Archives of the Machine Age: Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony. The United States (1885-1915): Recitative

Abstract

The article examines the ways in which American Objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff (1894–1976) rewrites and compiles excerpts from US archival legal records in his epic-like Testimony. The United States (1885–1915): Recitative (published from 1965 to 1978) so as to represent the social and economic changes, particularly within the context of industrial accidents and child labor, during the late phase of the Industrial Revolution in America. As is argued, the poet’s often uncritically accepted assertion that in his ‘recitatives’ he engages with depositions of authentic witnesses given in a court of law in an unbiased, objective manner is not confirmed either in close reading or in the juxtaposition of particular fragments of the book with the original documentary material on which they are based.