Date of Award

Fall 2025

Embargo Period

4-29-2025

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

College/School/Department

Department of English

Program

English

First Advisor

Eric Keenaghan

Second Advisor

Paul Stasi

Subject Categories

American Literature

Abstract

My thesis is designed as an investigation of the ethical and political implications of the everyday in postwar American poetry. While recent scholarship of everyday life studies has clarified the centrality of the everyday or the ordinary to modernism and postwar literature, it does not elaborate enough on the impact of the political condition on literary expressions of everyday life in post-1945 period. Given U.S. military’s infiltration into everyday life of people living inside and outside the country after World War II, it is an important task to spotlight the way American postwar poets tackled U.S. war culture through their expressions of everyday life. Therefore, building on everyday life studies, Cold War studies, and studies of pragmatism, my thesis focuses on the works of two white American male poets—Wallace Stevens and Robert Duncan—circa 1950, when the United States was escalating its military commitments on a global scale. I demonstrate how Stevens’ concept of “the ordinary” and Duncan’s concept of “life” provide a key to understanding their efforts to examine the postwar condition through their meditations on the connection between everyday life at home and war abroad. With their respective projects’ strengths and limitations in mind, I argue that their expressions of the everyday give rise to a new idea of community and public space. My analysis will ultimately bring to the fore the significance of everyday life in postwar poetry as a topos by which one can reflect on war culture from one’s own personal perspective.

License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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