| Popis: |
The shared subtitle of Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004) and Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) draws attention to questions of national identity and poetic genre. This chapter explores the way Rankine’s reconfiguration of lyric address in those books engages the ‘you’ and ‘us’ of racism and ideology across the English-speaking world. The ‘American’ dynamics of her books are mediated, moreover, by collage techniques and ‘prose poetry’, and by intermedial dialogue with visual materials, not least video and television. In her work, poetic articulations of conversation and conversational implicature are mapped on to implied social experiences of complicity and ideological interpellation. In this chapter, interpellation is understood (following Louis Althusser) as the aggregation of processes by which individuals are hailed by ideology – through social interaction and language – and mediated into misrecognising their social being and interests through various subject positions and identities. Mapping experiences of ideological interpellation onto a structure of lyric interpellation bears witness to wounds of affect and experience – in this case, experiences of race, intersectionality, climate, and the Anthropocene – not so as to reproduce such experiences for literary consumption, but rather to trouble readers into recognitions of their perspectives and complicities. |
