Muriel Rukeyser’s "The Book of the Dead" and the representational challenges of slow violence

  1. Begoña Simal-González 1
  1. 1 Universidade da Coruña
    info

    Universidade da Coruña

    La Coruña, España

    ROR https://ror.org/01qckj285

Revista:
Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos

ISSN: 1133-309X 2253-8410

Año de publicación: 2022

Número: 26

Tipo: Artículo

DOI: 10.12795/REN.2022.I26.07 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openAcceso abierto editor

Otras publicaciones en: Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos

Objetivos de desarrollo sostenible

Resumen

Los sucesos narrados por Muriel Rukeyser en The Book of the Dead (1938) constituyen un buen ejemplo de lo que Rob Nixon denomina “violencia lenta,” un tipo de violencia alejada de la espectacularidad, violencia de progresivo “desgaste” difícil de trasladar a una obra literaria. Este artículo estudia las estrategias desplegadas por Rukeyser para superar esos obstáculos a la hora de representar literariamente la “violencia lenta”: optando, primero, por un patchwork de géneros, eligiendo, además, la estructura del poemasecuencia polifónico y, por último, dando visibilidad al proceso de “wastification” o “basurización” de los mineros que protagonizan el poema. Leído desde la óptica de las recientes corrientes críticas conocidas como Waste Studies y Waste Theory, The Book of the Dead se erige como una de las primeras obras poéticas en examinar de forma conjunta la materialidad de los desechos tóxicos (el polvo de sílice) y la “basurización” humana.

Referencias bibliográficas

  • ALTMAN, M. “Muriel Rukeyser’s the ‘Book of the Dead.’” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 23, no. 1, 2004, pp. 146-148, https://doi.org/10.2307/20455181
  • ARMIERO, Marco. Wasteocene: Stories from the Global Dump. Cambridge Elements, 2021.
  • BARNAT, Dara. “‘Women and Poets See the Truth Arrive’: Muriel Rukeyser and Walt Whitman.” Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981-), vol. 34, no. 1, 2015, pp. 94–116, https://doi.org/10.5325/studamerjewilite.34.1.0094.
  • BAUMAN, Zygmunt. Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts. Polity Press, 2004.
  • BELL, Lucy. “Place, People and Processes in Waste Theory: A Global South Critique.” Cultural Studies vol. 33, no. 1, 2019, pp. 98-121, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2017.1420810
  • BRINNIN, John Malcolm. “Muriel Rukeyser: The Social Poet and the Problem of Communication.” Poetry, vol. 61, no. 4, Poetry Foundation, 1943, pp. 554– 75, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20583291.
  • BULLARD, Robert D. Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality. Routledge, (1990) 2019.
  • CARELESS, Eleanor. “Muriel Rukeyser and the Security of the Imagination: Poetry and Propaganda in 1940s America. ” Modernist Cultures, vol. 14, no. 4, 2019, pp. 421-445, https://doi.org/10.3366/mod.2019.0266
  • CHERNIACK, Martin. The Hawk’s Nest Incident: America’s Worst Industrial Accident. Yale University Press, 1986.
  • DAYTON, Tim. “Lyric and Document in Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Book of the Dead.’” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 21, no. 2, Indiana University Press, 1997, pp. 223–40, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3831461
  • DOWDY, Michael. “Shakeout Poetics: Documentary Poetry from Men of Fact to Data Bodies.” College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies, vol. 47, no. 1, 2020, pp. 155–84.
  • GARDINIER, Suzanne. “‘A World That Will Hold All the People’: On Muriel Rukeyser.” The Kenyon Review, vol. 14, no. 3, Kenyon College, 1992, pp. 88–105, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4336719.
  • GOODMAN, Jenny. “‘Presumption’ and ‘Unlearning’: Reading Muriel Rukeyser’s the ‘Book of the Dead’ as a Woman’s American Epic.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 25, no. 2, 2006, pp. 267-289, https://doi.org/10.2307/20455282
  • GREEN, Chris. “Working Truth Inside and Out: Don West, Muriel Rukeyser, Poetry, and the Popular Front in Appalachia, 1932-1948.” Journal of Appalachian Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, 2002, pp. 382–406, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41446548.
  • GREEN, Chris. The Social Life of Poetry: Appalachia, Race, and Radical Modernism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp.161-198.
  • GRIEVE, Sarah. “Environmental Justice Witnessing in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead.” ISLE-Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 26, no. 4, 2019, pp. 968-1005, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isz021.
  • HOLLENBERG, Donna Krolik. “Witness to Her Age.” The Women’s Review of Books, vol. 17, no. 5, 2000, pp. 10–11, https://doi.org/10.2307/4023317.
  • KALAIDJIAN, Walter. “Muriel Rukeyser and the Poetics of Specific Critique: Rereading ‘The Book of the Dead.’” Cultural Critique, no. 20, 1991, pp. 65– 88, https://doi.org/10.2307/1354223.
  • KERTESZ, Louise. The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser. Louisiana State UP, 1980. https://archive.org/details/poeticvisionofmu00kert
  • MOORE, Catherine Venable. Introduction to Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, West Virginia University Press pp.1-59, 2018.
  • MORRISON, Susan Signe. “Waste Aesthetics: Form as Restitution.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment vol. 20, no. 3, 2013, pp. 464-478
  • NAVAS, Grettel, Giacomo D’Alisa, and Joan Martínez-Alier, “The role of working-class communities and the slow violence of toxic pollution in environmental health conflicts.” Global Environmental Change, vol. 73, March 2022, pp. 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2022.102474.
  • NIXON, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.
  • PARKS, Justin. “Toward a Resource Poetics in Muriel Rukeyser’s Book of the Dead and Mark Nowak’s Coal Mountain Elementary.” Textual Practice, vol. 35, no. 3, Mar. 2021, pp. 395–412.
  • ROSNER, David, and Gerald Markowitz. Deadly Dust: Silicosis and the Politics of Occupational Disease in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton UP, 1991.
  • RUDNITSKY, Lexi. “Planes, Politics, and Protofeminist Poetics: Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘Theory of Flight’ and ‘The Middle of the Air.’” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 27, no. 2, 2008, pp. 237–57, https://doi.org/10.2307/20541064.
  • RUKEYSER, Muriel (1938). The Book of the Dead. West Virginia University Press, 2018.
  • RUKEYSER, Muriel. “Sand Quarry.” Poetry, vol. 47, no. 1, 1935, pp. 25–26, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=47 &issue=1&page=38
  • SCIGAJ, Leonard M. “Ecology, Egyptology, and Dialectics in Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Book of the Dead.’” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 38, no. 3, 2005, pp. 131–47, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44029674
  • SIMAL-GONZÁLEZ, Begoña. “The waste of the empire”: Neocolonialism and environmental justice in Merlinda Bobis’s “The Long Siesta as a Language Primer.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 55, no. 2, 2019, pp. 209-222, https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2019.1590633
  • SLATER, Avery. “American Afterlife: Benjaminian Messianism and Technological Redemption in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead.” American Literature, vol. 86, no. 4, 2014, pp. 767-797, https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2811802.
  • TALES, Bryn. “Salvaging the Symbol in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead.” Comparative Critical Studies, vol. 14, no. 2-3, 2017, pp. 323-346, https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2017.0242
  • THOMPSON, Michael. (1979, 2017). Rubbish Theory; The Creation and Destruction of Value. Pluto Press
  • WARE, M. S. “Opening the ‘Gates’, Muriel Rukeyser and the Poetry of Witness.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 22, no. 3, 1993, pp. 297-308, https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.1993.9978983.
  • WECHSLER, Shoshana. “A Ma(t)ter of Fact and Vision: The Objectivity Question and Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 45, no. 2, 1999, pp. 121-137. https://doi.org/10.2307/441826.