Dis/United States of Vulnerability

How has the condition of vulnerability shaped the U.S. literary and cultural sphere since the 1960s? Against the backdrop of the Cold War era with its emerging counter-cultural liberation movements and an increasingly interconnected world, what new insights into cultural processes of meaning-making can vulnerability, as an analytic lens, reveal? Through in-depth analyses of selected poems by Sylvia Plath, Audre Lorde, Agha Shahid Ali, and Ocean Vuong, this book discusses how their representations of vulnerable selves and states transgress conventional literary and cultural boundaries. It elucidates how the four poets’ ways of writing vulnerability into their works offer more nuanced understandings of the sociopolitical dis/unities that have shaped the U.S. from the 1960s into the 21st century. The book thus theorizes vulnerability as an analytic concept that engenders new points of access for studying alternate processes of meaning-making in American studies.