Department of English

• Tuesday, July 22, 2025 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Zoom (online only)

On Tuesday, July 22, Bethany Swann will defend her dissertation, “The Spatial Logics of Lyric Torsion.” Bethany writes:

In taking stock of the status of contemporary poetry a few decades into the twenty-first century, literary critic Timothy Yu writes that we have seen, “if not precisely a ‘return’ to lyric, then a renewed interest in exploring the potential of the category of lyric to be turned to new and often more politically engaged, ends.” So, what can be said of these new and more politically engaged ends? At the convergence of the fields of Asian American and Asian diasporic studies and contemporary poetry and poetics, "Lyric Torsion" draws from a rich set of interdisciplinary conversations in psychoanalysis, the natural sciences, and visual and material culture. Torsion, from the Latin torquere, is defined by the Cambridge English Dictionary as an action, a force, and a state of being. Each of torsion’s multipronged modes contributes to my intervention into a process through which poets revise the self and subject at the center of the contemporary poem. Through the construct of the “lyric I,” I track an alternative logic to the modern subject formation underwritten by Western empire. To elaborate, I turn to Don Mee Choi’s geopolitics of diasporic space in DMZ Colony (2020), Tan Lin’s playful theory of sampling in 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary (2010), Arthur Sze’s expansive vision of synchronicity in The Redshifting Web (1998), and the viscous lifeworlds that emerge in the aftermath of militarized violence in Hoa Nguyen’s A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure (2021).

The defense will be held exclusively on Zoom (please contact Bethany for the link). The private portion of the defense will take place from 2 to 3 pm, and the public portion of the defense will take place from 3 to 4 pm.

We hope to see you there as we congraulate Bethany on this wonderful achievement!