Author

Laura Carter

Date of Award

8-3-2007

Degree Type

Closed Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

English

First Advisor

Beth Gylys - Chair

Second Advisor

Calvin Thomas

Third Advisor

Randy Malamud

Abstract

“What does it mean, to make a genuine generalization, to create an objective concrete abstraction of a phenomenon?”—Evald Ilyenkov. As Guy Debord writes in his Society of the Spectacle, “the lack of general historical life also means that individual life as yet has no history.” These poems are my process of coming to understand history, and many of them are critiques of histories per se. If, as Frank O’Hara writes, “these anxieties remain erect,” they also shape the poems that I have written here. I want to be in dialogue with the spectacle that shapes postmodernism. I want to live in communication with the memories of events that have shaped my speech over the years. The title is a struggle to regain a home while not forgetting the displacement of the proverbial poet, a poet to whom I am forever indebted and probably likely to become.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.57709/1059482

Available for download on Thursday, January 01, 2099

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