Presentation Title
Linguistic Disobedience: The Intactness of the Minoritized Subject in Contemporary American Poetry
Date
10-1-2020
Description
Oxford English Dictionary Intact, adj. Definition: Untouched; not affected by anything that injures, diminishes, or sullies; kept or left entire; unblemished; unimpaired. Etymology: Latin intactus,
To be intact: "to be unbroken" is to be untouched. Theodore Adorno defines lyrical language as an expression of an individual's personal subjectivity into universality through specific concepts and signs. However, to render a minoritized subject into a language designed to oppress them is to make that subjectivity lose its intactness. By bringing in Paul Ricoeur's conception of the metaphor as a discursive linguistic act which has to work on the level of the sentence as a thought-structure, this paper examines how line breaks allow the expression of a minoritized subjectivity. I argue that the line break in the poetry of Jericho Brown, Ilya Kaminsky, Natalie Diaz and Terrence Hayes disrupts the logic of the sentence and unsettles the metaphor, breaking the "wholeness" of the sentence while maintaining the "intactness" of the thought. This paper applies sociolinguistics to contemporary American poetry in order to theorize the place of the poetic line in Ricoeur's rule of the metaphor. If in the phenomenon of the sentence, language passes outside itself, then the breakage of that sentence into the poetic line has the potential to decolonize that oppressive language.
Recommended Citation
., Saoirse, "Linguistic Disobedience: The Intactness of the Minoritized Subject in Contemporary American Poetry" (2020). 2020 JHU Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Symposium. 375.
https://www.mackseysymposium.org/virtual2020/all/presentations/375
Included in
Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons, Women's Studies Commons
Linguistic Disobedience: The Intactness of the Minoritized Subject in Contemporary American Poetry
Oxford English Dictionary Intact, adj. Definition: Untouched; not affected by anything that injures, diminishes, or sullies; kept or left entire; unblemished; unimpaired. Etymology: Latin intactus,
To be intact: "to be unbroken" is to be untouched. Theodore Adorno defines lyrical language as an expression of an individual's personal subjectivity into universality through specific concepts and signs. However, to render a minoritized subject into a language designed to oppress them is to make that subjectivity lose its intactness. By bringing in Paul Ricoeur's conception of the metaphor as a discursive linguistic act which has to work on the level of the sentence as a thought-structure, this paper examines how line breaks allow the expression of a minoritized subjectivity. I argue that the line break in the poetry of Jericho Brown, Ilya Kaminsky, Natalie Diaz and Terrence Hayes disrupts the logic of the sentence and unsettles the metaphor, breaking the "wholeness" of the sentence while maintaining the "intactness" of the thought. This paper applies sociolinguistics to contemporary American poetry in order to theorize the place of the poetic line in Ricoeur's rule of the metaphor. If in the phenomenon of the sentence, language passes outside itself, then the breakage of that sentence into the poetic line has the potential to decolonize that oppressive language.
