Endless assents: John Dewey, aesthetic experience, and the promise of American poetry
Item
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Title
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Endless assents: John Dewey, aesthetic experience, and the promise of American poetry
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:27e2504c1515:11547
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identifier
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12067
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Creator
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Hoff, James Dennis,
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Contributor
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Joan Richardson
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Date
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2012
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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 | Modern literature | Aesthetics | American | Animal | Dewey | Modernism | Poetry
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Abstract
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Endless Assents makes the argument that John Dewey's theory of art (articulated in such texts as Experience and Nature and Art as Experience) offers a new and fruitful way of better appreciating and understanding the uniquely generative and transformative value of aesthetic experience in American poetry (specifically in the works of Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, and A.R. Ammons).;Understood from the perspective of Dewey's explicitly naturalist philosophy of aesthetic experience, the poetry and poetic discourse examined in this dissertation is interpreted (in various different ways) as an example of the simple fact that art is neither a fixed concept nor a static object but is instead a quality of experience, made manifest through active engagement with the environment. Thus art and aesthetic experience, far from representing some abstract ideal of beauty---somehow separate from the ugly business of so-called "ordinary" life---is in fact an active and integral, though rarely realized, part of day to day experience. Understood thus, the aesthetic becomes, as it did for all of the poets in this dissertation, not only a source of pleasure, but a method for engaging with and changing our environment. Such a realization marks a radical shift in the way that American poets thought about the value and use of their own work and of poetry more broadly.;This realization, however, as Dewey argues, is impossible without first recognizing the value and embracing the experience of what he called "Animal life below the human scale," for it is in animal life that we can most readily grasp the source of the aesthetic. Unfettered by the many habits, conventions, and false dichotomies of human reason, the animal exists, in a state of constant engagement with the facts of the environment, weaving together seamlessly the past and future into the present moment. Thus this dissertation argues that by recognizing and embracing animal life as a vital and indispensable part of the human, these poets were, in a stereotypically modernist fashion, able to transcend the limits of culture and habit, redefining the very nature of experience. Healing the rift between the human and the animal allowed these poets to then articulate a poetics of aesthetic engagement as a model for transforming life and experience from the ground up.
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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
