Feminist theory, and by extension queer theory because it was built out of feminist theory, put an emphasis on the role, and importance, of gender in a work. This can take many forms, exploring the number of female characters, the quality of those characters (for example, whether or not they have agency and autonomy and, if they don’t, what that implies for the text), the portrayal of those characters, if and how they conform to gender norms (and if they don’t in what ways they break the norm and if they must face any “consequences” for their actions), and much more. By exploring these things, a reader gathers information about not only the text, but can begin to extrapolate the importance of representation and diversity to the author. While this may not be universally applicable (meaning one can’t/shouldn’t always assume that an author is sexist because their female characters are flat or nonexistent (but they should definitely do better)), it is interesting to analyze instances in which the author is explicitly interested in and driven by their female characters and how they are being portrayed.

What is so interesting to me about Chase Berggrun’s book of poetry, R E D, is the way she explores gender and feminism through the act of erasure. R E D is a book of erasure poetry, the source text of which is Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Berggrun, using a very specific formula that she created, physically blacked out Stoker’s original words and narrative from Dracula and created her own that gave the female characters much more agency and autonomy than they previously had. By doing this, the former story is erased and replaced with a much more empowering one.

This, immediately, relates back to feminist theory because of the agency the characters have in R E D that they were lacking in Dracula–the poems are centered around the women and focused on them. Rather than remaining background characters, they come center stage and take the focus from the male characters (including and especially Dracula himself).

What makes R E D so effective is not just the complete erasure of Dracula to create an entirely new narrative, but that Berggrun herself uses R E D to explore her own femininity and womanhood during her transition (she says this in what functions as an introduction, contextualizing the book and explaining how it functions). This adds another dimension to the role femininity plays within the text because the reader immediately understands that the stakes are not just about erasing what is universally understood as not feminist text, but erasing it to give a voice to female characters while the writer is examining and exploring her own femininity.

Berggrun, Chase. R E D. Birds, LLC, 2018.

Chase Berggrun’s poetry book, R E D, is an erasure of Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula. According to Berggrun’s website, “R E D excavates from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, through the process of erasure, an original narrative of violence, sexual abuse, power dynamics, vengeance, and feminist rage, and wrestles with the complexities of gender, transition, and monsterhood.”

I am interested in looking at the way Berggrun deconstructs Stoker’s text not only to create erasure poems, but to completely flip the narrative on its head to explore ideas of gender using queer theory. By applying deconstruction to the Dracula through R E D, and applying queer theory to R E D directly, I will explore how queer voices have been historically erased, and Berggrun uses literal erasure to begin to give them back some of their power.

X: Exploration of gender in R E D by Chase Berggrun.

Y: How have queer voices been historically erased? In what ways are they fighting back against that?

Z: By pushing back on these traditional and exclusionary structures, queer voices are able to reclaim their stories in the very ones that cut them out in the first place.

As a preliminary secondary source, I may look at “Out of Time: Queer Temporality and Eugenic Monstrosity” by Thomas Stuart. “Out of Time” explores Dracula and how the titular character “stand[s] in opposition to the progress- and procreation-oriented culture of fin-de-siècle England. This paper examines the Gothic queerness of stopped time, arguing that a subtle figuration of these characters as trans- underlies their radical break from a contemporary eugenic logic. A trans- impulse in these texts—one that encompasses taxonomic, temporal, and gender boundaries—initially marks the monstrous body but ultimately engulfs the English subject,” according to the article’s abstract.

As a second secondary source, I may look at “‘Nothing is Left Out’: Kenneth Goldsmith’s Sports and Erasure Poetry” by Brian C. Cooney. According to the abstract, this essay takes “a closer examination of [erasure poetries] beginning with their antecedents in the visual arts reveals a number of disparate techniques resulting in erasure and a wide variety of political and aesthetic results.” While not all of this essay will apply, it may make a good starting point for defining terms and looking at erasure poetry. It will also give me some more ideas for secondary sources, based on the ones Cooney uses in his article.

Works Cited:

Berggrun, Chase. “Home: Chase Berggrun.” Website, 2017, http://www.chaseberggrun.com/.

 

Potential sources (primary and secondary):

Berggrun, Chase. R E D. Birds, LLC, 2018.

Cooney, Brian C. “‘Nothing Is Left Out’: Kenneth Goldsmith’s Sports and Erasure Poetry.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 37, no. 4, 2014, pp. 16–33. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.37.4.16.

Stuart, Thomas M. “Out of Time: Queer Temporality and Eugenic Monstrosity.” Victorian Studies, vol. 60, no. 2, Winter 2018, pp. 218–227. EBSCOhost, doi:10.2979/victorianstudies.60.2.07.

Tarner, Margaret, and Bram Stoker. Dracula. Macmillan Heinemann, 2005.

 

New historicism allows the reader to incorporate important historical information into the reading of the text, not only through factual information like names and dates, but also contextualizing that information to make it relevant to the text. I think one of the most important key terms of new historicism is “interpretation,” because new historicists understand that, “our understanding of what such facts mean, of how they fit within the complex web of competing ideologies and such social, political, and cultural agendas of the time and place in which they occurred is…strictly a matter of interpretation, not fact” (268-269). Recognizing that our understanding of a previous time period and the goings on during that period can only be interpreted means understanding that there is a limit to what we can know, and that what we think we know can be skewed over time as we misremember or misinterpret events from the past. Interpretation then opens the door for subjectivity, giving the new historicist the ability to decide what information is most relevant to the text, and how to apply it.

While new historicism is most obviously helpful when dealing with texts that are much older and requite a bit of background information to be understood. That being said, really any text has have new historicism applied to it. For example, it is extremely relevant to apply new historicism to Dracula, because it is an old text, so new historicism would help contextualize why women are portrayed the way they are, how religion factors into the book based on how important it was at the time the book was written, etc. New historicism could also be applied to R E D because understanding our current historical and political climate allows us to understand why a book like R E D is so important and how queer erasure and gender are being reclaimed and reapplied.

For most of recent history, the contributions of queer people have been erased, or their identities have been so that their contributions can be celebrated. Recently it was discovered that the skeletons of two people holding hands, known as the “Lovers of Modena,” were both men. There were then a frenzy of other labels being used including, “best friends,” “soldiers,” “brothers,” etc., erasing the fact that the skeletons were queer.

Knowing that the above is the kind of society in which we live today, where people are constantly trying to erase the identity of queer people, it increases the need for a book like R E D, which takes the story of Dracula and makes backout poetry out of it, literally erasing the original story to create a queer narrative of transitioning, survival, power dynamics, etc.

Chase Berggrun’s poetry book, R E D, is an erasure of Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula. According to Berggrun’s website, “R E D excavates from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, through the process of erasure, an original narrative of violence, sexual abuse, power dynamics, vengeance, and feminist rage, and wrestles with the complexities of gender, transition, and monsterhood.”

I am interested in looking at the way Berggrun deconstructs Stoker’s text not only to create erasure poems, but to completely flip the narrative on its head to explore ideas of gender using queer theory. By applying deconstruction to the Dracula through R E D, and applying queer theory to R E D directly, I will explore how queer voices have been historically erased, and Berggrun uses literal erasure to begin to give them back some of their power.

X: Exploration of gender in R E D by Chase Berggrun.

Y: How have queer voices been historically erased? In what ways are they fighting back against that?

Z: By pushing back on these traditional and exclusionary structures, queer voices are able to reclaim their stories in the very ones that cut them out in the first place.

As a preliminary secondary source, I may look at “Out of Time: Queer Temporality and Eugenic Monstrosity” by Thomas Stuart. “Out of Time” explores Dracula and how the titular character “stand[s] in opposition to the progress- and procreation-oriented culture of fin-de-siècle England. This paper examines the Gothic queerness of stopped time, arguing that a subtle figuration of these characters as trans- underlies their radical break from a contemporary eugenic logic. A trans- impulse in these texts—one that encompasses taxonomic, temporal, and gender boundaries—initially marks the monstrous body but ultimately engulfs the English subject,” according to the article’s abstract.

Works Cited:

Berggrun, Chase. “Home: Chase Berggrun.” Website, 2017, http://www.chaseberggrun.com/.

 

Potential sources (primary and secondary):

Berggrun, Chase. R E D. Birds, LLC, 2018.

Stuart, Thomas M. “Out of Time: Queer Temporality and Eugenic Monstrosity.” Victorian Studies, vol. 60, no. 2, Winter 2018, pp. 218–227. EBSCOhost, doi:10.2979/victorianstudies.60.2.07.

Tarner, Margaret, and Bram Stoker. Dracula. Macmillan Heinemann, 2005.

 

Reader response theory explores the idea that it is not author’s text that matters, but how the reader perceives it. While there are four types of reader response theory identified by Tyson, I was most interested in the psychological reader response theory because of the weight personal experiences have on the text. Through psychological reader response theory, the text is understood not as what is written down, but what the reader thinks about it and how their experiences [in]validates it.

When initially reading the chapter, I couldn’t help but think that reader response theory was stupidly subjective (not stupid, but so beyond subjective that it reached a whole other level). It wasn’t until I was reading through the section about psychological reader response that I understood why it was okay for the reader to be so  subjective with the text–because their past experiences control the text. Reading that section of the chapter made me think of all the times I read something and had a visceral reaction to it, and validated those feelings. I would like to think that I can normally pull myself out of that subjectivity and speak about the piece objectively, if not only by stating the facts of the work and what it’s doing, but thinking about those types of responses is really interesting when considering the use of trigger and content warnings on texts.

Trigger and content warnings are effectively the same thing–seeing a “TW” or “CW” on a piece of media quickly indicates to the reader that they are about to interact with material dealing with sensitive topics. Typically the “TW”  or “CW” is followed by an indicator of what the sensitive content is– sexual assault, abuse, gun violence, suicide,  etc. These warning allows the reader to either 1) get into the correct head space to interact with that text or 2) give the reader the opportunity to avoid interacting with the content altogether without feeling guilty. By giving the reader these options, they are playing into the argument of psychological reader response, but are telling the reader upfront that that type of response is a strong possibility.

These warnings are most often used on social media platforms like Twitter, where people use the thread feature to talk about a topic in as much space at they need to, while recognizing that some of their followers may not want to interact with that content–in the world of social media, one can quickly get sucked into post after post of emotionally draining content, seeing a “TW” or “CW” can allow a user to decide whether or not they want to take on any additional emotional baggage.

(CW: school shootings and gun violence.) This week, one of the major trending videos on Twitter was a “back-to-school essentials” ad released by the Sandy Hook Promise account (the ad can be viewed here https://twitter.com/sandyhook/status/1174291982857883653). This account which, according to their bio, is committed to, “protecting children from gun violence with programs that work,” is based out of Newtown, CT, where the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting took place in 2012. The ad, which is seemingly to showcase essential back-to-school items, shows how these items can be used save lives in a school shooter situation. The effectiveness of the ad comes from the calmness of the children’s voices as they use their supplies to save their own, and other’s lives–some of the more compelling essentials are mundane things like a skateboard, which a student uses to break a window and get out of the building, and a knee-high sock, that one student takes off their foot to wrap around a wounded student’s leg as a make-shift turnakit, and the student crouching on the toilet texting their mother on their new phone.

While the ad is extremely effective in showing why we need gun control (the actors are like 12 tops and speak very calmly throughout the video), it can be extremely triggering for Twitter users who have also been in school shootings or who have been involved in any shooting (which, unfortunately, is a lot of people). While Sandy Hook Promise tweet did not include a “TW” or “CW,” it did say, “This PSA contains graphic content related to school shootings and may be upsetting to some viewers,” and goes on to say that if watching it is “difficult for you, you may choose not to watch.”

account, Sandy Hook Promise Verified. “Sandy Hook Promise (@Sandyhook).” Twitter, Twitter, 18 Sept. 2019, twitter.com/sandyhook.

Promise, Sandy Hook, director. Twitter. Twitter, Twitter, 18 Sept. 2019, twitter.com/sandyhook/status/1174291982857883653.

Structuralism is interested not in the text itself or the history of the author, but solely in the work’s structure and the history of not only that structure, but also all the structures that led to that one. While I think it can be useful to look at the structure of a work and what it means for something to be written in that structure, I also think that it is impossible to get a good critical reading of a piece if your only concern is how the piece is structured and why. For example, in Prof. Rydel’s Women Writers to 1800 class, we were talking about how the form of the lai predated the fairy tale, but Marie de France’s lais still read very much like fairy tales. We then talked very briefly about Frye’s four archetypes of literature before moving on to discuss the content of the lais, which ultimately helped us analyze the lais more than determining how the fairytale and lai structures were similar.

When applying structuralism to a text, I think it becomes most useful when the author is purposefully subverting the structure, or the structure is explicitly important. One example of a structure being purposefully subverted, as we have mentioned in class a few times, is John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In the first few lines of the poem, Milton tells the reader exactly what is going to happen—the poem is an epic retelling of Genesis in which Jesus is the epic hero. Despite this, Milton subverts the reader’s expectations of an epic poem by focusing on Satan, creating the impression that he is in fact the epic hero instead. This subversion of the reader’s expectation creates an interesting dynamic between the author and the structure that I think a structuralist would run with (but I guess we’ll see for sure when we read the article about Paradise Lost).

The other time I think the structuralist criticism would be most interesting is when the structure of a piece is explicitly important. While I realize a structuralist would argue that the structure of a piece is always explicitly important, I am again more interested in what an author chooses to do with a structure. One of the most obvious examples of this is poets who write into a form—sonnet, ghazal, sestina, couplets, etc. Jericho Brown created the duplex, which he describes as, “a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues” (jerichobrown.com). An example of a duplex can be found here: https://poets.org/poem/duplex. The structuralist perspective would be interested in the way Brown’s poem is in couplets, it has a rhyme structure, it’s got lyrical qualities, etc. There are infinite possibilities and rabbit holes in which a structuralist could dig to find the “deeper structure” of a duplex, beyond what Brown gives us in his definition of one. A structuralist would not care about Brown’s mention of abuse or him being gay—two things that feel important to the poem—and would only focus on the interconnections of the structures.

Brown, Jericho. “Poet: Jericho Brown.” Jericho Brown, http://www.jerichobrown.com/.

“The Tradition.” The Tradition, by Jericho Brown, Copper Canyon Press, 2019.

When applying New Criticism to a text, the analyzer is only supposed to take into consideration what is in the text. New Critics value content over context, ignoring anything that isn’t explicitly stated by the writer in that particular work. While I appreciate the heavy reliance on analyzing the text, I find it counterproductive to the project of the piece not to contextualize it—not to think about what was happening at the time the text was written, who the writer was, and what they were interested in forces the reader to ignore certain aspects of the text (or completely miss references) does the work a disservice.

Because of the intense focus on the text, New Critics are able to deeply analyze a text, which I think is fundamental when it comes to analysis of any kind—you have to be able to articulate what the text is doing before you can begin to unpack how it’s doing that. However, I think New Criticism falls short in ignoring outside aspects and influences of the work. As we began to talk about in class today, when artists or critics or curators or whomever are analyzing work they look at the piece itself, but then they look at the piece in relation to the other pieces made by that artist or made in the same time period or during the same movement in order to create the most compelling, thorough analysis of the work.

One poet whose work I am really interested in right now is Jericho Brown, whose latest book, The Tradition, deals with a lot of heavy topics including race, queerness, and trauma. If we were to look at Brown’s poems as New Critics and analyze only the content of the poems, we would still be reading amazing poems, but we would lose so much of their nuances. Brown’s personal history plays a huge role in the emotion of these poems—he is an African American, queer man who has undergone some intense traumas in his life, and to separate that context from the content of his poems would mean losing the value of them.

In the titular poem for Brown’s book (which can be found here: https://poets.org/poem/tradition), New Critics would lose so much of the historical implications of the poem, which deals with slavery and police brutality without ever naming those things. To separate Brown from the poem would mean that lines like, “our dead fathers/Wiped sweat from their necks” wouldn’t have the implications of slavery because a New Critic would not consider Brown’s race when analyzing the poem. And a New Critic would completely lose the meaning behind the end of the poem because they wouldn’t be able to understand who John Crawford, Eric Garner, and Mike Brown are or why the ending of the poem is not only intelligent, but also extremely emotional. When Brown says, “Men like me and my brothers filmed what we/ Planted for proof we existed before/ Too late, sped the video to see blossoms/Brought in seconds, colors you expect in poems/Where the world ends, everything cut down./John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown.” he is equating black men who have been murdered by police officers to flowers that have been plucked and cut down. Without the context of Brown’s background or the current political climate surrounding police brutality, New Critics wouldn’t be able to fully grasp what Brown was doing in the poem.

“The Tradition.” The Tradition, by Jericho Brown, Copper Canyon Press, 2019.