Hybrid Aesthetics and the Politics of the Archive: Muriel Rukeyser's Spanish Civil War
Item
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Title
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Hybrid Aesthetics and the Politics of the Archive: Muriel Rukeyser's Spanish Civil War
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:40b6c3a6c85d:11734
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identifier
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12341
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Creator
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Kennedy-Epstein, Rowena,
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Contributor
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Ammiel Alcalay
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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American literature | Gender studies | Modern literature | Archive | Modernism | Poetry | Spain | War | Women Writers
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Abstract
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In July, 1936 the American poet Muriel Rukeyser (1913--1980) traveled to Spain for the British magazine Life and Letters To-day to report on the People's Olympiad (July 19--26, 1936), an alternative to Hitler's Berlin games. Instead of reporting on the games, however, she witnessed the outbreak of civil war. Rukeyser was only in Spain five days, but she cites the experience as the place where "I began to say what I believed" and "the end of confusion." Only twenty-two at the time, Rukeyser's experience as witness to both the military coup and the revolutionary response in Catalonia proved transformational; she would write about Spain, its war, revolution, exiled and dead, for over forty years after, creating a radical and interconnected twentieth-century textual history. In each work on Spain the same narratives, images and phrases proliferate, recontextualized inside her contemporary political and literary moment. In poems, reportage, memoir, essays and fiction, and more often in experimental forms that combine these genres, she reiterates, re-imagines and theorizes her experience during the first days of the war and her own moment of political, sexual and poetic awakening inside its history. Through this proliferating textual history Rukeyser continually documents, recuperates and archives the narratives of those who fought against fascism in Spain and those marginalized by "History's revision"---women, activists, exiles and refugees. This dissertation trace these narratives through her archive and activism, through nearly all of her poetry collections, in numerous out of print essays and unpublished poems, and in diaries and correspondences that retell again and again the scenes of possibility, of freedom, of desire, of violence and of subjectivity that shaped her and her work. The story of Spain is most fully developed in her unpublished novel, Savage Coast, which is edited and presented here for the first time.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
