Date of Award

1-1-2014

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of English

Content Description

1 online resource (viii, 219 pages)

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Don Byrd

Committee Members

Pierre Joris, Tomas Noel

Keywords

American, Empiricism, Modernism, Poetics, Poetry, Postmodernism, American poetry, Aesthetics, American, Empiricism in literature, Experimental poetry, American

Subject Categories

American Literature

Abstract

Critique is Not Enough: The Empirical Imperatives of Innovative American Poetryproposes that innovative modern and early contemporary American poetries redefine the relation of knowledge, consciousness, and poetic performance to lived experience. This study demonstrates how the radically different poetic projects of Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Charles Olson not only equally insist upon empirically investigative poetics, but also endeavor, each to each, to individualize their poetic methodologies, which thus challenges the generalized Enlightenment myth of rationality. In that each of these writers undertakes to redefine the relation of knowledge, consciousness, and poetic performance to lived experience, they also undertake to rewrite our relation to the given practices of literacy that underwrite both modern and contemporary formations of culture.

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