Online

Burkett, Matthew Luis

English

2019

M.A.

This thesis examines the use of the body in avant-garde poetics, relating it to both theory and contemporary culture. An outline of how the body has been depicted, represented, and formalized in modernism is made, and contemporary issues involving the body, from what Meredith M. Render calls the "alienability" of the body to posthuman hybridity and technological transcendence. Language poetry, including the works of M. SourbeSe Philip, Clark Coolidge, Steve McCaffery, Charles Bernstein, Karen Mac Cormack, Lyn Hejinian, and Bruce Andrews is then examined for the body's fraught usage in a generally non-referential poetics. The body's place in conceptual writing combines contemporary technologies with a look back at Antonin Artaud's corps sans organes.