Under a New Law: Walter Benjamin's "Literary Montage" and the Collage Poetics of Susan Howe and Anne Carson

Abstract

Beginning with Walter Benjamin's notion of "literary montage," as touched upon in Convolute N of Benjamin's The Arcades Project, this thesis examines the collage poetics of Susan Howe's collection of poetry That This and Anne Carson's book-length elegy Nox, focusing on the two texts' engagement with the material object (particularly manuscripts and extratextual artifacts) and collage as a method of historiography. The fragment's form (and its poetic, historical, and philosophic significance) as well as the elegy's form figures prominently in the discussion, as both poets are interested in postmodern form in poetry and its relation to history, and both texts are poetic acts in memory of the dead--Howe's husband and Carson's brother. Chapter I compares the origin of collage (visual arts Vs. cinematography) in Howe and Benjamin's work, respectively, while Chapter II examines the "surface" of collage: collage techniques and strategies, and collage's relation with scrapbooking techniques. Texts in conversation with Howe's That This and Carson's Nox include Benjamin's The Arcades Project, Theses on the Philosophy of History, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, The Task of the Translator, and On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.