MURIEL RUKEYSER’S THE BOOK OF THE DEAD AND THE REPRESENTATIONAL CHALLENGES OF SLOW VIOLENCE
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.07Keywords:
Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead, slow violence, Rubbish Theory, Waste Theory, Waste StudiesAbstract
The events narrated in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead (1938) constitute a good example what Rob Nixon calls “slow violence,” a type of “attritional,” non-spectacular violence that seems to resist effective literary representation. This essay focuses on the means Rukeyser deploys in order to overcome the representational limits posed by Nixon’s “slow violence”: the patchwork of genres, the choice of the poem-sequence structure and, last but not least, the visible process of “wastification” of the tunnel workers, who play such a central role in the poem. Read in the light of recent scholarship on waste, Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead emerges as one of the first poem sequences to explore the conjunction of material toxic waste (silica dust) and human wastification (Rubbish Theory).Downloads
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Accepted 2022-09-08
Published 2022-11-09
