My dissertation, Tiny Lives, consists of a collection of poems of the same title and a critical essay, ““This Is the Place That You All Made Together”: Traversing the Fantasy of the Global Village in Lost.” The poetry collection is composed of four sections. The first three sections— “Tiny Lives,” “Word Problems,” and “In the Church of Loneliness”—form a single book-length manuscript. The fourth section, “Thirteen Coiled Loops in a Borrowed Rope,” represents, in a still very much raw form, my current work and experimentation towards a new manuscript that takes as its subject the history of my native city, Mobile, Alabama.
Each section of the poetry manuscript develops around a central theme. “Tiny Lives” examines both the smallness of individual and animal lives. “Word Problems” is concerned with the limitations of language (and thus poetry) as well as the limitations of “small math” and science as discourses to adequately and completely represent subjective experience. “In the Church of Loneliness” operates out of my poetic philosophy of loneliness as a prime mover, that the desire to connect with others is fundamental both to motivation and identity. Finally, as a coda, “Thirteen Coiled Loops in a Borrowed Rope” represents my recent experiments with documentary poetry rooted in Alabama history; I hope that it will ultimately grow into its own book-length manuscript.
The critical portion of my dissertation analyzes how the final season of the television program Lost functions as an ideological fantasy of a global village that covers over the fundamental antagonisms of late capitalism, namely the divide between the First and Third worlds. I ground my discussion in the work of Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek.