!2012 Anne Keefe ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

!2012 Anne Keefe ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WORDIMAGE: LYRIC EKPHRASIS AND SUBJECTIVITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY by ANNE KEEFE A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program of Literatures in English written under the direction of Mark Doty and approved by ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey May, 2012 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Wordimage: Lyric Ekphrasis and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century By Anne Keefe Dissertation Director: Mark Doty My dissertation challenges how we conceptualize the relationship between verbal and visual within the ekphrastic encounter. Beginning with the modernist lyrics of H.D. and Marianne Moore and extending to the contemporary poetry of Natasha Tretheway, Sharon Dolin, Siri Hustvedt, Mark Doty, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, I argue that the voice, form, and content of the ekphrastic lyric is a productive site for understanding the poetics of aesthetic politics. Dominant theories of ekphrasis such as the rivalry between the sister arts and models of confrontation between poet and painter foreclose on the possibilities of the mode as a political space in which the differences between word and image allow poets to engage in new ways with the solitary, embodied, and viewing lyric voice. While feminist and conceptual poetics have privileged the fragmented, multi-vocal poem as the most political form for negotiating subjectivity, my focus on more humanist lyrics engaging fixed forms and lyric selves illuminates an aesthetic for the 21st century in which modern problems connecting vision and identity such as the gaze, the loss of aura, the uncanny double, and viewer passivity, become transformed into opportunities for rethinking subjectivity and desire. ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank Rutgers University and the Graduate Program of Literatures in English, as well as the Mellon Foundation for their support in the writing of this project. This dissertation would not have been possible without sustained intellectual conversations about these poems and ekphrasis in general with my committee members: I thank my director, Mark Doty, whose poetry has been a lifelong inspiration and whose generous and thoughtful reading of my work has helped me to articulate my thoughts as both a poet and a critic. I thank Jonah Siegel, whose work on the museum and the figure of the artist greatly influences my own understanding of how these two key concepts affect contemporary ekphrasis and whose acute reading of my manuscript has helped me to refine my ideas. I thank Harriet Davidson, whose encouragement about the worth of my insights kept me going when I was not sure where to go. And, I thank Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux, whose graduate seminar on Poetry and the Visual Arts at the University of Maryland first opened my eyes to the wonder of ekphrasis, and whose study of contemporary ekphrasis has reshaped the field of ekphrastic studies for younger female scholars. To my parents, Delia and Frank, for their unfailing support of all intellectual and artistic pursuits; to my older brother, Dan, and his wife, Susi; to Aidan and Safi; and in the memory of my younger brother, John, whose vibrant life was cut short too soon; my gratitude to all of you for your unconditional love and for getting what it means to be a Dr. Keefe! I dedicate this dissertation to you all; and, to my husband, Tyson Lewis, who spent many hours in deep conversations about de-framing on our nightly walks through the park and who understands me like no one else. iii Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii Introduction 1 What is wordimage? Toward a Phenomenology of the Ekphrastic Sensible Prologue 12 Ekphrastic Antagonism and the Medusa Chapter 1 28 Model Women Beyond the Frame: Feminist Ekphrasis, Beauty, and the Uncanny Pose Chapter 2 81 The Ecstatic Embrace of Verbal and Visual: Lyric Beyond the Ekphrastic Paragone Chapter 3 122 Near Distances: Ekphrastic Aura from Wunderkammer to Still Life Chapter 4 164 Visionary Ekphrasis and the Mind’s Eye: Image-Making through Enargeia and Synesthesia Epilogue 200 Wordimage Concordance and the Poet-Artist Collaboration Works Cited 204 iv List of illustrations Unless otherwise attributed, all images are reproduced via the Rutgers University Libraries’ subscription to ARTstor Digital Library. Under the ARTstor terms and conditions, these images are only approved for use in a student dissertation. No reproduction or distribution of these images without permission from the copyright holder is allowed. 1. Medusa (c. 1600), Galleria degli Uffizi, 16 2. Edouard Manet, Olympia (1863-65), Musée d’Orsay, 28 3. Jean Auguste Ingres, Mrs. Charles Badham (1816), National Gallery of Art, 39 4. Parmigianino, Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror (ca. 1523-24), Kunsthistorisches Museum, 42 5. Jean-Baptiste Chardin, Back from Market (ca. 1739), Louvre, 47 6. Edgar Degas, The Laundresses (1844), Musee d’Orsay, 51 7. E.J. Bellocq, Portrait of a Prostitute (c. 1912), from Storyville Portraits, 55 8 and 9. E.J. Bellocq, two untitled photographs (1911-13), The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 56 10. E.J. Bellocq, untitled photograph (1911-13), The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 57 11. E.J. Bellocq, Portrait of a Prostitute (c. 1912), from Storyville Portraits, 58 12. John Everett Millais, Ophelia (1852), Tate Britain, 63 13. E. J. Bellocq, Storyville Portrait (c. 1912), Williams College Museum of Art, 63 14. E.J. Bellocq, Portrait of a Prostitute (c. 1912), from Storyville Portraits, 69 15. Richard Diebenkorn, Sea Wall (1957), 96 16. Richard Diebenkorn, Poppies (1963), 100 17. Joseph Cornell, Medici Slot Machine (1942), 137 18. Joseph Cornell, Medici Princess (n.d.), 138 19. Joseph Cornell, Untitled [Bébé Marie] (1940s), The Museum of Modern Art, 140 20. Joseph Cornell, The Crystal Cage (Portrait of Berenice) (1943), 145 21. Albrecht Dürer, View of the Arco Valley in the Tyrol (1495), Louvre, 150 22. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Kiki Smith, Concordance (2006), Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions. Courtesy of the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions, 201 v ! 1 Introduction What is wordimage? Toward a Phenomenology of the Ekphrastic Sensible So, I continue to calculate my house, its significance as a holding place for something to look at (image,/word), building would illustrate. --Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, “Safety” (I Love Artists 125) In the epigraph above, contemporary poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge builds a complex metaphor comparing the “calculating” (or perhaps, imagining) of material, three-dimensional space with the two-dimensional work of word and image, the typographically visual and aural “(image,/word).”1 In doing so, Berssenbrugge both spatially and temporally builds a real house atop the imaginary, a “holding place,” a “building [that] would illustrate” in the mind’s eye a visual metaphor for the affective sensation of safety that she explores in this poem. Berssenbrugge’s conflation of material form and image is challenging, but in many ways representative of the 20th and 21st century poets discussed in this dissertation, all of whom engage in a radical recasting of vision and language through their reinterpretation of ekphrasis. More often mentioned than studied in depth, ekphrasis is usually defined as “poetry about art,” or “writing that cites a work of art,” or, merely, “description” (the exact inversion, some say, of illustration), or perhaps (as James Heffernan has it), “a verbal representation of a visual representation” (3). Yet, while ekphrasis seems deceptively straightforward, in the wake 1 In quoting Berssenbrugge here and in the in-depth discussion of her work in Chapter 4, I follow the convention of printing her sentences as they exist with a slash (/) to indicate the original line break. While I Love Artists is oriented in landscape for printing such long lines, it is one of several recent works of Berssenbrugge’s to abandon the convention of indenting when the margin has dictated the line break. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that these line breaks are in fact deliberate and therefore need typographical indication of such. See Jonathon Skinner (np) for a further discussion of this. ! 2 of abstract expressionism’s influence on visual art, contemporary poets find in the ekphrastic mode ways of investigating, celebrating, and submitting to the enigma of the visual that are far from simple. Indeed, ekphrasis draws poets to a lyric mode open to the enterprise of ars poetica and therefore central to the study of modern and contemporary poetry. The poets in my dissertation give voice not only to the experience of viewing, but also offer in their own poetic lexicons critical concepts that vivify the self-conscious practice of poetry in our day. Jacques Ranciere has usefully characterized the 20th century as bringing about an “aesthetic regime of the arts” which, unlike former artistic regimes, breaks rules of hierarchicalization, crosses borders between legitimate and illegitimate subject matter, and erases divisions between high and low art: “The aesthetic mode of art is the one where the arts are no longer distributed hierarchically according to their proximity with the power of words to make us see, where instead they are equivalent as languages” (“What Aesthetics Can Mean” 24). In the case of ekphrasis, this aesthetic redistribution enables a re-vision2

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