Christopher Patrick Miller | University of Utah (original) (raw)
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Papers by Christopher Patrick Miller
Twentieth Century Literature, 2023
Hart Crane’s lyrics abound with transient figures who often doubt their intelligibility or viabil... more Hart Crane’s lyrics abound with transient figures who often doubt their intelligibility or viability as persons, and his letters reflect a significant anxiety about his own ability to communicate the problems he experienced in being and remaining intelligible to others. Against that background, this article offers a reading of Crane’s transient figures as linguistic performances of such doubtful and tenuous existences. In this, the article puts Crane in dialogue with one of his most admired and mimicked contemporaries, Charlie Chaplin, as well as with theories of transient sociability from language philosophy, urban sociology, and modernist studies.
Poetics Today, 2022
Indeterminacy is a term that has been asked to do a lot of work for literary and cultural critici... more Indeterminacy is a term that has been asked to do a lot of work for literary and cultural criticism. For strictly formalist critics, it might be the quality of a text or artwork that both preserves useful ambiguity and invites participation from respondents. For criticism that challenges the status quos of social and political life, it is often the interpretive condition that can unsettle existing patterns of recognition and judgment. What this essay finds in the work of Lisa Robertson is a more situated notion of indeterminacy, one that relates indeterminacies of speech, form, and affect to the destabilizing effects that postindustrial capitalism can have and has had on cities and their inhabitants. Following a brief overview of indeterminacy as a critical concept, from New Criticism to poststructuralist theory, the essay closely reads Robertson's Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2003) as a multi-genre study in Vancouver becoming “money” and the effects of this process on work characterized as temporary or feminine. Indeterminacy becomes a double bind for the speakers of her “Office,” in that freedoms of expression, feeling, or movement fold into occasions for speculation and displacement. Finally, the essay relates Robertson's indeterminacies to recent debates about the character of avant-garde writing, arguing for a more socially and historically contingent notion of aesthetic experimentation.
Modernism/modernity, 2019
Wallace Stevens Review, 2018
Journal of Modern Literature, 2017
While recent work in lyric theory has put the generic category of the lyric into radical question... more While recent work in lyric theory has put the generic category of the lyric into radical question, less attention has been paid to how lyric poets employ the instabilities of figuration and reference to critical, and ultimately social, ends. Taking as a test case the most popular poet of a regionally authentic American lyric, Robert Frost, I argue that Frost uses techniques of lyric voicing to critique the very means by which persons appear as familiar individuals, of a sociality or place, and therefore worthy of certain liberties and property claims. I draw upon Frost's early New England poems, his relationship with Edward Thomas, as well as his final public lecture, "On Extravagance" to show how he links " drifts" in reference and cumulative "shifts" in sound or sense to the lived experience of transience, particularly within the context of rural economies. Frost allies the vocation of poetry and lyric form not with a rugged isolationism but a more conditional notion of freedom, one that forms across a variety of egoisms, boundaries, and moral or ethical values.
Twentieth Century Literature, 2023
Hart Crane’s lyrics abound with transient figures who often doubt their intelligibility or viabil... more Hart Crane’s lyrics abound with transient figures who often doubt their intelligibility or viability as persons, and his letters reflect a significant anxiety about his own ability to communicate the problems he experienced in being and remaining intelligible to others. Against that background, this article offers a reading of Crane’s transient figures as linguistic performances of such doubtful and tenuous existences. In this, the article puts Crane in dialogue with one of his most admired and mimicked contemporaries, Charlie Chaplin, as well as with theories of transient sociability from language philosophy, urban sociology, and modernist studies.
Poetics Today, 2022
Indeterminacy is a term that has been asked to do a lot of work for literary and cultural critici... more Indeterminacy is a term that has been asked to do a lot of work for literary and cultural criticism. For strictly formalist critics, it might be the quality of a text or artwork that both preserves useful ambiguity and invites participation from respondents. For criticism that challenges the status quos of social and political life, it is often the interpretive condition that can unsettle existing patterns of recognition and judgment. What this essay finds in the work of Lisa Robertson is a more situated notion of indeterminacy, one that relates indeterminacies of speech, form, and affect to the destabilizing effects that postindustrial capitalism can have and has had on cities and their inhabitants. Following a brief overview of indeterminacy as a critical concept, from New Criticism to poststructuralist theory, the essay closely reads Robertson's Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2003) as a multi-genre study in Vancouver becoming “money” and the effects of this process on work characterized as temporary or feminine. Indeterminacy becomes a double bind for the speakers of her “Office,” in that freedoms of expression, feeling, or movement fold into occasions for speculation and displacement. Finally, the essay relates Robertson's indeterminacies to recent debates about the character of avant-garde writing, arguing for a more socially and historically contingent notion of aesthetic experimentation.
Modernism/modernity, 2019
Wallace Stevens Review, 2018
Journal of Modern Literature, 2017
While recent work in lyric theory has put the generic category of the lyric into radical question... more While recent work in lyric theory has put the generic category of the lyric into radical question, less attention has been paid to how lyric poets employ the instabilities of figuration and reference to critical, and ultimately social, ends. Taking as a test case the most popular poet of a regionally authentic American lyric, Robert Frost, I argue that Frost uses techniques of lyric voicing to critique the very means by which persons appear as familiar individuals, of a sociality or place, and therefore worthy of certain liberties and property claims. I draw upon Frost's early New England poems, his relationship with Edward Thomas, as well as his final public lecture, "On Extravagance" to show how he links " drifts" in reference and cumulative "shifts" in sound or sense to the lived experience of transience, particularly within the context of rural economies. Frost allies the vocation of poetry and lyric form not with a rugged isolationism but a more conditional notion of freedom, one that forms across a variety of egoisms, boundaries, and moral or ethical values.