The plain sense of things : an analysis of mid-20th-century departures from modernism
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Starting with Symbolism, various modernist movements in the first half of the twentieth century privileged the work of direct perception, objective attitudes and concrete imagery over direct demonstrations of mental processes involving abstract ideation. Imagism, in particular, had and continues to have substantial impact on descriptive practices in Anglo-American poetry. By the middle of the century, however, the modernist engine was exhausted. Poets and literary critics started finding the modernist emphasis on objectivity and concrete imagery insufficient for engaging the mind's more immediate and spontaneous modes of responsiveness. This dissertation studies how plain rhetoric and the concept of plainness enabled mid-twentieth-century poets to make meaningful departures from the stylistic orthodoxies of modernism. The four poets studied here -- Wallace Stevens, Frank O'Hara, Thom Gunn and Eavan Boland -- supplement the technical achievements of modernism with a plain rhetoric that tests the affordances of abstraction, generalization, and epigrammatic statement for modern poetry. The desire for plainspoken language challenges some cherished critical distinctions between poetic language and everyday language, calling attention to how communicative uses of language may in fact increase the resourcefulness of poetic expression. Accordingly, these poets foreground the gestural and referential strivings of their speakers to establish compelling continuities between the concrete elements of experience and the mind's abstractive gestures. The project analyzes these literary developments within the larger context of intellectual thought to demonstrate how transformations in the history of philosophy and critical theory inform changes in literary style. More specifically, the project consults various accounts in the Philosophy of Language and Psychoanalysis to evaluate the challenges and importance of referential intention in fixing reference. Finally, this project also investigates the revival of the Renaissance plain style in the period by Yvor Winters, a prominent literary critic at Stanford University, whose work influenced many critics and poets. An analysis of Winters's legacy and influence on his students like Thom Gunn shows how Renaissance conceptions of plainness offered generative stylistic models for modern poets and critics
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2020; ©2020 |
| Publication date | 2020; 2020 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Levi, Melih |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Greene, Roland, 1957- |
| Thesis advisor | Greene, Roland, 1957- |
| Thesis advisor | Altieri, Charles, 1942- |
| Thesis advisor | Phelan, Peggy |
| Degree committee member | Altieri, Charles, 1942- |
| Degree committee member | Phelan, Peggy |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Comparative Literature. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Melih Levi |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Comparative Literature |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2020 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2020 by Melih Levi
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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