Shock treatments: Witnessing in postwar performance (Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin)

This dissertation reconsiders the so-called “confessional” works of Beat and Confessional poets, early Method actors and James Baldwin as acts of witness that respond to the social, economic, historic and psychic upheavals attending World War II and its aftermath. As projects of rhetorical address, these performances reshaped the postwar public sphere, crystallizing new counterpublics as audiences responded to and appropriated new possibilities for speaking, acting, being and knowing. Although popular audiences enthusiastically embraced these performative modes, contemporary critics rejected their subjective presentation of marginalized experience—madness, racial oppression, queer sexuality and disenchanted domesticity—as too “confessional.” While this critical characterization persists, it fails to account for these works' passionate popular appeal and transformative social effects. “Shock Treatments” reclaims the critical as well as affirmative work they performed and argues that by transvaluing the personal as political, their witnessing shaped the strategic articulation of postwar liberation movements. Further, it relocates the notion of “extremity” that has characterized recent discussions of history, trauma, and witnessing by showing how witness might give shape to the unspeakable within the contours of everyday experience.; Chapter 1 suggests that stress fractures within the dominant culture gained mainstream visibility first through the white male body, in the expressive performances of early Method actors, Elvis, the Beats and their many fans. As their howling and mumbling deformed normative speech and ruptured official fictions of social consensus, they performatively challenged the credibility of dominant representations, improvising instead new ways of believing and acting. Baldwin's race, class, and sexuality, however, positioned him as marginal to dominant as well as countercultural publics. Chapter 2 examines how he exploits his off-center positioning to speak across diverse publics, witnessing to the untold stories of American nation- and empire-building and the burning need to address them, collectively. Chapter 3 shows how Sylvia Plath's Ariel poems act upon readers in the performative mode Artaud conjured as “theatre of cruelty,” provoking intense and polarized reader responses. Communicating trauma with penetrating power, the poems' orchestration of rhetorical, historical, and formal violence produced among women a witnessing effect that propelled early feminist articulations.