American Hybrid Poetics: Gender, Mass Culture, and Form

Amy Moorman Robbins

Published by Rutgers University Press 2014

American Hybrid Poetics

Gender, Mass Culture, and Form

Amy Moorman Robbins

In the series The American Literatures Initiative

https://doi.org/10.36019/9780813564661

Overview
Contents

About this book

American Hybrid Poetics explores the ways in which hybrid poetics—a playful mixing of disparate formal and aesthetic strategies—have been the driving force in the work of a historically and culturally diverse group of women poets who are part of a robust tradition in contesting the dominant cultural order. Amy Moorman Robbins examines the ways in which five poets—Gertrude Stein, Laura Mullen, Alice Notley, Harryette Mullen, and Claudia Rankine—use hybridity as an implicitly political strategy to interrupt mainstream American language, literary genres, and visual culture, and expose the ways in which mass culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has had a powerfully standardizing impact on the collective American imagination. By forcing encounters between incompatible traditions—consumer culture with the avant-garde, low culture forms with experimental poetics, prose poetry with linguistic subversiveness—these poets bring together radically competing ideologies and highlight their implications for lived experience. Robbins argues that it is precisely because these poets have mixed forms that their work has gone largely unnoticed by leading members and critics in experimental poetry circles.

Author / Editor information

AMY MOORMAN ROBBINS is an assistant professor of English at Hunter College, CUNY, where she specializes in modern and contemporary experimental poetics with emphasis on the work of women poets. She has published critical essays on the work of Gertrude Stein (Journal of Lesbian Studies), Harryette Mullen (Contemporary Literature), and Alice Notley (Pacific Coast Philology).

Reviews

"An incisive study of a hotly-debated term in U.S. poetry today, American Hybrid Poetics reveals how women’s hybrid forms converse with, and subvert, the gendered tropes of mass media culture. Robbins reveals that women’s hybrid poetics possesses not only a history but—more important—a politics, whose radicalism should no longer be ignored."

— Elisabeth A. Frost, author of The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry

“With layers of richness and historicized depth, American Hybrid Poetics makes a distinct contribution to the field. Robbins’s lively writing and strong critical voice are splendid.”

— Linda Kinnahan, Duquesne University

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Gertrude Stein’s Blood on the Dining-Room Floor: Hybrid Poetics in Modernist/Mass Culture Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	20
2. Laura Mullen’s Murmur: Crime Fiction, Cruel Optimism, and a Hybrid Poetics of Affect Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	44
3. Alice Notley’s Disobedience: The Postmodern Subject, Paranoia, and a New Poetics of Noir Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	71
4. Harryette Mullen’s Poetics in Prose: A Return to the Modernist Hybrid Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	100
5. Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: A Lyrical Long Poem in a Post-Language Age Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	124
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	151
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	165
About the author Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	173

Language: English
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 188

eBook

Published: July 21, 2014
ISBN: 9780813564661