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Full text release has been delayed at the author's request until June 01, 2025

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Limitrophe

Eder, Claire E.
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1521467355668106

Abstract Details

2018, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, English (Arts and Sciences).
The dissertation is divided into two sections: an essay titled “The Evolution of Contemporary American Poetry of Witness: C. K. Williams, Claudia Rankine, and Aracelis Girmay” and a poetry collection titled Limitrophe. “The Evolution of Contemporary American Poetry of Witness: C. K. Williams, Claudia Rankine, and Aracelis Girmay” discusses recent poetry that testifies to experiences of extremity, such as racist violence, the global migrant crisis, and environmental catastrophes. This essay traces the roots of poetry of witness to Carolyn Forché’s 1993 anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness and describes how witnessing was defined in the context of the twentieth century. I then demonstrate the ways in which twenty-first-century American political poets have challenged the genre’s original articulation, expanding the category of who counts as a witness and which events are worthy of being witnessed. The writers I discuss here reframe the act of poetic testimony by expressing self-awareness, doubt, and complicity; by placing microaggressions into the category of atrocity; by investigating the possibilities for technologically mediated and nonhuman witnessing; and by invoking a witnessing that is collective and global in scope. Limitrophe is composed of poems that investigate how individuals can most ethically participate in communities, using the context of the neighborhood as a motif. The poems enact a self-conscious witnessing of local happenings, often revealing their speakers’ complicity within systems of oppression. This collection questions the limits of intimacy within romantic and platonic relationships and meditates on how connections are influenced by facets of identity, such as gender, class, and race.
Jill Rosser (Committee Chair)
Mark Halliday (Committee Member)
Mary Kate Hurley (Committee Member)
Devika Chawla (Committee Member)
115 p.
Literature
poetry; creative writing; poetry of witness; political poetry; C K Williams; Claudia Rankine; Aracelis Girmay; Carolyn Forche; twenty-first-century American poetry; atrocity; microaggressions; neighborhoods; community; insects; gender; local

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Eder, C. E. (2018). Limitrophe [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1521467355668106

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Eder, Claire. Limitrophe. 2018. Ohio University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1521467355668106.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Eder, Claire. "Limitrophe." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1521467355668106

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ohiou1521467355668106
© 2018, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Ohio University and OhioLINK.