Lyric Eye

Description

Lyric Eye: The Poetics of Twentieth-Century Surveillance presents the first detailed study of the relationship between poetry and surveillance. It critically examines the close connection between American lyric poetry and a burgeoning US state surveillance apparatus from 1920 to the 1960s. The book explores the myriad ways that poets―Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, W.H. Auden, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Sylvia Plath, Gertrude Stein, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg and others―explored a developing and fraught environment in which the growing power of American investigative agencies, such as the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, imposed new pressures on cultural discourse and personal identity. In analysing twentieth-century American poetry and its various ideas about "the self," Lyric Eye demonstrates the extent to which poetry and surveillance employ similar styles of information-gathering such as observation, overhearing, imitation, abstraction, repurposing of language, subversion, fragmentation and symbolism. Ground-breaking and prescient, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature, politics, surveillance and intelligence studies, and digital humanities. Cover Half Title Endorsement Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of Contents Acknowledgments Copyright acknowledgments Introduction: the observed of all observers Notes Chapter 1: Towards a theory of the Lyric Eye Why Lyric? Big blue eye: the new surveillance normal The FBI everybody knows Notes Chapter 2: Hoover’s optics: Bureau reading and impractical criticism Every American is innocent: Hoover, the FBI and American literature Codes for everything and nothing: American criticism and surveillance Make it indecipherable: William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound Notes Chapter 3: Surveillance poetics abroad Seeing over seas: nationalism, modernism and countersurveillance Escaping the FB eyes: Langston Hughes and James Baldwin The secret agent: W.H. Auden writes American poems Notes Chapter 4: Surveillance poetics at home Diver under a glass bell: containment and surveillance poetics The American suburbs: Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath as eyewitnesses Poetry, privacy and paranoia: (wire)tapping into the American Dream Notes Conclusion: poetry in the age of dataveillance Works Cited Index