Legible ashes: Muriel Rukeyser's 'The Book of the Dead'.

摘要

This dissertation, arching theories of law and of poetry on grounds of representation and documentation, takes as its subject an industrial disaster in the 1930s in West Virginia that gave rise both to a massive lawsuit and to a sequence of twenty poems by Muriel Rukeyser, "The Book of the Dead." Some two thousand men labored to drive a three-mile tunnel through a mountain to divert the waters of the New River and thereby harness hydroelectrical power for a metallurgical plant owned by Union Carbide. When hundreds of workers began to sicken and die, the cause turned out to be acute SiliCOBiS, contracted by the inhalation of dust during the drilling. Many of the workers, alleging unsafe working conditions, brought suit, unsuccessfully, against the construction contractor. Rukeyser, meanwhile, journeyed to West Virginia to see and hear for herself what had happened and then to write her sequence of poems based on the case.; A close reading of this sequence involves matters of representation and documentation considered over a range of overlapping technical, legal, philosophical, political, ethical, aesthetic, and poetic issues. Chapter One sets out theoretical comparisons between law and poetry and surveys some of the work by critics engaged in the interdisciplinary study of law and literature. Chapter Two takes up the problem of locating artistic authority in the act of voyage and witness, comparing linguistic strategies to photographic strategies. Chapter Three carries on the comparison of poetry and photography, specifically as modes of evidentiary presentation, while bringing in a discussion of legal approaches to evidence. Chapter Four considers the problem of speaking for other people and takes account of the functions of poetry and law in the preservation of names and voices. Chapter Five intensifies consideration of emotional issues and ethical issues involved in writing an ambitious political poetry. Chapter Six concludes the study by asserting the power of poetry to be, not only an organ of protest, but also, like law, a continual force for deep change in the configurations of people, living with each other, facing death.