The Romance Between Poetry and Theory After the Death of the Subject
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“I AM OTHERWISE”: THE ROMANCE BETWEEN POETRY AND THEORY AFTER THE DEATH OF THE SUBJECT DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Alex E. Blazer, M.A. * * * * * The Ohio State University 2003 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Walter A. Davis, Advisor Professor Jon Erickson _________________________ Advisor Professor Jessica Prinz English Graduate Program Copyright 2003 by Alex E. Blazer ABSTRACT The broad questions the dissertation poses are 1) What is the poet’s relationship with language? and 2) How do post-structuralist theories of linguistically constituted subjectivity affect how and what the poet writes? The examination applies this issue to a range of American poets working in the late 1970s and early 1980s when the new theories of how language and literature worked were being spread through the academy and the general culture alike. The dissertation’s method first reads a poet’s work from this period with a keen focus on what her poems both explicitly and implicitly say about language. Then, the work of a theorist, whose work is contemporaneous with the poet, explication in terms of its consequences for language and subjectivity. Finally, the two))poet and theorist))are engaged in a dialectic that exhibits how theories of language affect how and what a poet writes. The dissertation proposes four poetic relationships with language. Using the poetry of Adrienne Rich and the theory of Harold Bloom, anxiety is determined to be the initial way a poet relates to language. Subversive irony quells such anxiety, according to the poetry of John Ashbery iii and the deconstructionism of Paul de Man. Maurice Blanchot conceptualizes a space of literature which allows a poet like Jorie Graham to anguish herself out of existence. Alternatively, a Language poet like Barrett Watten so obsesses over language that he comes upon a relationship with language that is like psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s theory of subjective destitution in which one uses language but is divested of its meaningful influence of anxiety, irony, and anguish. The dissertation determines the inauguration of a new kind of poetry, one which merges poetry and theory. One of the results of the study finds that the new theoretical poetry suffers itself to understand language’s effect on subjectivity and then clear away the saturation of language in order to construct a subjectivity that exists both inside and outside the realm of language. Whereas poets of the past tarried with philosophy or criticism, poets of this time period unite lyric feeling with literary theory. iv For K. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank my advisor, Walter Davis, for teaching me that theory should not be a shield, but a confrontation, and more importantly, for showing me how to read and to think, not just with my intellect, but with my psyche. I am grateful to Anthony Libby for helping me fully realize what I was undertaking in this dissertation. His early responses to this work compelled me to transform my project from a simple act of criticism to, what I hope will become, a theory of poetry. I thank Jessica Prinz for keeping me attuned to the fundamentals))clarity and definition. I thank Jon Erickson for his comments from the other side of the language debate. I am indebted to Jeff Bickerstaff for our many conversations that helped me to understand and articulate my relationship with literature. And finally, I thank my wife, Kara Kostiuk, not only for her support, but for showing me how the artist can traverse existence through art. vi VITA December 24, 1974 . Born - Springfield, Ohio 1997 . B.A. English, Denison University 1999 . M.A. English, The Ohio State University 1997 - present . Graduate Teaching and Administrative Associate, The Ohio State University PUBLICATIONS Blazer, Alex E. “Chasms of Reality, Aberrations of Identity: Defining the Postmodern through Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present) 1.2 (Fall 2002): <http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/ articles/fall_2002/blazer.htm>. [Refereed] Blazer, Alex E. “Charting Ironic Progress: The Reflexive and the Romantic in Barrett Watten’s Progress.” Moria Poetry Journal 2.3 (Winter 2000): <http://www.moriapoetry.com/blazer.htm>. [Non-Refereed] FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English Specialization: Twentieth-Century American Literature Specialization: Critical Theory vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract................................................ iii Dedication.............................................. v Acknowledgments......................................... vi Vita.................................................... vii Chapters 1. Subjectivity, Poetry, Theory, Death........... 1 1.1 A Brief History of Death in Poetry....... 1 1.2 Post-Structuralist Theory Romances Postmodern Poetry........................ 19 1.3 The Blooming Anxiety of Post- Structuralist Thought.................... 31 2. A Rich Inflammation or a Dead Bloom? The Poetry of Adrienne Rich and the Theory of Harold Bloom.................................. 47 2.1 A History of Death in Rich............... 48 2.2 Blooming with Language / Dying in Language................................. 72 2.3 The Wreck of Language.................... 98 3. John Ashbery’s Demand for Self-Reflection..... 121 3.1 The Riches and the Limits of Language.... 121 3.2 From Bloomian Anxiety to De Manian Irony.................................... 149 3.3 The Demands of Reading and Writing....... 169 4. Jorie Graham: Hollows and Voids............... 194 4.1 Skinning Matters......................... 202 4.2 The Void of Literature................... 223 4.3 Outside Indifference..................... 240 5. Barrett Watten: From the Other Side of the Machine....................................... 258 5.1 Anxiety-Irony-Anguish-Obsession.......... 258 5.2 Welcome to the Machine................... 275 5.3 The Destitute Machine.................... 301 6. The Convergence of Poetry and Theory.......... 323 viii 6.1 A Brief History of Death in Poetry (Reprise)................................ 324 6.2 When Poetry and Theory Meet.............. 331 Notes................................................... 342 Glossary................................................ 365 Bibliography............................................ 368 ix CHAPTER 1 SUBJECTIVITY, POETRY, THEORY, DEATH 1.1 A BRIEF HISTORY OF DEATH IN POETRY Since Blake’s experienced “chimney-sweeper” was “clothed [. .] in the clothes of death, / And taught [. .] to sing the notes of woe” . Since Wordsworth was bowled over by a little girl’s willful disavowal of death in “We Are Seven”: “But they are dead; those two are dead! Their spirits are in heaven!” ‘Twas throwing words away: for still The little Maid would have her will, And said, “Nay, we are seven!” Since Coleridge revealed the mutuality of life and death in his “Epitaph”: “That he who many a year with toil of breath / Found death in life, may here find life in death!” . Since Byron dreamily declared the world a void and “lump of death))a chaos of hard clay” in “Darkness”: “All earth was but one thought))and that was death, / Immediate and inglorious” . Since Shelley asserted death’s profound supremacy over the dream of living in “To a Skylark”: Waking or asleep, 1 Thou of death must deem Things more true and deep Than we mortals dream Since Keats affirmed his affinity with negation in “Ode to A Nightingale”: “I have been half in love with easeful Death,” the Romantic legacy has remained a fascination with death, mortality, and finitude, has tarried with death in life, immortality, and infinity beyond this worldly finitude. The terror-filled and awe-full sublime experience sensitizes the Romantic poet to death’s hollowing, yet ironically enlivening, vicissitudes. The Romantic, a melancholic prophet of death in life, feels the full force of life by traversing the threshold of absolute emptiness and penetrating loss: the Romantic poet lives life by confronting death. As such penetrating otherworldliness crossed the ocean, it was transformed, but not altogether contained by American transcendentalism, Yankee pragmatism. ‘It,’ the other side of life, “reared its head. / In the monarch Thought’s dominion)) / It stood there!” in Poe’s “The Haunted Palace,” unnameable and uncanny, destroying and hollowing the otherwise radiant and beautiful soul-house from the inside. Roderick and Beatrice form a dialectic of obsession and hysteria, of death and life, which is sublated by the return of the repressed which cannot die. Death itself is rendered visible by Beatrice walking half-past life. Although Dickinson plays faithfully with death in poem 976, 2 Death is a Dialogue between The Spirit and the Dust. “Dissolve” says Death )) The Spirit “Sir I have another Trust” )) death ultimately constitutes the force in dialectic that overturns her faith in transcendence and relegates her to a tempestuous half-life of subjectivity in poem 721: “Behind Me )) dips Eternity )) / Before me )) Immortality )) / Myself )) the Term between )).” The poet’s sentence (her life- term) on this mortal coil is terminal, yet undying and interminable, fraught with the soul’s ineffable, yet always already utterable, if not iterative, friction with death. Even Whitman, who simultaneously sings both the body and the soul electric, knows the limits of his populist universe as the cold touch of death, that is knowledge of death’s ultimate otherness.