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Radical Empiricist Poetics in the New York School and Beyond

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Radical Empiricist Poetics in the New York School and Beyond Radical Empiricist Poetics in the New York School and Beyond by Maude Chanson Emerson A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Charles Altieri, Chair Professor Eric Falci Professor John Campbell Spring 2017 ! Abstract Radical Empiricist Poetics in the New York School and Beyond by Maude Chanson Emerson Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Charles Altieri, Chair This dissertation contends that the first-generation New York School poets—especially John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler—develop the aesthetic possibilities of the philosophical stance that William James called “radical empiricism.” James followed the British empiricists in granting priority to parts, individuals, and unanalyzed sensations, but he radicalized the empiricist perspective by holding experiences of cohesion and relation to be as real as those of disjunction and discrete sensation. Schuyler, Ashbery, and O’Hara each practice an empiricist poetics: a poetics of the everyday, the felt, and the miscellaneous. At the same time, their poetries pose challenges to the conceptions of experience on which empiricism historically has been based, from the presumption of a unified experiencing subject to the relegation of sensation and abstraction to separate orders of reality. I argue that these challenges should not be seen as a denial of experience, as some postmodernist readings of New York School poetry allege, but as part of a careful and critical commitment to experience. As radical empiricists, these poets understand experience not as an inward phenomenon but as a field in which inner and outer are merely potential and constantly shifting divisions. In the first chapter, I locate a precedent for Ashbery’s radical-empiricist poetics in Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation, arguing that both Stein and Ashbery confound the conceptions of experience that predominate in critical assessments of modern and postmodern poetry and art. In the second chapter, O’Hara’s poetry presses the necessity of distinguishing between radical-empiricist poetics and the influential poetics of pragmatism. O’Hara shares pragmatism’s conception of experience as fluid and precarious, but his poems highlight affective dimensions of experience that are lost when poetry is understood pragmatically, as an instrument designed to provide the reader, or the poet, with momentary clarity and provisional ideals conducive to her progress in an unsteady world. Chapter Three analyzes the technique of bathetic deflation that Schuyler employs to forestall the idealization of notions like experience, self, and nature in an effort to keep the phenomena that those terms describe thoroughly suspended in the matrix of the empirical. Finally, in a chapter linking the poetry of the New York School to the art of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, I argue that these poets and artists respond in parallel ways to the models of experience associated with Abstract Expressionist painting. Johns and Rauschenberg recover the category of experience by unhooking it from the language of self, soul, and expression with which it had long been associated and resituating it in the world of material objects, including the human body. ! 1 Table of Contents List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ ii Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... iii Introduction ................................................................................................................................... iv Chapter One. John Ashbery’s Conjunctive Poetics ....................................................................... 1 Chapter Two. Precarious and Stable: Experience in Frank O’Hara’s Poetry and the Problems with Pragmatism ........................................................ 24 Chapter Three. “The greens around them, and / the browns, the grays, are the park”: James Schuyler’s Empiricism ............................................................... 46 Chapter Four. “A Paper Rubbed Against the Heart”: Robert Rauschenberg, Frank O’Hara and Jasper Johns ............................................................... 75 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................... 109 ! i! List of Figures Fig. 1. Robert Rauschenberg, Red Import, 1954. ......................................................................... 86 Fig. 2. Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled, 1954. .............................................................................. 89 Fig. 3. Robert Rauschenberg, Red Interior, 1954. ....................................................................... 97 Fig. 4. Jasper Johns, Skin with O’Hara Poem, 1963-65. ............................................................. 98 Fig. 5. Jasper Johns, Memory Piece (Frank O’Hara), 1961-70. ............................................... 101 Fig. 6. Marcel Duchamp, Torture-Morte, 1959. ........................................................................ 103 ! ii! Acknowledgements During my years at Berkeley I have benefited from the support and guidance of a number of professors without whom this dissertation would not have been possible. Charles Altieri and Eric Falci have provided prompt and productive feedback on virtually everything I have written. The balance between the enthusiasm of the former and the gentle skepticism of the latter was just the tonic I needed to bring this project into being. Dan Blanton has been extraordinarily generous with his time and in his readings, which have a way of turning every sentence into the seed of exciting possibilities. Mitch Breitwieser shaped my sense of the relationship between literature and philosophy and made (continues to make) literary scholarship feel like a noble undertaking. I thank him especially for getting me hooked on William James, and giving me, as Dan Blanton (and Isabelle Stengers) put it, someone to “think with.” I found a new person to “think with”—a room full of them, in fact—in the Whitehead reading group of 2013-14. I am grateful to Lyn Hejinian for organizing that group, and for showing me the kind of reader I would like to be: patient and generous but not uncritical, and in the end, I think, pragmatic—looking, that is, toward the lives that words lead in the world. I am grateful to James Turner for a grant-in-aid from the James D. Hart Chair of English and a matching grant from Charles Altieri that allowed me to observe the drips and crackles of Rauschenberg’s Red Paintings from up close. My fellow graduate students have been an invaluable source of social and intellectual companionship. Years of conversations with Jocelyn Rodal, Juliana Chow, and Christopher Miller, in particular, have left their mark on this dissertation. Immeasurable thanks to Nick, for listening to me think out loud, among many, many other things. Finally, this dissertation owes a debt to my dad, scholar of pop music, who taught me to be suspicious of claims to authenticity, and that the borrowed and the faked are by no means incompatible with the best things in art, or life. ! iii! Introduction This dissertation makes two central claims. The first is that the category of “experience” is key to understanding the work of the first-generation New York School poets, especially John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Frank O’Hara. The second is that amid a wider impetus across the postwar American arts to reorient art around everyday experience, the New York School poets, along with certain of their contemporaries like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, handle the concept of experience in a distinctive and philosophically important way. I find a model for this way of treating experience in the thinking and writing of William James, especially in the worldview that James calls “radical empiricism.” It might sound strange to identify the emulation of lived experience as characteristic of the postwar moment in the American arts. By most accounts, a turn toward subjective experience and everyday life is a defining trend of the modernism of the first half of the twentieth century, not the postmodernism of the second half. For a broad swathe of artists in the 1950s and 1960s, however, that’s not what modernism looked like, or if it did, it was a modernism that they felt had been lost or misinterpreted, overwhelmed by mid-century by a tide of academic formalism. (This is the implication, for instance, of Donald Allen’s claim in his preface to The New American Poetry, 1945-1960 that the “one common characteristic” of the poetry included in that anthology is “a total rejection of all those qualities typical of academic verse” (xi).) In this dissertation, I situate the New York School poets amongst a range of contemporaneous voices across the arts that called for renewed attention to the manner and makeup of experience—a call that may be understood alternately and sometimes even simultaneously as a departure from modernism and a return to its fundamental principles. In Chapter One, for example, I argue that John Ashbery’s poetic development is continuous with the historically modernist work of Gertrude Stein, especially her Stanzas in Meditation.
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