“What I lack is myself”: The Fluid Text and the Dialogic Subjectivity in Susan Howe’s Debths

Jacek Partyka

doi:10.18778/2083-2931.13.08

Authors

Jacek Partyka University of Bialystok https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0734-6138

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.13.08

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Keywords:

Susan Howe, Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce, found poetry, textual fluidity, extremity, dialogic subjectivity

Abstract

James Joyce’s neologism “debths” (Finnegans Wake) that Susan Howe elects for the title of her 2017 volume of poetry points to at least three semantic coordinates of “obligation,” “trespass,” and “demise,” never—due to its implied transaction between the sound and the spelling—fully yielding to or being appropriated by any stable signification. In Debths, the end of life, writing, and, perhaps, literature are palpable, if overtly manifested, currents of poetic discourse. In my article, I advance the idea of recognizing this tripartite taxonomy as a variant of what Divya Victor calls “extremity.” Within this context, I demonstrate the emergence of a dialogic, intertextual, and appropriative subjectivity of the poet.

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Author Biography

Jacek Partyka, University of Bialystok

Jacek Partyka is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Philology, University of Bialystok, Poland, where he teaches courses in the history of American literature, intertextuality, and comparative studies. His research interests center on American late modernist and postmodernist poetry (Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, Susan Howe), literary representations of genocide (Edward Lewis Wallant, Cynthia Ozick, Charles Reznikoff), W. H. Auden’s reinvention of himself as a new poet in the US, and the literature of the Jewish diaspora in New York City. He has co-edited numerous volumes of essays on American literature and culture (e.g., American Wild Zones: Space, Experience, Consciousness; Dwelling in Days Foregone: Nostalgia in American Literature and Culture) and is the author of a monograph study on the use of old criminal records and testimonies in literary texts, Disarchiving Anguish: Charles Reznikoff and the Modalities of Witnessing (2021).

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