Pointing back and laughing at Uncle Sam: Humor, genre, and political critique in recent American poetry

This dissertation argues that humor in recent American poetry and manipulations of poetic genre work together to critique dominant cultural narratives and to expose and question the ideologies that create and sustain those narratives. The constraints and conventions of various poetic genres invoke the restrictions of these cultural narratives and the societal structures that reinforce them. The poets' humorous treatments of their particular poetic genres works to destabilize the cultural narratives while simultaneously expanding the reader's understanding of the genres. This process of destabilization and expansion enacts the kind of thought process necessary to assemble an alternative political vision and opens up a space in which to imagine new, less restrictive social constructs. My dissertation uses as case studies the work of four U.S. poets, Marilyn Hacker, Harryette Mullen, Ed Dorn, and Russell Edson, written in varied poetic genres during the final decades of the twentieth-century in which humor critiques aspects of American society in an attempt to better it.;Chapter One shows that Hacker's hedonism, her engagement with the genre of the sonnet sequence, and her humor, which alternately creates or is produced by hedonistic revelry, in Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons help her to critique the dominant patriarchal and heteronormative cultural narratives of love with only a modicum of didacticism. Chapter Two reveals how Mullen's non-narrative word play in Sleeping with the Dictionary highlights and counters the ways in which American consumer culture encourages the process of reification. As demonstrated in Chapter Three, in Dorn's Gunslinger the Howard Hughes figure's protean nature apes and derides the overlapping, and sometimes conflicting, narratives that capitalism appropriates in order to assert and sustain its dominance in the West. Hughes's guises help the reader to identify and separate the overlapping narratives of capitalism, enabling critique Chapter Four asserts that Edson's amusing depictions of the lives of animals and inanimate objects and frequent critiques of humanist egocentrism in his prose poems create a posthuman world characterized by violence, isolation, and frustration, mainly because many of the humans cling to a humanist paradigm.