"Such loss is no loss": Exploring Queer Poetics in H.D.'s Archive and "Eurydice"

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2019
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Haverford College. Department of English
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Award
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eng
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Open Access
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Abstract
This essay investigates the queer poetics of reticence and disidentification in the modernist poet H.D.’s personal archive and poem “Eurydice.” Using a letter found in the Bryn Mawr Special Collections that H.D. wrote to her friend John Cournos in 1919, this essay explores Catherine Imbriglio’s concept of reticence as a means of creating a disruptive alternative space within language that allows for a navigation of the publicity of queerness from within the closet. In approaching “Eurydice” the essay turns to José Muñoz’ idea of disidentification, and highlights H.D.’s reticence as an act of disidentification before going on to explore the ways H.D. disidentified both from the classical tradition that she engages with in “Eurydice” and from modernism itself. H.D.’s disidentification provides a case for a conceptualization of queerness as a non-relational identity that is not confined to one’s choice of partner, which in turn advocates for an expansion of the queer community, and for queer theory to be brought to bear upon a broader range of social and cultural phenomena.
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