Ambitious Confusion: Recovering the Unthought in Contemporary Memorials to the Antebellum South

Ambitious Confusion: Recovering the Unthought in Contemporary Memorials to the Antebellum South Aundeah J. Kearney Thadious M. Davis This dissertation examines how contemporary authors and artists who craft memorials to the antebellum South reconcile the presence of disruptive artifacts with narratives of history they inherit as members of a national collective, actively engaging with shared memories of critical moments in the nation’s past. In this study, I identify ambitious confusion as a generative state which moves beyond mere recognition of conflicting histories toward a memorial that successfully manages the reintegration of previously excised artifacts of history. I borrow the term “unthought” from Rinaldo Walcott, and deploy it rather than the more innocuous “forgotten,” to refer to these disavowed artifacts, as the term acknowledges the intentional actions that led to certain exclusions from the privileged narrative. Throughout the dissertation, I use ambitious confusion to read memorials that engage what I determine to be the four dimensions through which narrative is constructed as a rhetorical event: time, place, body, and law. In each chapter I demonstrate that an analytical posture informed by ambitious confusion illustrates how contemporary artists, for instance Kara Walker, and authors, such as Harryette Mullen, Natasha Trethewey, and Edward P. Jones, destabilize the boundaries that demarcate each of these four dimensions to provide space for the reintegration of the unthought. Attending to the formal qualities of the memorials, which include Walker\u27s silhouette tableaux, and her more recent Sugarbaby, Mullen\u27s Sleeping with the Dictionary, Trethewey’s Native Gaurd, and Jones\u27 The Known World, ambitious confusion exposes fractally dense temporalities, slippery subjectivities, and a unique state of temporally ambiguous being which I call “static animation” as fecund sites for memorial projects. Memorial narratives, as continuously revised and performed rhetorical events, allow for understanding ambitious confusion as a new method of reading that can account for the diverse influences and innovative techniques that often surface in contemporary memorials as moments of disjunction or even nonsense. Ambitious confusion allows for reading not only memorials that blatantly resist the excision of the unthought, but also for looking again at memorial sites deemed beyond reclamation, such as controversial monuments to heroes of the Confederate Army, for the dynamism that belies voices long thought lost

“The raven” : referências, traduções e intermidialidade

Tese (doutorado)—Universidade de Brasília, Instituto de Letras, Departamento de Teoria Literária e Literaturas, 2019.Esta tese objetiva atualizar o debate sobre a potencialidade intermidiática do poema “O Corvo” de Edgar Allan Poe, especialmente no que diz respeito ao enorme volume de referências, traduções literárias e intermidiáticas ligadas ao poema mais importante do já citado escritor estadunidense. Através de levantamentos de dados sobre o poema “O Corvo” em diálogo com a música, com o teatro, com as artes visuais e principalmente com o cinema, a partir das contribuições teóricas da literatura, das teorias do cinema, da teoria midiática e da intermidialidade, esta investigação concluiu que o mencionado poema e o ensaio “A Filosofia da Composição” tem uma importante contribuição para a formação da linguagem cinematográfica e também para o desenvolvimento de vários gêneros artísticos intermidiáticos que se harmonizam em muitos aspectos com os postulados estéticos edgarianos. Os principais resultados desta pesquisa são: “O Corvo” foi constantemente reproduzido nos jornais norte-americanos, demonstrando o grande interesse da mídia do século XIX, o jornal impresso, por este texto. “O Corvo” também foi reproduzido inúmeras vezes em antologias, manuais didáticos e de retórica, aparecendo como um poema-ícone da formação literária americana a partir da segunda metade do século XIX. Além disso, “O Corvo” parece ser o poema moderno mais traduzido no mundo; um dos mais traduzidos para a música (em vários gêneros) e também transposto para o cinema (há 110 anos de relações dialógicas entre este poema de Poe e o cinema). As relações entre “O Corvo” e as demais artes tem ressonâncias no cinema produzido com base no citado poema. Há ainda convergências entre a estética de Poe e várias estéticas cinematográficas, bem como em relação aos respectivos atos de criação dessas artes, além de ter incontáveis diálogos com as artes visuais. O conjunto de dados da pesquisa e as análises realizadas evidenciam que “O Corvo” de Poe é um prisma excepcional para as artes e para as mídias. Assim, a poética edgariana provou ser bem-sucedida, do ponto de vista formal, estrutural e temático.This thesis aims to update the debate on the intermedial potentiality of Edgar Allan Poe's poem “The Raven”, especially as regards the enormous volume of references, literary and intermedial translations linked to the most important poem of the aforementioned American writer. Through data surveys about of “The Raven” poetry in dialogue with the music, with the theater, with the visual arts and especially with the cinema, based on the theoretical contributions of literature, of the theories of cinema, media theory and intermediality, this investigation concluded that the mentioned poem and the essay “The Philosophy of Composition” has an important contribution to the formation of cinematographic language and also to the development of various intermedial artistic genres that harmonize in many respects with Poe’s aesthetic postulates. The main findings of this research are: “The Raven” was constantly reproduced in the US newspapers, demonstrating the great interest of the nineteenth century media, the printed newspaper, by this text. “The Raven” has also been reproduced countless times in anthologies, didactic and of rhetoric manuals, appearing as a poem-icon of the US literary formation from the second half of the 19th century. Besides that, “The Raven” seems to be the most translated modern poem in the world; one of the most translated for the music (in several genres) and also transposed for the cinema (there is 110 years of dialogical relations between this poem of Poe and the cinema). The relations between “The Raven” and the other arts have resonances in the cinema produced based on the mentioned poem. There are still convergences between Poe’s aesthetic and various cinematographic aesthetics, as well as in relation to the respective acts of creation of these arts, besides having countless dialogues with the visual arts. The set of research data and the analyzes carried out show that Poe’s “Raven” is an exceptional prism for the arts and for the medias. Thus, the Poe’s poetics has proven to be successful, from the formal, structural and thematic point of view