Strange New Canons: The Aesthetics of Classical Reception in 20th Century American Experimental Poetics.

Abstract

American experimental poets after modernism turned to Greek and Latin texts as pretexts to explode the ideal of the classical tradition, and to explore, instead, the radical discontinuity and linguistic alterity of the classics. Focusing on divergent but related modes of classical reception in American avant-garde poetry, this dissertation asks why and how “the classical” is a key site for poetic experiments by several generations of poets, including Louis Zukofsky, David Melnick, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Spicer, Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe. Though heterogeneous in many respects, their poetics demonstrate the irreconcilability of classical texts—in all their graphic, phonic, and material particularity—with an idea of classics at the center of Anglo-American culture. They create “strange new canons” through epitextual, paratextual, and metatextual engagements with classicism, demonstrating how canon becomes anti-canon, and opening up alternative models for canonical revision.

After a theoretical introduction about literary canonicity and poetic innovation, each of the dissertation’s three chapters pairs two authors according to the dual criteria of literary period and mode of classical reception, tracing a line from late modernist Objectivism to the New American Poetry and Language Writing. Chapter One analyzes homophonic translation in Zukofsky’s Catullus and Melnick’s Homer, as two examples of “epitextual” poetics that foreground the material text. Chapter Two turns to Ginsberg and Spicer to compare different “paratextual” strategies of adaptation through the figures of Catullus and Orpheus, simultaneously critiquing hegemonic classicism and adapting “classics” for their own poetic purposes: while Ginsberg usurps and transposes classical authority for alternative texts and social identities, Spicer responds critically to Ginsberg by offering up an even more potent critique in his self-cancelling classical poetics. Chapter Three contrasts Bernstein’s poetics of citation with Howe’s poetics of luminous fragments (in Pythagorean Silence) with Bernstein’s poetics of citation (in The Sophist and elsewhere) as two examples of “metatextual” reception, creating classical simulacra divorced from Greek and Latin texts for ironic critique or historical transformation.

The conclusion reflects further on the implications of American experimental poetics for rethinking the past and future of classical reception studies, and extends its implications into contemporary canon debates and avant-garde poetics.