Elegy uncanny : Origins, Milton, Melville, & Levis

Abstract

This dissertation proposes that the modern elegies written by the American poet Larry Levis represent a body of work uniquely placed to shed light on the genre's trajectory from its earliest examples into its more contemporary and uncanny evolutions. It explores how the elegy has been continuously adapted and developed as a poetic mode for dealing with death and loss in a wide range of literary and human contexts over time. In order to contextualize my analysis of Levis' contemporary elegies, Chapter 1 will begin by outlining the traditional characteristics of the elegy as a genre in order to try to define its common figures and purposes. This will then be followed by an attempt to show how the elegy has changed over time, with a particular focus on its Greek and English manifestations. By tracking some of these changes an appropriate context will be established for theorising and responding to what I will argue is the increasingly uncanny nature of the elegy in its modern and postmodern manifestations. Chapter 2 will provide some baseline definitions and outline Freud's theory of the uncanny; the purpose here will be to suggest another possible method for responding to the elegy in a contemporary context, one somewhat overlooked in the contemporary critical paradigms of elegy studies. Chapter 3 will engage in a sustained analysis of Melville's elegy to the American Civil War battle of Shiloh. The intent is to posit Melville's elegiac response (and its nominal effects) as an aesthetically and politically subversive response to the elegiac genre's own propensity to render nationally witnessed trauma and loss as something morally and philosophically transcendent. Chapter 4 will explore Larry Levis' elegy 'Shiloh' as evidence of the genre's uncanny account of the elegy as a witness to national and American cultural tragedies which in and of themselves must be reconfigured if in fact American elegists are to point to a more aggressively democratic apotheosis within the cultural dynamics of mourning. In the conclusion, I will argue the idea that although the elegy may have outgrown its traditional conventions, at the same time it points the living back to a praxis whereby they may mourn as more authentic witnesses to loss and death.