Style and the Experiment: the Coherence of Experimental Writing
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STYLE AND THE EXPERIMENT: THE COHERENCE OF EXPERIMENTAL WRITING A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Diana Sue Hamilton February 2016 STYLE AND THE EXPERIMENT: THE COHERENCE OF EXPERIMENTAL WRITING Diana Sue Hamilton, Ph.D. Cornell University 2016 This dissertation tracks “style” as it is produced by literary experimentation: I consider the self- referential style of William Carlos Williams’ Kora in Hell, the mechanical, automated movement of style in William Burroughs’ two trilogies, the minimal “literariness” needed to make appropriation in U.S. Conceptual Writing function as poetry, and the role of the image in the styles of John Ashbery, Bernadette Mayer, and Raymond Queneau. Style functions as a machine, as a structure that ties syntax to plot, as both an effect of writing and a cause, and as the creation of a text’s apparent subjectivity. In these readings, I proceed from the many critical assumptions of style’s outdatedness—like Fredric Jameson’s insistence that the term does not apply to works produced after modernism, and to less period-restricted rejections of style’s implications of individuality—in order to redefine style in terms of its relationship to the experiment. I argue that style is what makes experimental writing legible as literature; it is the condition of differentiating writing, recognizable by the stylistic phenomena that, according to Gérard Genette’s semiotics of style, must somehow cohere into stylistic features. By examining works more often discussed in terms of their abilities to stave off style via disjunction, I find style where it should not be: in works made by citation or collage, by procedures that emphasize chance or otherwise undermine authorial intent, writers fail to rid themselves of this sense of authorial coherence. iii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Diana Hamilton was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, and she now lives and writes in New York, where she earned her B.A. in Comparative Literature from New York University in 2008. In 2010, she started graduate school in the doctoral program in Comparative Literature at Cornell University. In addition her academic work, she is the author of one full-length book of poetry, Okay, Okay (Truck Books 2012) and four chapbooks: Universe (Ugly Duckling Presse 2014), 23 Women to Kiss Before You Die (Make Now Books 2014), Some Shit Advice (The Physiocrats 2014), and Break-up (Troll Thread 2015). In 2015, she took on the position of Associate Director of the Writing Center at Baruch College, City University of New York. iv for Easy, who was a cat v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to the members of my committee—Jonathan Culler, Roger Gilbert, Tracy McNulty, and Neil Saccamano—who have guided my thinking and reading on literature, aesthetics, and theory for the past five years (and who have all tolerated my regular abuse to syntax and sense). It is impossible to express, in the space available, just how much I have learned, and what I have yet to learn, from my advisors: but these writers and thinkers and teachers have supported me in ways material and intellectual and friendly and rigorous. Speaking of support, it would be impossible to leave graduate school without thanking Sue Besemer, the Department Coordinator in Comparative Literature. I would never have successfully taken or taught a class, applied for or received funding, or even have processed the day-to-day stress of academic life, without her care and skill. I would also like to acknowledge my parents, who, in addition to being lovely, are among the most constant readers I have known. And to my brother, who has given me, historically, among other things, feminism, unparalleled kindness, and intellectual challenge. The list of names of friends who helped me with this project would be too long. I must thank, though, the members of my Dissertation Writing Group, Rebecca Kosick, Anna Horakova, and Elizabeth Blake (and the Society for the Humanities, which funded our work). Even more than writing, reading, and breakfasting with these friends helped me with this project, this collaboration taught me so much about how to support and seek support from other writers. Finally, if somewhat abruptly, I would like to thank books—without which this dissertation would not be possible. The most important books to a dissertation, I think, are the ones that do not appear within it, or appear only in the flourish of aside (which a writer hopes a vi reader can forgive): the only way to keep writing about books, I am sure, is to read other books no one expects me to make arguments about. Along these lines, I would like to thank the Collected Works of Jane Austen, especially her Juvenilia, which remind me daily of the Seriousness of Silliness and of Freindship [sic], Samuel Delany’s The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, Jane Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies, Lawrence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy, Melville House’s Novella Series, to which I subscribe, and, most of all, every poem or novel Elizabeth Blake ever emailed me about, which gave me reasons to wake up to a morning of the poem (“The Morning of the Poem” being a Schuyler poem for which I am also grateful). Similarly, I learned as much from reading groups in graduate school as I learned from class, and I would be a member of the Big Fat Post-War American Novel Reading Group for the rest of my life, I think, especially if, dear friends, we quit reading so much Pynchon. To books whose authors I know personally, I forward my thanks to your creators. With one exception, that is: I would thank the books, rather than their author, of Steven Zultanski, because he dislikes all things academic too much to want mentioning here, even if he was close at hand for all of this dissertation’s writing. In one respect, I hope that I am not like Montaigne—that I am not myself the matter of this book—but I thank him, nonetheless, for the essais: this is a project about experiments, and therefore about trying. I offer, this, with thanks, as one such attempt. Thank you, too, to the em-dash, which got me through this dissertation. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .................................................................................................................................. III ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...................................................................................................................................... V INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................................... 1 TEACHING STYLE ....................................................................................................................................................................... 1 OUTDATED STYLE ..................................................................................................................................................................... 5 LOW-STAKES EXPERIMENTATION ...................................................................................................................................... 10 STYLE, IN GENERAL ................................................................................................................................................................ 17 CHAPTER 1: STYLE AS METAPOETICS ......................................................................................................... 24 P IS FOR POETRY ..................................................................................................................................................................... 24 CRITICISM WITHIN POEMS ................................................................................................................................................... 28 CHAPTER 2: STYLE IN QUOTATION MARKS .............................................................................................. 52 THE POET AS COLLECTOR ..................................................................................................................................................... 59 THE WRITING ASSHOLE ........................................................................................................................................................ 63 BEYOND THE CUT-UP ............................................................................................................................................................. 73 BETWEEN THE TRILOGIES .................................................................................................................................................... 77 STYLE, MORE OR LESS ........................................................................................................................................................... 83 CLEM SNIDE, CUT AND UNCUT ............................................................................................................................................ 86 THE STYLE OF CRITICISM ...................................................................................................................................................... 89 AUTOMATED STYLE ............................................................................................................................................................... 92 CHAPTER 3: CONDITIONAL LITERATURE .................................................................................................. 99 THE FAILURE TO DEFINE CONCEPTUAL