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.
Recommended Citation
Rizzo, Christopher, "Critique is not enough : the empirical imperatives of innovative American poetry" (2014). Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024). 1254.
https://scholarsarchive.library.albany.edu/legacy-etd/1254