Toward a New American Lyric: Form as Protest in Claudia Rankine

This thesis argues that Claudia Rankine\u27s two American lyrics destabilize the subject-object dialectic underwriting American lyricism. First, I consider Don’t Let Me Be Lonely’s rejection of spectatorship, insofar as spectatorship objectifies the suffering of the Other. Second, I analyze Citizen’s subversion of the lyric “I”, particularly as it vocalizes the “you”-position traditionally relegated to poetic object. I suggest that both works, by returning power to the object, manifest an aesthetic disruption to the racially-based power dialectic underpinning American lyric tradition. Eventually, I propose that Rankine mobilizes the poem as a future-space for the realization of an ideal politics