Reading the impossible: Articulations of postwar idealism and the interrogation of American identity

"Reading the Impossible" explores the ways in which James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, and John Coltrane disrupt the momentum and direction of reductive, exclusionary narratives of American identity by way of unorthodox formal arrangements and discordant tones. The dissertation highlights a convergence between American art and politics in which unconventional forms aspire to apparently "impossible" ends and explores the idea that the utopian aims Baldwin, Ginsberg and Coltrane profess must inevitably take shape and sound in relatively broken, inarticulate ways. I argue that they generate extravagant compositions and performances which persistently remain open to the re-emergence of elided terms, sounds and modes of organization. I further contend that in the hopeful pursuit of social justice and spiritual enlightenment, Baldwin, Ginsberg and Coltrane demonstrate an improvisatory commitment to risk and discovery, such that their texts and tunes tend to stray from their own organizing principles and generic conventions. I also am concerned with the question of how the unorthodox arrangements and ethico-political imperatives at work in their texts invite and demand a reconsideration of the exigencies of reading and listening. The dissertation offers the work of Baldwin, Ginsberg and Coltrane as an opportunity for contemporary audiences to imagine and participate in material relationships between aesthetic innovation and political possibility. The project brings Baldwin, Ginsberg and Coltrane together by arguing that each of them is making a broken claim to the possibility of human connectedness in response to specific historical events and cultural forces that undermine the American capacity for connection. The dissertation arranges their work as a resonant chord that reverberates around relationships between aesthetics, racial/sexual subjectivity, and the echoing question of American identity. The project highlights ways in which each figure generates an aesthetic of absolute observation which generates an unpredictable and disorienting arrangement of sound, image and argument. I suggest that they look to overwhelm the American tendency toward constituency by virtue of an enthusiastic long-windedness that endeavors to hear more rather than less, to imagine connections and relationships ambitiously rather than familiarly, to surrender the will to order.