Significant little wrecks: Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, & the Question of 'Small Poetry' in Twentieth-Century American Writing
Item
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Title
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Significant little wrecks: Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, & the Question of 'Small Poetry' in Twentieth-Century American Writing
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:5faaf92f6dfa:10888
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identifier
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11229
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Creator
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Harkey, John,
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Contributor
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Wayne Koestenbaum
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Date
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2011
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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 | Aesthetics | Modern literature | niedecker | oppen | peirce | poetics | semiotics
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Abstract
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Certainly a great deal of critical attention has been paid to collage and disjunction in experimental poetry; likewise, there are valuable discussions of poetic brevity and concision. But there is not yet sufficient work on how the conjunction of these two features constitutes a unique poetic strain, a sort of "genus": spare, damaged groups of words posited as page-contained, emphatically material, readable objects.;In this study I argue that there is indeed such a poetic type in twentieth-century American poetry, that it is mainly characterized not by lyric criteria (of voice and subjectivity) or mere size ("short" poems) but by an emblematic use of form, and thus that the significances of this type can best be drawn out through a textual-semiotic approach to the relevant words, pages, and books. I explore a notion of form that entails both the material qualities embodied in these words, pages, and books, and also, much more narrowly, the exclusive potential in constructed things or objects to function as conceptual shells, totem-like vehicles that can figure accretions of ideas, feelings, and associations.;Though the study of experimental poetry has regularly made use of semiotics, it has relied almost exclusively on the work of Saussure, neglecting the rich earlier work of thinkers like the American Philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. In my dissertation I use Peirce's semiotics to help construct a theory of "small poems" in America, focusing on the works of Lorine Niedecker and George Oppen, and, continuing into the present moment, Susan Howe and Myung Mi Kim. The written output of all four poets is almost exclusively limited to disjunctive, spare, page-bound verses. In response to the enveloping, relentless violence and upheaval of modern experience, both before and after the Second World War, these poets present the irreducible facts of their cryptic hand-marked forms.;According to my reading, a disciplined commitment to small poems constitutes an investment in negative values of refusal, transience, and inscrutability---what Theodor Adorno calls "barbaric asceticism in the arts" (Minima Moralia )---as means of articulating an emblematic response to twentieth-century violence and superfluity. I also contend that, in spite of these negative postures or gestures, Niedecker, Oppen, Howe, and Kim do not enact the strict Nominalist skepticism about language often claimed for modernist (or "post-modernist") poetics. Instead, in ways consonant with Peirce's philosophical Realism, their poems affirm the adequacy of language to human experience by insisting on their own material status as incised documents of witness and as emblems of dissent.
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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
