Pop poetics: Between lyric and language
Item
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Title
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Pop poetics: Between lyric and language
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:c56952deb6b0:10313
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identifier
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10177
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Creator
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Fitch, Andrew,
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Contributor
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Wayne Koestenbaum
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Date
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2009
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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American literature | Joe Brainard | Poetry | Pop | Seriality
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Abstract
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Pop artists (painters and poets) often get praised or censured for their inclusion of low-brow commercial iconography. Such appraisals, positive or negative, obscure the epistemic rigors of Pop serial-design. Pop-inflected poetic projects by Joe Brainard, James Schulyer, Eileen Myles, and David Trinidad rarely receive attention, for instance, as exemplary experimental texts. This dissertation thus introduces the concept of "Pop poetics" as a metacritical third-term by which to problematize reductive distinctions between "lyric" and "language-based," "representational" and "abstract," "confessional" and "constraint-generated," postwar poetry. It tracks a perspective-based, serial-realist poetic strain inherited from Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and John Cage, even as it posits a direct relation between Pop poetics and the modernist grid, the mixed-media assemblage, the serialized gallery display, and the serialized art manifesto.;Each chapter imports the critical vocabulary of poststructuralist art-historians Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin Buchloh, and/or Hal Foster, as well as the timely (mid-sixties) insights of Pop-theorist Lawrence Alloway, of Artforum editor John Coplans, and MoMA-curators William Seitz and John Elderfield. Adopting artist-poet Joe Brainard as its principal personage, my project presents Pop poetics not as some minor, coterie impulse meriting a sympathetic footnote in subsequent accounts of the postwar era's major literary movements, but as a missing link that confounds and potentially conjoins any number of interpretive distinctions ("authentic" record vs. algorithmic process, "personal" recollection vs. indexical trace, etc.). Pop lyricism matters, I argue, not just to the aberrant Brainard aficionado, but to anybody concerned with reconstructing the dynamic aesthetic exchange between postwar art and poetry.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
