Confessional poetry and constitutional privacy: Paradoxes of self-disclosure in Cold War America.
Item
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Title
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Confessional poetry and constitutional privacy: Paradoxes of self-disclosure in Cold War America.
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Identifier
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AAI9630493
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identifier
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9630493
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Creator
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Nelson, Deborah L.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Nancy K. Miller
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Date
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1996
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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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Literature, American | American Studies | Law
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines confessional poetry in light of the Supreme Court's privacy decisions between 1945 and 1989. I place the work of Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, W.D. Snodgrass and Paul Monette within the wider debate about privacy that was one of the Cold War era's most divisive domestic controversies. With a focus on the period from NAACP v. Alabama in 1958 and the publication of Lowell's Life Studies in 1959 to Roe v. Wade in 1973 and the death of Anne Sexton in 1974, I organize a series of close readings through the language of the Court's shifting definitions of privacy. Moving back and forth between a cluster of poems and a landmark Supreme Court opinion generates what I am calling a "poetics of privacy," a rhetorical analysis that exposes the deeply rooted contradictions in Cold War ideology. Chapter one explores the paradox of the home, conceived in Poe v. Ullman (1960) as the ideal retreat from totalitarian surveillance but imagined by poets like Sexton as the site of an intolerable scrutiny. In the second chapter, I examine an ethical problem often associated with confessional poetry--the exposure of a family member--by considering Lowell's Life Studies and The Dolphin in terms of Griswold v. Connecticut's (1965) creation of privacy within a relationship. The third chapter traces the evolution of individual privacy that culminated in Roe v. Wade in juxtaposition with "operation poems"--poems which feature the opening of the body in surgery. Bringing the relationship between confessional writing and constitutional rights up-to-date, I conclude with an analysis of Paul Monette's Love Alone and Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) and ask how, in the context of AIDS and the end of the Cold War, this later-generation confessional poet conceived of privacy so that it protected without imprisoning the gay citizen. This poetics of privacy, which derives from reading across disciplinary boundaries--from the public voice of the Supreme Court to the private voice of the lyric poet--resituates confessional poetry not as an apolitical art of personality but as an art actively engaged in a debate central to postwar America's self-definition.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
