Marianna Hagler

I am a PhD candidate and Rackham Humanities Research Fellow in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, specializing in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American poetry. My research and teaching interests include avant-garde poetics, intertextuality in African American poetry, ecopoetics, British and American psychoanalysis, and critical and intellectual history. 

My dissertation, “How to Read Gertrude Stein: Lessons from Lyn Hejinian, Anne Carson, Harryette Mullen, and Tracie Morris,” argues that these four contemporary experimental American poets adapted Stein’s work to promote an alternative to conventional academic reading practices and pedagogies. I am currently revising the dissertation into a monograph titled The Mother of Us All: How American Poets Learned to Read Gertrude Stein, arguing that the alternative reading practices described in my dissertation responded to midcentury avant-garde poets’ dissatisfaction with the literary critical and pedagogical methods of the midcentury academic institution. My work joins recent critical interest in the ambivalent relationship of professional literary criticism with lay reading habits in the twentieth century. While recent scholarship has shown how avant-garde writers often interpreted their modernist predecessors’ work in their own image, the poets I study consciously resist this tendency and instead proliferate multiple versions of Stein in their reading and teaching practices.