Admit impediment: The use of difficulty in twentieth-century American poetry (Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, Ludwig Wittgenstein) [electronic resource]
說明
277 p
附註
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 62-03, Section: A, page: 1021
Supervisor: Kurt Heinzelman
Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Texas at Austin, 2001
The twentieth century saw a number of American poets rise to national prominence under the auspices of their poetry's resistance to swift and confident interpretation. T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, and Jorie Graham were the preeminently "difficult" poets of their respective generations. This dissertation tracks the rise in the last eighty years of the use of difficulty as a blunt poetic trope that warrants interpretation and, indeed, paradoxically guides readers to understandings otherwise unavailable. Modernist anchormen Eliot and Stevens gave their era the "news" in the form of seemingly similar dictums ("poets...must be difficult" and "The poem must resist the intelligence/Almost successfully") but represent opposing sides in an ongoing tug-of-war regarding poetic difficulty: should it be allusive or elusive? Following the introduction's reading of Graham's "On Difficulty" in the light of Stanley Fish's reader-response interpretation of Paradise Lost, chapter 1 chronicles the critical use of difficulty and its ostensible synonyms, giving special attention to Eliot's ideas on the subject and critical responses to his work. Chapter 2 derives from George Steiner's taxonomy of poetic difficulty a single communicative species---interpretive resistance put to good use---by showing, with Charles Altieri's guidance, how the grammatical pragmatism of late-Wittgenstein and Paul Grice's theory of conversational implicature can help us speak of use and understanding without presuming privileged access to a poet's mind. Chapter 3 finds Stevens's lectures and later poetry promoting the use of difficulty and exemplifying what Wittgenstein called the "blurred concept" of language games. There and in chapters 4 and 5, on Ashbery's and Graham's uses of difficulty respectively, the arguments center on how readerly bewilderment, when formalized, may yield interpretive insights. Each author-specific chapter focuses particularly on those "lective gestures" with which poets acknowledge what Whitman called "the push of reading" and thus admit to impeding even as they impede
