"FANTASTIC MOTION": THE DOCUMENTARY POETICS OF ANNE CARSON

Abstract

Although critical studies of Anne Carson’s genre-bending poetry abound, there is as yet no sustained examination of her poetics as it relates to the form and genre of documentary. Likewise, few critics have attempted a study of documentary as it manifests within the fictive construct of poetry. Situated at the juncture of these two fields, this thesis argues that Carson’s documentary praxis is founded on the principle of motion, as an approximation and approach to a truth that is, correspondingly, elusive. In the first chapter, I discuss the principle of motion as a transgression beyond the frame of documentary, and a dismantling of the frame itself in the act of representation. In the second chapter, my focus shifts from the mode of representation to the ethics of reception, and how representation may inform reception. I consider mobility as it pertains to the fluid relation between the reader and the other, in the encounter staged by documentary, specifically, in the form of an anthropology. This paper diverges from the traditional association of documentary poetry with factual reality, evaluating Carson’s documentary poetics as an alternative epistemology in the theory and practice of documentary, in order to offer a new valuation of documentary.