Description
- Abstract:
- My work examines the ways in which modernist lyric poems activate specific ways of thinking through their formal and thematic engagements with time. One particularly persistent line of literary criticism has theorized the temporal mode of lyric as a kind of perpetual present that resists the passage of time and strives for access to the eternal. This line of thought has led to a larger assumption about the closed nature of lyric time: that is, that the “now” that lyric insists upon makes it fundamentally less capable than other literary genres of incorporating other tenses, of positing relations between temporal actions or events, or of navigating between story and discourse. I argue that this assumption will not withstand a sustained examination of how time works in lyric and the thinking that it enables. Because the temporality of a poem is part of its non-paraphrasable content, it is difficult to use it to produce a “reading” of a text. I argue that what the temporal qualities of lyric may reveal instead is how a poem thinks, how we think when we read a poem, and what poetic modes of thinking can offer—ethically as well as aesthetically—that other cognitive modes cannot.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2014)
Access Conditions
- Rights
- In Copyright
- Restrictions on Use
- Collection is open for research.
Citation
Miller, Katherine M.,
"Temporal Thinking in Modern Lyric"
(2014).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0SB4435
