Squaring the “I”: Subjectivity and (Un)Creativity in Laura Mullen’s Subject (2005)

Paula Currás-Prada

doi:10.14198/raei.28713

Authors

Paula Currás-Prada UUniversidade da Coruña, Spain https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6094-954X

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14198/raei.28713

Keywords:

subjectivity, poetry, feminism, uncreativeness, Laura Mullen, lyric, experimentation, selfhood

Abstract

From the point of view of feminist hermeneutics—Felski 1989, Hejinian 2000, White 2014—and phenomenology—Husserl ([1912] 1989), Merleau-Ponty ([1945] 2013)—the present paper takes up analysis of Laura Mullen’s 2005 poetry collection Subject, specifically focusing on its metatextual, innovative version of poetic subjectivity. While critics and poets such as Marjorie Perloff (2010) or Kenneth Goldsmith (2011) have accurately signaled to the death of creativity—an otherwise logical conclusion to the postmodern extinction of the lyric self—feminist and socially engaged analyses of contemporary poetry have reclaimed the need for historically oppressed groups to fight for their right to creativity. As such, although Amy Newlove Schroeder may have coded Subject as a “funeral for subjectivity” (qtd. in Fleisher 2012, 211), Mullen rarely lets the “I” become unnoticed. Instead, as this paper shows, the poet forces the reader to bear in mind the artifices that set the poetic self into movement. The subject—a central tool for straightforward, voice-based poetry—becomes in these poems a subjective object (Husserl [1912] 1989). Aware of itself as a physical object within the page, the “I”—repeatedly italicized or enclosed between inverted commas—is for Mullen a locus for the reconciliation of subjectivity and objectivity, expression and estrangement, agency and subjection. Most concretely, the present paper contends, the feminist subjective object can be now used as a way of contesting the pull of the “uncreative”—materialized in the popularization and evolution of AI—while still engaging in postmodern pastiche, plagiarism and appropriation. All in all, Mullen’s Subject presents the reader with a version of (female) subjectivity that escapes personal expression while still considering the self as a viable artifact within new, feminist, and socially conscious poetry.

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