News Archive
CASiLaC invites you to the third of our ECR Research Seminar Series for 2015-16
Dr. Donna Alexander will give a talk on Wednesday 24th February 2016 at 4 p.m. in ORB 1.24
Dr Donna Alexander, Dept of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies
"An Array of Strategies and Techniques": Lorna Dee Cervantes's Docupoetry
This paper hones in on Cervantes’ unique definition and structure of Docupoetry. The socio-cultural and political contexts that inform her approach to docupoetry are also examined. Cervantes’s innovative approach to docupoetry finds its foundations in traditional genres and forms like lyric poetry, narrative poetry, testimonio and epistle, as well as in documentary techniques found in filmic approaches. Close readings of of relevant examples are framed by Susan Stanford Friedman’s theory of “long poems as big poems” in women’s poetry, signalling that in tandem with the plethora of long, "epic" poems evident in masculine literary traditions, women produce poems that are “big” in terms of their depth of field.
Donna Maria Alexander teaches in the School of English, Department of SPLAS, and the Digital Arts and Humanities programme in UCC. She completed her IRC-funded PhD thesis at UCC in 2015, titled: Chicana Poetics: Genre and Style in Gloria Anzaldúa and Lorna Dee Cervantes. She is the Runner-up in the Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Women's Studies, and is currently working on her first monograph, entitled: Weeder of Wreckage: Documentary and Death in the Poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes. Her research interests include contemporary American poetry, feminist literature, literary geography, digital narratives, and textualities.