Richard Anthony Cavell

This dissertation theorises the contemporary Anglophone lyric alongside developments in media history (with a specific focus on print’s relationship to the Internet from Web 1.0 to 2.0), and asks how this juxtaposition addresses questions of subjectivity as racialised. Analysing poems by canonical, avant-garde, and diasporic poets of colour, I argue that the Internet, often framed as a force enacting a radical break in history, in fact recapitulates liberal humanist tenets and the racial order of colonial modernity as codified through print capitalist conditions. Over the course of five chapters, I examine how posthumanist rhetoric occludes the Internet’s continuities and liberal humanism. In Chapter 1, I argue that avant-garde poets who viewed the early Internet as a resource for pure dematerialized language in fact recapitulate a Eurocentric installation of whiteness as the invisible, transcendent, and universal master-subject. I propose in Chapter 2 that such rhetoric hinges upon a notion of metaphysical abstraction termed virtuality which must be understood as emerging from print conditions, when the legal-economic necessities of print capitalism transformed embodied writers in pre-modern Anglophone culture into abstract author functions, giving rise to the post-Romantic lyric’s vaunted universality through the printed poem’s hallucinatory orality. Subsequently, I identify in Chapter 3 how such purported transcendent universality as derived from print culture in fact created the possibility of racist virtualities which constructed the global racial hierarchy of colonial modernity, and investigate how such racist virtualities imbricate the formal operations of lyric poetry for white and racialised writers in different ways. In Chapters 4 and 5, I argue that social media in Web 2.0 catalyses a categorical confusion between the material and virtual realms through mobile computing, digital photography, and geopositioning functions that connect the offline and online positionalities of Internet users, and suggest that these changes could be encapsulated as social media’s remediation of the post-confessional lyric. While such irruptions reify representations of race within neoliberal capitalism as commodifiable products, I argue that they also offer new forms of relationality that unsettle conservative notions of identity, model possibilities for diasporic affiliation outside of ethno-nationalist understandings, and socialise intersectional allyship as lyric intimacy.

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Through a critical examination of his oeuvre in relation to his transoceanic geographical and intellectual mobility, this dissertation argues that George Woodcock (1912-1995) articulates and applies a normative and methodological approach I term "regional cosmopolitanism". I trace the development of this philosophy from its germination in London's thirties and forties, when Woodcock drifted from the poetics of the "Auden generation" towards the anti-imperialism of Mahatma Gandhi and the anarchist aesthetic modernism of Sir Herbert Read. I show how these connected influences--and those also of Mulk Raj Anand, Marie-Louise Berneri, Prince Peter Kropotkin, George Orwell, and French Surrealism--affected Woodcock's critical engagements via print and radio with the Canadian cultural landscape of the Cold War and its concurrent countercultural long sixties. Woodcock's dynamic and dialectical understanding of the relationship between literature and society produced a key intervention in the development of Canadian literature and its critical study leading up to the establishment of the Canada Council and the groundbreaking journal "Canadian Literature". Through his research and travels in India--where he established relations with the exiled Dalai Lama and major figures of an independent English Indian literature--Woodcock relinquished the universalism of his modernist heritage in practising, as I show, a postcolonial and postmodern situated critical cosmopolitanism that advocates globally relevant regional culture as the interplay of various traditions shaped by specific geographies. I account for the relationships that pertain between this cosmopolitanism and the theories of the other most prominent Canadian cultural critics of the period, Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan. Woodcock's regional cosmopolitanism, advancing a culturally and politically confederate country as first established by Canadian Aboriginal civilizations, charged the ascending Romantic nationalism of the period with imperialism. As a theory of "common ground" fostering participatory agency for the post-national global village, regional cosmopolitanism offers an alternative to multiculturalism and Western humanist models of organization associated with neoliberalism.

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This dissertation positions the International Concrete Poetry movement within its historical moment and links it to the emergence of a new global imaginary around the middle of the 20th century. It makes the argument that contemporaneous social and technological shifts directly influenced the compositional strategies of a group of poets who aimed to transform poetry’s communicative power in a rapidly shifting media environment. By positioning primary materials – poems, manifestos, and statements by the poets themselves – against contemporaneous cultural phenomena across various disciplines, I perform a critical examination that allows for new strategies for engaging work that has historically frustrated readers. I identify in a series of permutational poems the influence of rudimentary computer technology and the implications that technology has for poetic subjectivity. I locate the international character of the movement in modernization projects such as Brasília, and in technologies that held significance for the entire globe, such as reinforced concrete, satellite photography, and nuclear weapons. As concrete poetry takes shape in both books and galleries, I investigate the spatial implications of the work in its various forms, and analyse its often fraught relationship with Conceptual Art, which also presented language in innovative ways though in pursuit of different purposes. Across this terrain my methodological approach oscillates between art history and literary and cultural studies, paying close attention to how the poetry circulated within and imagined global spaces at a time that predated but in some ways initiated the trends we now see more fully developed in current concepts of globalization.

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