- Title Information
- Title
- Speculating Experience: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Koelz, Stephen Edward
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- creator
- Origin Information
- Copyright Date
(keyDate="yes", encoding="w3cdtf")
- 2008
- Physical Description
- Extent
- xvii, 179 p.
- digitalOrigin
- born digital
- Note
- Thesis (Ph.D.) -- Brown University (2009)
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Blasing, Mutlu
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- director
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Keach, William
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- reader
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- McLaughlin, Kevin
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- reader
- Name:
Corporate
- Name Part
- Brown University. English
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- sponsor
- Genre (aat)
- theses
- Abstract
- My dissertation explores the problem of experience in the work of three twentieth-century American poets: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill. In the broadest
sense, it might be understood as an effort to rethink what Eliot called a "dissociation of sensibility" through a set of terms seldom applied to American Modernist poetry and its heirs. The
project is largely motivated by my suspicion that some of the most significant and most often overlooked engagements with the "dissociation" that Eliot identifies become legible in light of
Walter Benjamin's reflections on the vexed position of the lyric poet in the wake of large-scale industrialization and the rise of mass forms of media. American poetry's response to the
scattered, ephemeral, or distracting character of modern experience is most often charted in relation to early Modernist attempts to secure the sovereign subject an experiential grounding
through the presentation of fixed concrete particulars. Williams's mantra "no ideas but in things," Eliot's objective correlative, the Imagist call for a "direct treatment of the thing": all
tend toward what Hugh Kenner calls a "renaissance of attention," the recuperation of new, fresh, or immediate experience through the apprehension of stable objects. By contrast, Moore, Bishop,
and Merrill, suspicious of the claims of immediacy, elect to host the blanks or gaps in conscious subjective experience. The conscious mind's inability to keep pace with the movements of mass
media, to amalgamate its "chaotic, irregular, fragmentary" forms, leads them to develop compositional habits that rely on a practice Benjamin identifies with early films, namely, "reception in a
state of distraction." In so doing, they cultivate poetic economies that allow them to speculate on the integrity of ephemeral experience, the value of which cannot be rendered upon receipt of
conscious subjective sense impressions.
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- Poetry,Experience,Moore,Bishop,Merrill,Benjamin
- Record Information
- Record Content Source (marcorg)
- RPB
- Record Creation Date
(encoding="iso8601")
- 20091218
- Language
- Language Term:
Code (ISO639-2B)
- eng
- Language Term:
Text
- English
- Identifier:
DOI
- 10.7301/Z0DR2SW9
- Access Condition:
rights statement
(href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/")
- In Copyright
- Access Condition:
restriction on access
- Collection is open for research.
- Type of Resource (primo)
- dissertations