Changing subjects
Subtitle: digressions in twentieth-century American poetry
By: by Srikanth Althuru Reddy
Published: 2008
Language: eng
Number of pages: 190
Description: Changing Subjects outlines an anatomy of "the excursus" within twentieth-century American poetics. Progressing from aesthetics to the archive to narratology to theories of identity, this study considers the various spheres in which American writers of the period revise prior models of purposeful discourse by cultivating a poetics of digression in the modern lyric. The opening section considers the manner in which Wallace Stevens employs digression within the ars poetica genre to deconstruct aesthetic theory under High Modernism; the second chapter examines Marianne Moore's use of the excursus to organize archival knowledge in the Progressive poetry of instruction; the third section considers Lyn Hejinian's construction of a digressive narratology to unsettle master-narratives of the Cold War era; the fourth chapter treats digression as a strategy for fashioning the self (or "person") in the poetry of Walt Whitman and Frank O'Hara; and the dissertation concludes with an examination of John Ashbery's digressive poetics, wherein both consciousness and the lyric itself pursue the shifting course of a river's topology.

Previous scholarship on digression has been largely restricted to articles on novelistic fiction; this bias has confined studies of digression to the social world of the novel. With its focus on inwardness, sensation, and philosophical inquiry, the lyric affords a forum for exploring the ways in which consciousness itself pursues a digressive trajectory through the uneven terrain of the historical moment. From Whitman through Ashbery, a major tradition in American lyric writing has substituted a poetics of digression for the rationalist ethos articulated by Enlightenment documents such as the prefatory "Design" of Pope's Essay on Man . Whereas Pope sets forth a poetic protocol for purposeful, ordered exposition which disallows digression in the Essay 's examination of personhood, these American writers cultivate our digressive capacity to "change the subject" as a minimal requirement for self-invention under modernity. While much of current critical discourse treats American poetry as an lovers' quarrel with British Romanticism, Changing Subjects argues that it is through an engagement with the precursor poetics of Enlightenment that various American poets (Moore, O'Hara, Hejinian, and others) secure epistemologically the digressive ground of identity.
Notes: "April 2008."

Thesis (Ph.D., Dept. of English and American Literature and Language)--Harvard University, 2008.

Includes bibliographical references.