Open AccessThe Reality Based Community
Author(s) -
Hugh J. Foley
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
excursions/excursions journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2055-494X
pISSN - 2044-4095
DOI - 10.20919/exs.5.2014.198
Subject(s) - poetry , theme (computing) , politics , order (exchange) , aesthetics , photography , literature , sociology , epistemology , art , philosophy , visual arts , political science , law , computer science , finance , economics , operating system
In this essay I argue that increasing blurring of boundaries between representational and the real has been characcteristic of the War on terror. I then argue that has produced a response in contemporary American poetry which attempts to produce a critique by collapsing or undermining these distinctions fictionally in order to draw attention to their collapse in political and military discourse. Looking at several poems which take photography as a theme, I aim to show how a specific genre of photo-ekphrastic poetry has proved partiularly germane to this effort.