Aesthetic Autobiography and the Poetics of Despair in Post-War American Literature
Item
-
Title
-
Aesthetic Autobiography and the Poetics of Despair in Post-War American Literature
-
Identifier
-
d_2009_2013:c190c1e7322b:11413
-
identifier
-
11725
-
Creator
-
Bahr, David,
-
Contributor
-
Wayne Koestenbaum | Mario DiGangi
-
Date
-
2012
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
American literature | Biographies | Philosophy | Aesthetics | Affect | Autobiography | Depression | Poetics | Post-War Literature
-
Abstract
-
This dissertation repositions "aesthetic" in its ancient Greek context, meaning to apprehend by the senses. The project is framed around my idea of the aesthetic autobiography, a creative work that phenomenologically conveys the embodied experience of its author. I do not use "aesthetic" as a transcendentalist term of critical assessment, as defined by Kant; instead, the term denotes the immanent realm of the senses. This move allows me to connect the aesthetic to affect, whose etymology I trace from the mid 18th Century to contemporary affect theory. I theorize the aesthetic as a dynamic and relational biophysical force. I aim to extend the boundaries of autobiographical "truth" in order to accommodate the feeling body, which exists in excess and often beyond the reach of conceptual language.;Specifically, I examine how five post-war authors formally confront the challenge of conveying the sensation of depression. By focusing on formal experiments in rhythm, syntax, structure, imagery, and genre, I look at texts by Allen Ginsberg, Joan Didion, Tim O'Brien, Art Spiegelman, and Darryl Cunningham. Grounding the project in mid-twentieth century America, chapter 1 begins with Edmund Wilson's "The Wound and the Bow" (1941), which situates the psychologically wounded artist as a vital and connective social force. In chapters 2 and 3, I juxtapose the respective approaches of Ginsberg and Didion in articulating the physiological experience of a depressive breakdown. Chapter 4 focuses on The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien, as a self-consciously constructed aesthetic autobiography: I show how "postmodernism" responds to representing the sensational body after the "death of the subject" and I argue for its affective possibilities. Finally, in chapter 5, I turn to graphic memoir, with Art Spiegelman's "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" and Darryl Cunningham's Psychiatric Tales: 11 Graphic Narratives of Mental Illness. I explore the formal strategies available to cartoonists in conveying the bodily affect of despair.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
2009_2013.csv
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
-
Program
-
English
