The invention of survival

Abstract

In its response to traumatic forms of oppression associated with race, gender, and sexuality, the literature of Langston Hughes, H.D., Djuna Barnes, and Zora Neale Hurston-the writers of this study-illuminates how survival narratives are dynamically linked to the present moment. Their work places emphasis upon readerly experience through a set of aesthetic strategies that compel readers to inhabit the present. Take, for instance, Hughes's appeal to jazz music in his poetry; he uses improvisational language and call-and-response techniques that prompt a reader's attention and response to the complex scenes of racial trauma at play in his poems. Just as a jazz musician is asked to improvise or invent in the moment of play, Hughes's reader is called upon as a creative witness whose own enlivened reading grants his poetry survival. Through critical reading of Hughes and the other writers of this study, I offer new ways of thinking about the temporal quality of readerly experience and its transformative power to bear witness to survival. If as traditional critiques of modernism suggest, "time" is war-weary and ruptured in high-modernist classics such as James Joyce's Ulysses and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, then in the literature of the periphery, broken time is reimagined as a source for creativity and transformation. By identifying the importance of alternative temporal imaginaries for marginalized populations, this dissertation contributes to new studies of time such as Elizabeth Freeman and José Muñoz's work on queer time, Alondra Nelson's study of "Afrofuturism," and Dana Luciano's work on sacred time. Furthermore, this project offers a critical intervention into trauma studies vis à vis the work of Cathy Caruth by arguing that the belated and repetitious impact of trauma is an imperative of survival aligned with present moment time. When we are present in our reading of stories about trauma, we participate as active witnesses to their survival; we partake-as the title of my study announces-in the "invention of survival" by transforming words on a page into living testimony.