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The Poetry of John Ashbery and Cognitive Studies

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The Poetry of John Ashbery and Cognitive Studies ORBIT-OnlineRepository ofBirkbeckInstitutionalTheses Enabling Open Access to Birkbeck’s Research Degree output Chinese whispers Chinese rooms: the poetry of John Ashbery and cognitive studies https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/40060/ Version: Full Version Citation: Kherbek, William (2014) Chinese whispers Chinese rooms: the poetry of John Ashbery and cognitive studies. [Thesis] (Unpub- lished) c 2020 The Author(s) All material available through ORBIT is protected by intellectual property law, including copy- right law. Any use made of the contents should comply with the relevant law. Deposit Guide Contact: email Chinese Whispers Chinese Rooms: The Poetry of John Ashbery and Cognitive Studies William Kherbek Birkbeck University of London Submitted for Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 1 Abstract This thesis examines the relationship of John Ashbery’s poetry to developments in cognitive studies over the course of the last sixty years, particularly the science of linguistics as viewed from a Chomskyan perspective. The thesis is divided into four chapters which position particular topics in cognitive studies as organising principles for examining Ashbery’s poetry. The first chapter concentrates on developments in syntactic theory in relation to Ashbery’s experiments with poetic syntax. The second chapter examines the notion of “intention” and “intentionality” in Ashbery’s writing from the perspective of cognitive “theory of context” writing, particularly the work of Deirdre Wilson and Daniel Sperber. The final two chapters consider cognitive questions using Ashbery’s poetry as a means of entry into controversial areas in formal cognitive studies. The third chapter examines his poetry in relation to temporality, suggesting that Ashbery’s experiments with time form “theories of consciousness” as they consciously manipulate readerly consciousness and attention. The final chapter explores perception in relation to Ashbery’s writing. The thesis argues that poetry can be conceived of as a less formalised method of cognitive study, and that poetic experiment can lead to significant reconceptualisations of cognitive notions which may play a role in framing critical questions for more formal experiments in cognitive science-philosophy going forward. The thesis concludes with reflections on the wider implications for literary cognitive studies in general. 2 Table of Contents: Introduction The Mooring of Starting Out: Basic Thesis Aims 6 Gertrude Stein, Ashbery and “Cognitive Literature” 12 John Ashbery’s reading of Gertrude Stein: A Proto-Cognitive Perspective on Stein’s Experiments 26 The Romantic Era: The Historical Foundations of Modern Cognitive Science 32 Major Trends in Twentieth-century Cognitive Studies: A Brief Overview 37 Cognitive Literary Studies: Bringing Formal Study of Mind into the Discussion of Literature 41 Positioning the Thesis in Relation to the Wider Field of Ashbery Studies 55 Chapter Synopses: Thesis Structure and Organisation 58 Chapter One Modern Linguistics, Cognition, and the Analysis of Literature 70 The “Chomskyan Revolution”: Post-Revolutionary Changes in the Scientific Understanding of Linguistics 71 Syntactics Destructured: Experimental Literature and Early Non-Scientific Investigations of Syntax 82 Ruptures, Continuities and Repairs: The Role of Syntax in the Literary Experiments of The Tennis Court Oath 90 You, Me, He, and John Ashbery: Unsettled Pronouns in Ashbery and Their Cognitive Implications 95 Later Approaches to Syntax: Collusion with Syntax in Long Poems and the Role of Unvoiced Language in Ashbery’s Writing 101 From the Specific to the General: 3 Considering How Chomskyan Syntax May Interact with Other Cognitive Faculties 107 Chapter Two Intentionality and Literary Experiment: Understanding the Literary Work as Intentional Act 114 Literary Intention as a Distinct Concept: The True Meaning of “True Meanings” of Literature 116 Intention in Philosophy: Modern Perspectives and Their Implications for Literary Intention 119 Cognitive Approaches to Literary Intention and Ashbery: Conceptualising and Theorising Intention Through Experimental Literature 137 Literature Leading Philosophy and Ashbery’s Treatment of The Relationship of Time and Mind 149 Chapter Three Time as a Vector For Cognitive Experiment in Ashbery’s Writing 155 The Distinction Between Cognition and Perception: A Key Question in Framing Formal Cognitive Questions 157 Experiments with Time: Depictions and Manifestations of Time in Other Mid- Twentieth-Century Artistic Forms and Their Influence on Ashbery 161 Ashbery’s Poetic Experiments: The Boundaries of Attention and the Geographies of the Page 171 Memory, Measurement and Entropy: Ashbery’s Conceptualisations of the Temporal 176 The Difference between Being in Time and Time in Being: Perception’s Role in Cognition 187 Chapter Four Perception and the Cognitive Environment in Ashbery’s Poetry 193 Early Modern and Modernist Influences on Ashbery’s Evolving Understanding of Perception 202 4 Phenomenologising Ashbery: Formal Philosophical Phenomenology and Ashbery, Dialogues and Divergences 208 Other Nows: The Influence of John Clare and Frank O’Hara in Ashbery’s Depictions of Experience 211 Now and The Present: Understanding Ashbery’s Metaphysics of The Present in Relation to Perception 216 Flow Charts and Fragments: Form, Attention and Perception in Ashbery’s Writing 225 Perception, Cognition, and Literary Experiment as a Foundation for the Conceptualising of a Grammar of Aesthetics 234 Conclusion The Status of Cognitive Critiques in Relation to Historical Ashbery Criticism 240 New Horizons in the Study of Literature and Mind: Further Applications of Cognitive Literary Studies 243 A Grammar of Aesthetics: A Chomskyan-Rawlsean Paradigm 246 A Mechanism for Conceptualising a Chomskyan-Rawlsean Grammar of Aesthetics 248 5 Introduction The Mooring of Starting Out: Basic Thesis Aims It comes down to so little: the gauzy syntax of one thing and another; a pleasant dinner and a frozen train ride into the exhaustible resources. (Ashbery, Chinese Whispers 85) This thesis explores two central questions. The first is a general one: can the study of literature provide meaningful insights into the study of mind? It is the position of this thesis that literary study not only can offer such insights, but instances can be pointed to where literature has actually arrived at critical questions about mental faculties before more formal scientific or philosophical disciplines have. In his book, Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science (1991), Mark Turner proposes “a reframing of the study of English so that it comes to be seen as inseparable from the discovery of mind” (Turner vii). In reframing the study of literature this way, he suggests, literary criticism will be seen to be “participating, even leading the way” in the discovery of mind, “gaining new analytic instruments for its traditional work and developing new concepts of its role” (Turner vii). The “reframing” of which Turner writes is central to understanding the purpose of this thesis. While there is a long history of critical examinations of the interaction of literature and mind, not least during the period of psychoanalysis’ greatest literary influence, the understandings and approaches developed in the modern cognitive sciences offer fresh conceptions of both “minds” as entities in themselves, and the sub-processes which create unified “minds”. Though many of the insights of modern cognitive science may be 6 new, they address questions which are as old as philosophy itself, and which have, thus, played a role in the creation and comprehension of literature since its beginning. The second question the thesis examines relates specifically to the writing of John Ashbery. How does a writer like Ashbery, who is both self-consciously experimental and self- consciously concerned with the depiction and function of the mind, explore the mind, and what can his writing tell us about its composition and function? Critics, even critics who are not particularly concerned with cognitive issues, have frequently noted how central the exploration of the conscious mind is to Ashbery’s writing. Though numerous examples will be produced throughout the thesis, a few exemplary passages here will serve to indicate how Ashbery’s writing has been received by critics in relation to questions of cognition. In an essay entitled, “Coming Full Circle”, collected in Susan Schultz’s book, The Tribe of John (1995), Fred Moramarco writes: Ashbery has worked toward finding the language to express an awareness that exists on the axis between our ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ lives, between our personal lives as individuals and our collective life as a contemporary civilization. In this sense Ashbery’s work is really not about language at all but about consciousness, which, for a poet, can be reached and conveyed only through language. (Schultz et al. 38)1 Moramarco’s point is a crucial one, though, as will be seen, whether language is merely the medium through which Ashbery explores consciousness, or part of a larger investigation of consciousness which considers “language” in more formal terms, is (for this thesis at least) a live question. In the same volume, Donald Revell writes, in “Some Meditations on Influence” that Ashbery’s writing is as much an enaction and conception of the imagination, and a dramatisation of human perceptual faculties, as it is a literary artefact: everywhere in The Tennis Court Oath, Ashbery reminds me that the imagination is not
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