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Book Section
Toby Altman ‘So Clear That One Can See the Breaks’: Colonialism, Materiality, and the Lyric in Jen Bervin’s The Desert
This essay places Jen Bervin’s 2008 artist book The Desert in conversation with lyric theory. It argues that Bervin disrupts the lyric as it has developed since the nineteenth century, restoring its suppressed materiality and contesting the imbrication of the lyric in colonial practices of land use. By doing so, the essay argues, Bervin restores the social world of material production and communal labour on which the lyric depends.
2024. lyric theory; colonialism; materiality; Jen Bervin; John C. Van Dyke; John Stuart Mill