Mad Futures Now: Avant-Garde Dishumanism in the Poetry of Claude Gauvreau, Hannah Weiner, and bill bissett

Abstract

This interdisciplinary dissertation puts the theories and aesthetics of avant-gardism into conversation with recent theories of mental disability arising from critical disability studies and madness studies. It does so in order to develop a critical approach that both expands literary disability studies' formal criticism, and provokes avant-garde theorization to reconsider some of its founding aestheticization and metaphorization of mental disability. Through a close analysis of the poetry and poetics of three North American avant-garde writers who have documented lived experiences of mental disability and ableist harm, including Claude Gauvreau (1925-1971), Hannah Weiner (1928-1977), and bill bissett (b. 1939), this dissertation analyzes the modes by which mentally disabled avant-garde poets integrated disruptive aesthetics with their lived experience. Through this analysis, this dissertation theorizes avant-garde dishumanist aesthetics and social critique. With critical attention to silenced narratives, a combined avant-garde dishumanism presents a complex temporality that acknowledges incompleteness, messiness, and the shifting critical positions of communicative relation in audiences of the present. Avant-garde dishumanist texts trouble normative and dominant ideologies for the purposes of creating experiences of future modes of relation and communication from located and embodied positions of disability. Avant-garde dishumanism finds form in a poetics of linguistic rupture and creation of a sense of more equitable futurity in poetry that resists, speaks back to, and reframes mental ableism. This dissertation ultimately argues for a literary disability studies approach informed by avant-garde poetics to both address the avant-garde's roots in mental ableism, and deepen disability studies' formal textual analysis.