Tropological Modes and Projected Images in The Fall of America

The Fall of America: Poems of These States, 1965–1971 (1973) is a collection of poems composed by Allen Ginsberg during his drive cross-country tour of America, for which he shared the U.S. National Book Award for Poetry. In these lines, the American landscapes, situation and his experiences and observations of the social and political turmoil during the 1960s and early 1970s are described with vivid and striking details in the projected images in the poems. This study aims to investigate tropological modes involved in the poetic images in The Fall of America, exploring Ginsberg’s encoded cognitive discourses on the corrupt government, industrialization and ecological deterioration through the tropological analysis of the projected images like “longhaired magician” and “borax” in the poems. It focuses on the primary level of Ginsberg’s multiple discourses and thus provides the foundation for his historical narratives on the 1960s. Textual analysis is the main research approach and Hyden White’s theories of four tropological modes are applied as the theoretical framework.