Resonance Over Resolution: Resisting Definition in Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, and Ed Roberson's Post-1968 Poetics

In this dissertation on contemporary U.S. literature, I situate the poetry of Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, and Ed Roberson within post-1968 leftist projects that share a common liberatory impulse. I mark the period of cultural production over the past fifty years by the term “post-1968” in order to evoke the popular imagination of “the sixties” as a time of revolutionary action that came to both real and imagined conclusions in 1968 in the U.S., France, China, Mexico, and elsewhere. In response, I argue, post-1968 writers developed a poetics based in cautiousness, wary of the double-edged danger of the tools we deploy toward social transformation. I insist that by doing so, their move from direct action to study represents a continuation rather than a departure from the liberatory projects that precede (and succeed) them, even as their political-aesthetic strategies shift from the certainty of resolute political visions toward the uncertainty of a politics of plurality. In the dissertation’s chapters, I excavate the ways Howe, Mackey, and Roberson’s post-1968 poetics draws on diverse cultural traditions to document American experience in ways that challenge formal convention—in their use of diction, syntax, and narrative, as well as historiography, literary study, and critical argument—while allowing multiple and often contradictory meanings to resonate with one another in cross-cultural relation, rather than resolve into single definitions that privilege one culture of meaning over another. Furthermore, by practicing a liberatory poetics with historical consciousness, they re-vision the American landscape as one haunted by the history of global capitalism, colonialism, and slavery during an age in which this history was increasingly obscured. By bringing Howe, Mackey, and Roberson’s work into literary-historical relation, I highlight a liberatory impulse and sensibility that was moving through the post-1968 period not otherwise accounted for by the existing narratives of innovative, experimental, avant-garde and oppositional poetry. By showing that what makes their individual work distinctive while charting a shared set of concerns and innovations, I make visible a wider field of liberatory poetic practice characterized by a commitment to resonance over resolution by resisting definition.Doctor of Philosoph