Postwork poetics: Contemporary American poetry and the disappearance of work (James Wright, Rita Dove, Susan Howe)

This dissertation investigates how poetry reinvigorates work's conceptualization in an era marked by concerns over the disappearance of both work and poetry. As the economic base in America has shifted to service and information industries, work has often been perceived, by prominent social critics, to be vanishing. This anticipated dissolution issues from the decline, since 1945, of traditional labor forms: the farmer and the factory worker have been replaced by the office manager and fast-food server. In turn, these archetypal models of “real” work have lost resonance. Work's postindustrial disappearance thus signifies a deep-seated crisis about the ability to articulate work's centrality to the human condition. My project turns to contemporary American poetry's rigorous linguistic exercise as a potent source for reconstituting work's meaning. In contrast to standard critical accounts of postwar American poetry that disconnect it from social reality, this project focuses on verse's pivotal implication in a radically changing American work culture.; My dissertation focuses on four traditional icons of work and non-work central to the rhetoric of work's disappearance: the factory worker and the farmer, whose “authenticity” haunts contemporary work structures, and the housewife and the poet, whose corresponding non-productivity serves to buttress the integrity of “real” work. Retaining these fading American figures as indexes for contemporary work only exacerbates anxiety about work's disappearance and enfeebles its conceptual development. Indeed, as the material counterparts of these icons recede from the landscape, an anxious discourse relying on metaphors of an abused human body surfaces in popular discourses. My project examines how contemporary poets redeem these rhetorically pained bodies by paradoxically embracing the violence done to them. Rather than despairing over postindustrial death and disappearance, poets as varied as James Wright, Rita Dove, and Susan Howe celebrate dying, tortured, and splintered bodies in order to acknowledge work's ongoing, and often violent, cultural transformation. Re-affiliating work with the organic body, however shattered or fragmented, these poets return to a more fundamental understanding of work: as human connection to and creation of the world—what Hannah Arendt calls the human artifice.