Noa Saunders

My scholarship explores the manifestations of everyday uncertainties in 20th century poetry and film. Reveling in the trivial, the quotidian, and the precarious, the artists I examine together demonstrate the ways in which we receive meanings through words and bodies that we don’t know what to do with. My dissertation illustrates how the uncertainty of twentieth-century life disrupts artistic production for poets and filmmakers in a way that not only has tangible impacts on form, but also electrifies our attention to cultural and political circumstance. By analyzing poetry and filmmaking as practices that occur in everyday life, I assert that both artist and text are vulnerable to material contexts, which results in uncertain, even unintended, forms of art. My poets and filmmakers therefore give shape to the experience of being confronted by what they cannot control and are nevertheless required to engage with. The project explores the work of poets and filmmakers across the century, including Gertrude Stein, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Charlie Chaplin, Maya Deren, Chantal Akerman, Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, and Diane di Prima. Drawing on performance and affect studies, language philosophy, and media aesthetics, my project asserts that these artists’ formal attention to and within states of confusion, clumsiness, and crisis underscores their adversity, constituting a disregarded political aspect of artistic production.

Education:
Ph.D., English and American Literature, Boston University, 2024
M.A., English and American Literature, Boston University, 2017
M.F.A., Poetry, University of Maryland, College Park, 2016
B.A., English with Linguistics Minor, Ohio State University, 2013

Recent Publications and Presentations:
“‘Improbable Life’: Bain, the Baroness, and Public Photography.” Modernism/modernity: Visualities forum, 2023.

“The Dreamer’s Modern Body: Slapstick and Winsor McCay in the Everyday Sensorium,” Comics and Modernism, ed. Jon Najarian, University of Mississippi Press (2024).

“The Digger Archives as Digger Artifact.” Roundtable. Modernist Studies Association, Brooklyn, NY. October 2023.

“Cinematic Clumsiness: Chaplin’s Mutual Vulnerability.” School of Criticism and Theory   Symposium. Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. July 2023.

“Bob Ross and Chill.” Bitchin’ Kitsch, forthcoming January 2022.

“‘With heat in their hands’: Amiri Baraka and the Work of Performing Presence.” Modern
Language Association, Washington DC. January 2022.

“(Un)certainty in Chantal Akerman and Cinematic Form.” Modernist Studies Association, Portland, OR. October 2022.

“Your Mother Dies.” Leavings, August 2021.

“Stirring the Dust of Archives: Sarah Ehlers’ Left of Poetry: Depression America and the Formation of Modern Poetics.” Against the Current. May/June 2021.

“Up Beacon Hill,” “Shepherd.” The Shore, March 2021.

“‘Something is Happening to Me’: Mediating Surprise, Fear, and Uncertainty in Sanctuary.” American Literature Association, Boston. May 2019.

“Subversive Sentimentality and the Comic Body in Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux.” Australasian Modernist Studies Network, Melbourne. October 2018.

“The Belated Kitty: Aura, Textuality, and Precarity of Anne Frank.” University of Virginia: Making and Collecting, Charlottesville. April 2017.

“A Sideways Confrontation of Death: Narcissus and Knowledge in Brenda Hillman’s Death Tractates,” Graduate English Organization Conference: Perversions, College Park, MD. April 2016.

“Self-Portrait,” “Cannonballs.” Ninth Letter, December 2015.

“Textuality and Reception of Nabokov’s The Original of Laura: Bibliography is Fun,” British Modernists Group, Urbana, IL. May 2015.

Courses Taught:
Tufts University
EN2: Digital Media Cultures
EN1: Expository Writing

Boston University
EN195: Literature and Ideas
EN120: 20th Century Literature and Film: Images Beyond Imagism
WR150: Poets, Pop Culture, and the Public Sphere
WR120: Poets, Pop Culture, and the Public Sphere

University of Maryland, College Park
ENGL 101: Academic Writing
ENGL 101S: Academic Writing for Scholars
ENGL 273: Beginning Poetry Workshop
ENGL 280: Introduction to the English Language