“The center of transformations”

Subtitle:reading Wallace Stevens elsewhere

This dissertation explores what it might mean to read Wallace Stevens “elsewhere” by considering various examples in which Stevens’s poetry is displaced, either through inclusion in international magazines and anthologies or via its presence in the work of other authors. Writing a piece of academic research on a poet inevitably entails reckoning with other readers’ experiences of that poet’s work and thus realizing the degree to which reading is a deeply situated act, in which one’s own concerns and interests inform how one encounters literature. This dissertation takes as its main point of departure precisely this notion, but looks past the realm of academia and toward that of other forms of literary afterlives and meaning-making. The first chapter charts the early international circulation of Stevens’s poetry, which grew substantially during and because of the Second World War, and reflects on the motivations and limits of Stevens’s portrayal as an “American” author. Many different figures and publications are brought to the stage, so that “Wallace Stevens and the United Nations of Literature” also serves as an illustration of Stevens’s firm position in a larger literary network, despite his reputation as a solipsistic, aloof poet. While the first chapter considers the presence of Stevens’s poems in international publications, the second and third look at various instances in which authors point to his work, either explicitly or obliquely. The poet and activist Adrienne Rich has often offered up Stevens as a poet who influenced her own poetics and understanding of what it meant to write poetry. The echoes of his work throughout her own make up the topic of this dissertation’s second chapter, which considers how, somewhat paradoxically, Stevens’s abstracted idiom, judged to be apolitical by many, served Rich’s own poetics and political evolution. The three case studies included in the third chapter look at authors working at a greater remove from the poet in both time and genre, questioning how Stevens’s presence functions in works by three fiction writers (Jon McGregor, Colum McCann, and John Banville). These intertextual readings illustrate the imaginative possibilities inherent in Stevens’s poetry, and, moreover, how his words are expanded by their inclusion in other writers’ works. While the three different chapters of this dissertation take various methodological approaches, then, they all seek to understand readers’ different encounters with Stevens’s work, in order to understand the lasting impact of his poetry and gain an insight into the interpretative and creative opportunities it continues to offer.

Publication year:2020

Keywords:Doctoral thesis

Accessibility:Closed