Self-involved subjects: Testimony and crisis in contemporary American literature

Self-Involved Subjects: Testimony and Crisis in Contemporary American Literature traces indirect responses to crisis in contemporary American literature and popular culture. In this indirect aesthetics, texts draw attention to their own rhetorical structures, rather than to the object of testimony itself. This self-referential move emerges through the lyric figures that make testimonial acts possible. While this self-involvement might seem antithetical to appropriate response, Self-Involved Subjects argues that these texts demonstrate that testimony does not rely on a failure of language. Instead, by focusing on the formal structures of testimony, these texts both use conventional forms of mourning (elegy, documentary, memoir) and reveal the heteronormative assumptions that condition these forms. In so doing, they suggest that lyric is particularly suited to engage the bodily realities of crises in ways that straightforwardly activist writing is not, because it draws attention to the epistemological assumptions inherent in representation more broadly. The dissertation takes AIDS and 9/11 as its case studies, as these two recent events organize much of the recent work in political aesthetics. James Marsh's film Man on Wire (2008) provides the opening model for these aesthetics; rather than document the events of 9/11, the film pairs the heist genre with an emphasis on the physical body to invoke the event indirectly and thus to show how meaning is produced. The television show Caprica (2009-2010) then provides the occasion for thinking through the relation between writing and the body as it emerges in ongoing debates about aesthetics and trauma; here, queer theory read through the legacy of Romanticism reminds us that formal conventions cannot be easily distinguished from material bodies. Following these theoretical foundations, the rest of the project traces apostrophe, prosopopoeia, and catachresis through Frank Bidart's poetry, Edmund White's The Farewell Symphony (1997), Jacques Derrida's Of Hospitality (1996), and Juliana Spahr's The Transformation (2007), before concluding with a reading of Herman Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) to suggest that an attention to the body and to testimonial forms reveals the implicit assumptions through which common experience can be said to emerge at all.