Includes bibliographical references (pages 221-230) and index.
Contents:
Ashbery and phenomenology -- Perception and experience -- Time, lyric, and perception -- Space -- Memory: "that stalled moment" -- Motility and motricity -- Order and meaning: the transcendence of the everyday.
Summary:
"In "A Serpentine Gesture": John Ashbery's Poetry and Phenomenology Elisabeth W. Joyce examines John Ashbery's poetry through the lens of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's conception of phenomenology. For Merleau-Ponty, perception is a process through which people reach outside of themselves for sensory information, map that experiential information against what they have previously encountered and what is culturally inculcated in them, and articulate shifts in their internal repositories through encounters with new material. Joyce argues that this process reflects Ashbery's classic statement of poetry being the "experience of experience." Through incisive close readings of Ashbery's poems, Joyce examines how he explores this process of continual reverberation between what is sensed and what is considered about that sensation and, ultimately, how he renders these perceptions into the 'serpentine gesture' of language" -- Back cover.
Series:
Recencies series: research and recovery in twentieth-century American poetics
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.