Textual desire: Longing, loss, and reappropriation in contemporary American poetry.
Item
-
Title
-
Textual desire: Longing, loss, and reappropriation in contemporary American poetry.
-
Identifier
-
AAI9108078
-
identifier
-
9108078
-
Creator
-
Attie, Alice Barbara.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Mary Ann Caws
-
Date
-
1990
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Literature, Comparative | Literature, American | Language, General
-
Abstract
-
Poetry, studied in the light of modern critical theory may be considered the most radical embodiment of both the discord and the creativity at the heart of discourse. Moreover, poetic utterance exemplifies what some believe to be the most refined manifestation of what is referred to as deconstruction. This study concentrates on several ways with which poetry illustrates the differential nature of language, its tendency to move away from its own articulations. It investigates the presence of desire in language, its generative capabilities and the figural transformations which it incites. Because desire is both distant and proximate to the material form of its satisfaction, it signifies both an impossibility, that of actually being uttered, and the possibility of something other, something supplementary, being created to satisfy what necessarily remains outside or ineffable.;This other, which may be considered invasive to the text, keeps meaning extenuated and mobile; in the form of a trope, the manifestation of desire moves towards other tropes keeping the text open, both formally and epistemologically. Post-structural criticism, that of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Paul de Man, points to the ways in which poetic discourse, because of the heightened metaphoricity of its language, withdraws from an otherwise assumed continuity.;What is of additional interest is how recuperative or memorial gestures are transfigured by the language act and appear quite different than the premises from which they originate. They are necessarily altered by language itself. The attempt to find a word or an image to account for our losses, becomes, poetically, an attempt to form illusions capable of fulfilling a need for plentitude. The images within the poem often suggest an arrival, an acquisition, an appropriation of something previously lost. Yet, they continue to generate new images, giving us something akin to new departures or new forms of a knowledge, new beginnings.;Poetry articulates the hitherto distant, unspoken or lost. It becomes the topos whereupon the lost or even the unknown appears in the shape of something knowable, material, satisfying. Figures shift to accommodate the limit's within language. In this way, discourse may be understood as a struggle to articulate unutterable forms of desire.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
