiography and story-telling through the foregrounding of the act of enunciation. In both examples, Cohn explains, the frame narratives question the relevance of historical narrative, though not its exemplary value. …

History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction

This article presents a comparative analysis of patriarchy and incest in the work of William Faulkner and Juan Rulfo. Focusing primarily on Absalom! Absalom! and Pedro Paramo, I argue that Rulfo adopts and, at the same time, interrogates Faulkner's patriarchal model of the family: the incestuous relationships that characterize Absalom! Absalom! reappear, under different disguises, in the Mexican writer's novel. My analysis also suggests that both Faulkner and Rulfo were intrigued by the symbolic implications of incest, and exploited these implications in order to talk about the collapse of the patriarchal and cultural order in the post-Civil War South and early 20th century Mexico respectively. The conclusion maintains that, despite Rulfo's reluctance to acknowledge Faulkner's impact on his artistic consciousness, the intertextual dialogue between the two writers should be read both as a form of incest, and as a quest for a new social structure.

Patriarchy and incest in William Faulkner's 'Absalom! Absalom!' and Juan Rulfo's 'Pedro Páramo'

Popular perceptions of Edna St. Vincent Millay do not generally see her as a poet interested in so-called “domestic poetry.” On the contrary, Millay is most commonly described as the female embodiment of the rebellious spirit that marked the 1920s, the “New Woman” of early twentieth-century feminism. Until the late 1970s, the subject of domesticity seemed incompatible with the celebrated images of Millay's “progressiveness,” “rebelliousness,” or “originality.” But then again, by the 1970s Millay was no longer seen as particularly rebellious or original, and the fact that she had also contributed to the tradition of domestic poetry was not to her advantage. Domesticity may have been an important issue for second-wave feminists, but it was discussed rather selectively and, outside feminist circles, Millay was hardly ever mentioned by literary critics. The taint of “traditionalism” did not help Millay's cause, and the poet's lifelong exploration of sexuality, femininity and gender stereotypes was somehow not enough to generate sophisticated critical analyses. Since Millay seemed to be a largely traditional poet and a “politically incorrect” feminist model, second-wave feminists preferred to focus on other figures, classified as more modern and more overtly subversive. Scholarly recognition of Millay's significance within the canon of modern American poetry did not really begin until the 1990s.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0021875804007911

Edna St. Vincent Millay and Anne Sexton: The Disruption of Domestic Bliss

This article examines Adrienne Rich’s Twenty-One Love Poems in relation to Edna St Vincent Millay’s Fatal Interview. Discussing notions such as lyric voice and innovation within traditional genres, the author analyses how Millay’s attempts to challenge commonplace definitions of female sexuality impacted on Rich’s articulation of sexual desire. The intertextual dialogue between the above works reveals that Millay and Rich produced two remarkably similar erotic narratives, which resist masculinist conceptions of literary history and comment on the self-referentiality of poetic composition. Finally, the author approaches Fatal Interview as a work that foregrounds the significance of women’s bonding, and argues that it was precisely this aspect that caught Rich’s attention and helped the younger poet develop her feminist consciousness.

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Love Poetry, Women's Bonding and Feminist Consciousness: The Complex Interaction between Edna St Vincent Millay and Adrienne Rich

This paper will discuss Edna Millay's influence on Anne Sexton, with particular reference to issues such as gender politics, femininity, performativity, and the female body. Through close comparative readings of some of the two women's most representative poems, I analyze, firstly, how Millay's outspokenness and daring self-presentation as a woman writer facilitated Sexton's handling of material that was previously considered unacceptable for poetry and, secondly, how Sexton expanded the scope of women's writing in a manner that paid tribute to the earlier poet's innovation. My paper maintains that Millay's repeated attempts to explore gender and interrogate the concept of ‘authentic’ femininity anticipated Sexton's overtly feminist works. Ultimately, I am arguing that, despite the literary climate of the 1960s (which urged the rejection of poets like Millay) and despite her own ambiguous feelings for the earlier poet, Sexton eventually recovered Millay as an important literary predecessor for her generation, consistently imitated her artistic posturing, performance strategies, and self-presentation, and finally acknowledged her unique contribution to women's writing.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fpalgrave.fr.9400150.pdf

Gender, body, and feminine performance: Edna St.Vincent Millay's impact on Anne Sexton

This essay will discuss corporeal and racial representation in the work of John Gregory Brown, a little-known, yet immensely rewarding, New Orleans novelist. Placing the discussion within the rich literary tradition of the American South, I will focus on the male protagonists of his first two novels – Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery (1994) and The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton Lafleur (1996) – and examine why Brown's characters constantly shift between different racial positions, and how notions such as racial purity or fixed subjectivity are exposed and interrogated. My analysis will also address physical defect, and explore how Brown destabilizes the ideal of the body as a privileged locus of authoritative wholeness. I will be arguing that, as a cultural and racial signifier, the body in Brown's work is linked with fluidity and fragmentation, and that the boundaries between whiteness and blackness are continuously reshaped by the characters' ambiguous perceptions of themselves as subversive, multi-racial subjects. The conclusion will maintain that both novels offer new insights into the interaction between corporeal representation and racial identity, which make an important contribution to the tradition of American and, particularly, southern literature.

Artemis Michailidou

Papers

Patriarchy and incest in William Faulkner's 'Absalom! Absalom!' and Juan Rulfo's 'Pedro Páramo'

Edna St. Vincent Millay and Anne Sexton: The Disruption of Domestic Bliss

Love Poetry, Women's Bonding and Feminist Consciousness: The Complex Interaction between Edna St Vincent Millay and Adrienne Rich

Gender, body, and feminine performance: Edna St.Vincent Millay's impact on Anne Sexton

Embodying and Transgressing Race in the Novels of John Gregory Brown