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Wieczorek, Piotr

University of British Columbia

This thesis straddles literary criticism, poetics, musicology, sound studies, esthetic and affect theory, as well as modernist, Caribbean and Black studies to perform musically inflected literary analyses of non-representational poetry: the portrait of Jacque Lipschitz by Gertrude Stein and the conceptual long poem Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip. I argue that both authors use sonic-literary spectral voice-loops as devices to bridge and generate disparate states of consciousness inaccessible by semantic referentiality of a language operating within oppressive systems of power. Primarily a phenomenological study, the thesis analyzes how literary loops generate in readers states of threaded focused and unfocused attention which open their consciousness to a more robust passing of affect that is then mobilized to reshape hierarchies by transforming subjectivity into a force of esthetic, socio-political and ontological change. Following a theoretical introduction (chapter 1), chapters 2 and 4 combine critical and poetic registers of language to lay out my main ideas and the scholarship I mobilize to textual analyses in chapters 3 and 5. In chapter 3, I close-read Stein’s portrait of Lipschitz through, formally, the Nāṭyashāstra esthetic theory, Indian raga and American musical minimalism, and, conceptually, the musical quality of timbre: which, I argue, Stein operationalizes to embed “esthetic flavours” of the objects of her acts of portraiture in herself and then the reader in an impressionist synchronization of affects, instituting an “erotics of difference.” I propose “spectral reading” and “subjective correlative” as new devices for poetic analysis. In chapter 5, I close-read multiple fragments of Zong! through fugue, calypso, polyvocularity and the Sufi religious practice of dhikr whirling to argue that the poem metaphorically apprehends the necessity of counterpoints becoming subjects as opposed to being subjected, in Philip’s politico-spiritual project of restoring dignity and justice to the victims of slavery and the violence of colonialism. I explore how Zong! turns its readers into surrogates that presence and revive the souls of Africans murdered on board the British slave ship Zong, making each act of reading—loud and silent alike, through loops of attention and words that revolve to the point of blurring—a ritual of creation.

Text

2025-06-27

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/91459

English

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/