The poet or the journalist: Stephane Mallarme, John Ashbery and the poeme critique.
Item
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Title
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The poet or the journalist: Stephane Mallarme, John Ashbery and the poeme critique.
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Identifier
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AAI9405574
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identifier
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9405574
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Creator
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Pies, Stacy Ellen.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Vincent Crapanzano
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Date
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1993
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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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Literature, Comparative | Literature, Romance | Literature, American
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Abstract
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Stephane Mallarme and John Ashbery describe their poetry as research, implying that their writing is an attempt to redefine poetry. Both write admittedly self-referential poetry that in fact questions its own autonomous status. This study is neither a purely formal analysis nor an influence study. Instead, I investigate the experimental use of poetic form as a means of negotiating both the poet's and poetry's position, for Mallarme, in society, and for Ashbery, in history. My focus is on the exploration of journalism in Mallarme's late writing, the "poemes critiques." Looking at Mallarme through Ashbery asks us to read Mallarme differently: writing differently invites a mode of reading differently. Similarly, Mallarme's use of syntactic and semantic disjunction--structures which would seem to reinforce poetry's isolation--in texts that explore journalism and the social position of poetry, invites an examination of Ashbery's work from a different perspective. I would like to suggest that Ashbery's poems are critical poems, in that they inquire what poetry is, not only in relation to the distinction of poetic and everyday language, but to history. Thus the relation of these two poets is based less on direct influence than on the power of the questions their poems ask, and on the journeys they make toward, and away from, answers.;Chapter one discusses Mallarme's representation of journalism in essays in Divagations, including "Crise de vers" and Quant Au Livre. Chapter two analyzes the prose poem "Un Spectacle interrompu" as an experiment in journalism. Chapter three, centered on the poeme critique "Bucolique," articulates a mode of reading the oppositions found in Mallarme's prose. The analysis of shifts of tone and voice in "Bucolique" lead into my discussion of Ashbery. The fourth and fifth chapters examine the opposition between "poetic" and documentary poetry in Ashbery's work, and include readings of "The Recital" and Flow Chart. Chapter five surveys the role of the report in Flow Chart to show how Ashbery's syntactic and tonal disjunctions both erase history and reintroduce it into poetry.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy Restricted.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.