Sleeping with the Lit Review

Ellie & Meredith

3 November 2017

Literature Review:

According to Amy Robbins, Language writing is “a genre or loose collective” that focuses on linguistic opacity, the unstable signifier, and a mistrust of any indicator of poetic identity (342). Poets in this tradition attempt to dispense not only with the lyric ‘I’ but also with any indication of the writer’s sociocultural position. Given this definition, the line in the sand between Language poetry and other poetic schools such as the Black Arts Movement is unsurprising. Harryette Mullen, however, blurs this division with her undeniably black and irrefutably experimental poetics, pushing scholars to address this divide in new ways. Critics come at this problem with a number strategies, including extra-literary theorizations such as cognitive study. Ultimately, they all land at the same conclusion: the assumption that language can ever be separated from identity is fallacious because of the intimate ways in which our lexicon is connected to our selfhood.

Robbins deals more with literary theory than any other Mullen scholar, dedicating the first third of her piece both to defining Language poetry and to explaining the critical pushback to which the language/identity dichotomy is subjected. Robbins takes this pushback a step further in order to shows that the poetic attempt to eliminate identity is not just a naive impossibility; rather,  it actually reinscribes and re-emphasizes marginalizing societal structures. While citing scholar Romana Huk’s claim that eliminating identity creates a universal hive-mind selfhood, Robbins posits that the presumption that one is capable of creating universality via erasure of the individual is the presumption that one is capable of understanding and representing a universal entity, which erases non-dominant identities (348). Robbins also highlights that, even for a movement so consciously removed from identity, Language scholars acknowledge certain gendered aspects of the work, a fact which Robbins says, “provokes the obvious and necessary next question: how does a movement aware of itself as white and male in origin deal with matters surrounding race?” (247).  She also emphasizes that Mullen’s work critiques the system that creates this false idea of language and identity separation, rather than just the fallacy itself: Mullen’s “work makes manifest and directly engages with the racial politics of the American avant-garde’s whiteness as it operates in literary history” (367).  This analysis aligns with the note that other scholars have taken of Mullen’s metapoetics, but again pushes the analysis a step further into interaction with the system of power behind these divides, not just with the false dichotomy.

Elizabeth Frost uses the term “hybrid poetics” to describe Mullen’s positionality at the intersection of cultural and linguistic experimentation. According to Frost, “Mullen splices together competing lexicons into a long poem that challenges the notion of any individual reader’s mastery and assumes a hybrid readership for her lyric fragments” (466). Not only are Mullen’s hybrid poetics a product of her fascination with the relationship between language and identity, but these poetics also produce a specific response in the reader. This reader, in decoding Mullen’s complex web of puns and allusions, is forced to perform a cultural synthesis in order to make sense of poems that contain diction pulled from contemporary cultural references and AAVE, among other various sources. Lauro Amorim quotes Frost’s analysis in his discussion of miscegenation and hybridity, though his analysis is focused more on the specifically racial implications of Mullen’s writing, whereas Frost analyzes it with an eye towards Mullen’s position within the lyric tradition and the contemporary avant-garde. Both writers agree, however, that Mullen’s choice to write in language influenced by overlapping cultural influences reinforces the ways that language and identity, specifically black identity, are created by intersecting social and historical forces. According to Jessica Luck, this construction of hybrid poetics and hybrid readership places the writer in the position of catalyst — a viewpoint which reinforces her fit within the Language poetry camp, since Mullen works, as the Language poets do, to provoke reader response while also emphasizing the centrality of the writer’s identity.

Luck, who uses cognitive theory to analyze Mullen’s poetics, “found that models of embodied cognition and theories of emergence from contemporary cognitive science offer a useful corrective to linguistically determined, poststructuralist models of the subject while still avoiding a return to an essentialized or biologically determined notion of self” (360). She uses the theories of emergence and possession to address the similarities between the creation of identity and poetry, noting the two inextricably linked. She cites theorist Margaret Boden in order to explain that Mullen’s use of defined rules in her poetry boosts her creativity and demonstrates the direct link between writing and identity: every person has a set of maps and structures to use when addressing the world, and creative minds tweak those ideas to create a new structure entirely (364-365). Critic Emily Beall also uses cognitive theory to analyze Mullen’s work, looking to the structure of her writing rather than the significations of her words. Deconstructing Mullen’s play with linguistic expectations, Beall examines the way that Mullen challenges the linguistic construct of the simile. Mullen, Beall argues, destabilizes the simile itself by reversing the positions of signifier and modifier in the classic simile “as _ as _.” In doing so, Mullen reveals the nonsensical basis of both our semantic conventions and of our construction of language itself.

Although scholars come to analyze Mullen from a number of viewpoints, nearly all of them end up discussing her relationship to the categorization of contemporary poetry. Mullen herself has spoken and written extensively about this conflict, and is in many ways the most reliable and accessible voice on this subject. In her essay “Telegraphs from a Distracted Sybil,” Mullen describes the “risk” she took in “abandoning the precisely located black female subjectivity of [her] first, folksy book — Tree Tall Woman” (19).  After making this risky shift to avant-garde territory, however, Mullen noticed something missing: “Suddenly, when I went around to do readings of Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T [her next two, much more formally experimental collections], I would be the only black person in the room […] The idea that you could be black or innovative, you know, is what I was really trying to struggle against.”(qtd. in Amorim, 109). Mullen scholars, however the choose to approach her work, all seem to be in agreement that she does not fit neatly into the categories available, and that she disproves the definitional separation of such categories.

Works Cited

Amorim, Lauro Maia. “The Invisible Blackness of Harryette Mullen’s Poetry: Writing, Miscegenation, and What Remains to Be Seen.” Revista De Letras, vol. 52, no. 1, 2012, pp. 101–120. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23654910.

Beall, Emily P. “‘As reading as if’: Harryette Mullen’s ‘cognitive similes.’” Journal of Literary Semantics, vol. 34, no. 2, 2005, p. 125-138.

Frost, Elisabeth A. “‘Ruses of the lunatic muse’: Harryette Mullen and Lyric Hybridity.” Women’s Studies, vol. 27, no. 5, 1998, pp. 465-481.

Luck, Jessica Lewis. “Entries on a Post-Language Poetics in Harryette Mullen’s ‘Dictionary.’” Contemporary Literature, vol. 49, no. 3, 2008, pp. 357–382. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27563802.

Robbins, Amy Moorman. “Harryette Mullen’s “Sleeping with the Dictionary” and Race in Language/Writing.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 51, no. 2, Summer2010, pp. 341-370. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.lib.davidson.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=57754800&site=ehost-live.

SSRs:

I. Frost, Elisabeth A. “‘Ruses of the lunatic muse’: Harryette Mullen and Lyric Hybridity.” Women’s Studies, vol. 27, no. 5, 1998, pp. 465-481.

II. “Of particular importance is an aesthetics that acknowledges blackness in its own “lyric” mode: in distinction from euphonious language commonly called “lyrical,” Mullen pays homage instead to a blues aesthetic” (475). Although Mullen works within the lyric poetry tradition, she does so while also retaining a musically-influenced awareness of the role of black identity. These double influences create a hybrid poetics in which Mullen can explore the limits of identity and language.

III. Frost opens her argument by placing Harryette Mullen into a literary/historical context; Mullen writes from the middle of two camps, the avant-garde Language poetry school and the Black Arts Movement, which are rarely investigated as being in conversation or mutually informative. Then, Frost pushes this analysis a step farther, looking beyond Mullen’s connection with these two camps to the ways she deviates from their conventions (465-466). Unlike much of avant-garde poetry, Mullen’s writing often retains the lyric “I.” Frost posits that Mullen’s retention of the lyric “I” is an exercise in hybridity, where a poem’s perspectives are collaged from a number of sources, as Mullen also collages her poetic language from a number of dialects and sources: popular American culture, African-American vernacular English, and historical allusion. Frost investigates Mullen’s connection to the history of the lyric, from the quotation from the Greek poet Callimachus that opens Mullen’s book Muse & Drudge to the numerous Sappho references in her work.

Pivoting on the word “hybrid,” Frost describes Mullen’s disapproval of another sort of hybridity — the “mongrelization” of black culture by the white mainstream. In this section, Frost intertwines close reading of Mullen’s poems with analysis of Mullen’s influences and references. She also brings in other critics in order to continue analyzing Mullen’s works in context; after beginning the article with Mullen’s relation to the avant-garde writing tradition of Language poetry, Frost concludes by putting Mullen in the context of Black Arts poetry. Arguing that Mullen “forges a hybrid poetics to elucidate and, at times, to critique the ‘mongrel’ nature of American history and contemporary culture,” Frost notes that Mullen’s formal innovations need not be at odds with her more personal expression; rather, the hybridity of Mullen’s poetics allows both sides to inform each other.

IV. Rhetorical Moves

1. Frost doesn’t limit the critical conversation to the start of the essay, instead invoking critics all the way through the paper’s final pages. This move has the effect of keeping her theories grounded in context throughout the paper.
2. Frost also close reads her own writing, re-examining the word “hybridity” towards the end of the article in order to make a turn from the avant-garde context of Mullen’s work to its focus on black American identity. This transition is smooth and demonstrates Frost’s willingness to examine her own writing and ideas.
3. Additionally, Frost ends the article with a close reading. This move works because Frost has been stringing critical commentary throughout the article, so her argument has already been posited by the article’s final paper. The effect of ending on a close reading is one of strengthening the argument; Here’s what I think, Frost seems to be saying, But don’t take my word for it — let’s look to Mullen’s own words instead.

I. Amorim, Lauro Maia. “The Invisible Blackness of Harryette Mullen’s Poetry: Writing, Miscegenation, and What Remains to Be Seen.” Revista De Letras, vol. 52, no. 1, 2012, pp. 101–120. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23654910.

II. “Mullen’s experimentation with punning, double entendres, intertextuality and heteroglossy, or, in other words, her engagement with writing and “writerly texts” (with orality punningly transferred to the ambiguities of writing) is another way of stressing the linguistic, synthetic miscegenation from which blackness itself is an outcome” (116). In other words: Mullen’s choice to write in language influenced by a number of overlapping influences reinforces the ways that language and identity, specifically black identity, are created by overlapping social and historical forces.

III.       The essay opens with a large section of Mullen’s poem “Sleeping with the Dictionary.” After providing this textual starting point, Amorim continues not with a close reading of the text, but with a discussion of the dictionary’s function in society and in our definition of language. Arguing that Mullen, as a black female experimental writer, is actively calling into question our literary power structures, Amorim also makes extensive use of Mullen’s own words. Not only does he pull block quotations from Mullen’s essays “Poetry and Identity” and “What is African About African American Poetry,” but he also quotes multiple interviews Mullen has given about her own work. Using quotations from critics as well, Amorim discusses several ideas from notable Mullen scholars including Elisabeth Frost; he also quotes one of Mullen’s contemporaries, the poet and scholar Evie Shockley. After discussing the ways that Mullen has situated herself in between the Language and Black Arts/identity camps, Amorim turns to the function of hybridity in Mullen’s work and influences. He invokes Mullen’s own discussion of Spirit Writing, a visionary arts tradition among illiterate former slaves, in order to bring up a discussion of visibility and the role of the expected audience for Mullen’s work. Finally, Amorim looks at Mullen’s position in current poetry anthologies in order to prove that the difficulty of classifying Mullen’s writing points to the destabilizing power of Mullen’s hybrid poetics.

IV. Rhetorical Moves

1. Opening a critical essay with a block quotation from a poem and providing no other explanation or interpretation, just leaving the poem there for context, is a move I haven’t really seen before. I like the idea of giving readers a sense of the text being discussed even before the argument is set up.

2. Amorim uses rhetorical questions throughout the text, and although this move can be tacky in some circumstances, I think that strategy actually works here, where the article is challenging readers to read actively and re-examine accepted categorizations of literature.

3. Although Amorim’s extensive use of quotations from Mullen herself is a move that de-emphasizes the utility of Amorim’s own argument, I do like the fact that the author of the texts themselves is so involved in the construction of this argument.

V. To my mind, the extensive use of block quotation is a somewhat clunky move, and one which I would not like to replicate in my own writing. Although the Mullen block quotation at the start of the article is an interesting move, but when it comes to creating a critical framework, I believe that an argument flows much more smoothly when quotations are incorporated into the text’s own sentence structure.

I. Luck, Jessica Lewis. “Entries on a Post-Language Poetics in Harryette Mullen’s ‘Dictionary.’” Contemporary Literature, vol. 49, no. 3, 2008, pp. 357–382. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27563802.

II. “I contend that Mullen’s experimental poetics offers an even more radical materialism of the sign by exploring the productive embeddedness of language within the whole embodied cognitive system….imagining the act of poetic creation as an event, a complex, dynamic, but unified process out of which the poem emerges… (349).” Essentially, Luck is arguing that the experimentation with identity language actually forces the reader to address the cognitive relationship between a person and language and therefore the aural and semiotic, as well as definitional, aspects of language.

III. Luck begins her piece, as do many other Mullen scholars, by addressing the inadequacy of the current definitions of Language and identity/lyric poetry to encompass poets like Mullen, and calling for a category that allows for the natural relationship between poetry and identity. The characteristics of Language poetry are introduced organically as they become relevant to the topics Luck is addressing, though much of this definition work does come at the beginning of the piece.

When it comes to addressing lyric and identity poetry, unlike that of many other scholars, Luck’s piece does not use demographic indicators, such as gender or race, as a center-point. She does not ignore Mullen’s race or fail totally to address it, but it rarely factors into the analysis or the theoretical framework.

Instead, Luck “found that models of embodied cognition and theories of emergence from contemporary cognitive science offer a useful corrective to linguistically determined, poststructuralist models of the subject while still avoiding a return to an essentialized or biologically determined notion of self” (360).  She primarily focuses on the theory of emergence, which says that identity is formed through experiences that build upon themselves, not through some inherent entity or existence, and possession, which is the way in which our inner voices force us to interact with the semiotics and aurality of language (360, 361). She cites scholar Denise Riley, who says that through this lens, writing is more a process of editing than creating (361). That, Luck says, makes the writer a catalyst—an idea that lines up with the idea of Language poetry intending to provoke something in the reader while also reemphasizing the centrality of the writer in this form emerging through them that they are editing (363).

Once the theory has been established, Luck starts a new section, entitled “Creative Constraints” that addresses how rules can actually boost creativity. Citing theorist Margaret Boden, she explains that we have a set of maps and structures that we use to look at the world, and the creative tweak those ideas to create a new structure entirely (364-365). While this section addresses the ways in which our background (i.e. our set of maps and structures) directly influences our work, the actual analysis of how Mullen’s poetry uses language to reflect identity could ostensibly fit in among a number of other critics who make the same point about language and identity under different structures.

The final section, Body Talk, addresses how the title poem demonstrates the ways in which language and poetry are a fully embodied experience. However, this section does not quite connect to the inextricability of identity and language and feels perhaps like it is attached to its own thesis. In particular, since the section centers around “Sleeping With the Dictionary,” which Luck refers to as “metapoetic perspective,” the analysis seems more to be making a case for Mullen’s beliefs about poetry than what Mullen’s poetry is doing (375).

IV. Rhetorical moves:

1.     Explaining the use of constraints as a tool for linguistic play and as a direct link to the poet’s identity
2.     Framing the writer as a catalyst, which allows us to draw a connection to the theories of Language poetry that deal with reader response that she does not directly address
3.     The way she brought up definitions and theories on Language poetry organically as they were relevant, which makes her analysis easier to follow

I. Robbins, Amy Moorman. “Harryette Mullen’s “Sleeping with the Dictionary” and Race in Language/Writing.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 51, no. 2, Summer2010, pp. 341-370. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.lib.davidson.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=57754800&site=ehost-live.

II. “I am arguing that the effect of the binary put forth…tacitly allows for the erasure of an important but excluded middle (349).” Robbins is arguing that the false dichotomy of Language and Identity poetry doesn’t just fail to make room for marginalized poets, it helps reinforce their marginalization.

III. Robbins spends the first third of her essay walking through and deconstructing traditional theories and definitions of Language Poetry. The first few pages are absolutely dominated by quotations; as the analysis moves further, Robbins’ own words begin to have the majority of the page, but quotations are still frequent.

Robbins particularly makes moves to point out the ways in which the theories don’t just fallaciously ignore identity but actually reemphasize marginalization. Among the ways she addresses this is in her response to another scholar: “If we reconsider here [Romana] Huk’s argument regarding Language writing’s ‘new culturally specific, yet universalized, conception of (non)selfhood’ (149), wherein selfhood is abstracted from embodied selves and obliterated universally, it in fact becomes a totalizing move of erasure to deny the identity positions of the marginal, as though they are in some way the same as the identity position of white males…[which] precisely reflects the sort of serious cultural blindness made possible by privilege” (348). Essentially Huk is contending that trying to remove the self entirely creates a sort of universal hive-mind non/self. Robbins pushes the idea further by positing that the presumption that one is capable of creating universality via erasure of the individual is the presumption that one is capable of understanding and representing a universal entity, which erases non-dominant identities.

Another point that she makes is that Silliman’s contention that a minority inhabiting the I that is assumed to belong to the dominant identity “explodes the fictions of the universal,” in some ways is “unwittingly remarginalizing their work through his support of the old distinction between writing that explodes the very notion of the self and writing that, in a belated and derivative way, adopts the conventions of selfhood to give “voice” to the personal experience of marginality” (343). Essentially, Robbins is claiming that to call something avant-garde because it is claiming a space traditionally inhabited by others is suggesting that minority groups will always be a step behind. As Robbins moves through her analysis she begins to highlight, that even for a movement so distant from identity, Language scholars acknowledge certain gendered aspects of the work, a fact which Robbins says, “provokes the obvious and necessary next question: how does a movement aware of itself as white and male in origin deal with matters surrounding race?” (347).

With the key question posed, we begin to deal with Mullen herself, although mostly with her commentary about poetry and her position in the poetic world, including her use of the term “aesthetic apartheid” to describe the delineation between black and formally experimental poetry (qtd in 351).

In another ten pages or so, the analysis on Mullen’s poetry itself begins, highlighting small details to conflate with grand sociopolitical commentary. Robbins, like others, addresses Mullen’s ars poetic nature as well: “Mullen’s work in Sleeping with the Dictionary is not simply a piece of evidence that there is a black avant-garde; rather, her work makes manifest and directly engages with the racial politics of the American avant-garde’s whiteness as it operates in literary history” (367).

IV. Rhetorical moves:

1. The step by step deconstruction of the theories
2. Addressing not just the inadequacies of the theories but the ways in which they function in a larger system of privilege and oppression
3. In the same vein, drawing a clear connection between Mullen’s metapoetics and her critique of the greater sociocultural systems and not just literary theory