Seth McKelvey

Research     Poetry    

From slave narratives to Henry Thoreau's cabin to science fiction, flights from undesirable realities persist in the American literary imagination. As a nation, after all, the United States was founded on escape in the Revolutionary War, threatened by escape in the Civil War, and, according to the logic of Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis, sustained, for a time, by the escape of westward expansion. It should be no surprise that American literature and culture have often adopted the content, structure, and logic of departure. This observation is the unifying impetus for my research.

Often, that pattern of escape angles away from the political state. From nineteenth-century anarchist movements to Occupy Wall Street, anti-state sentiment and rhetoric persists in American politics and culture through varying, sometimes contradictory and electorally-opposed forms. Within this history of anti-state thought, American literature is often preoccupied with imagining political philosophy's unimaginable: exit from the state. I research escape as a thematic, formal, and political concern in American literature and culture spanning genres and political allegiances, examining how fiction, poetry, and adjacent cultural productions, such as graffiti and film, struggle to imagine a way out of the political state, constituting what I call the poetics of escape.


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