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theses

In my dissertation, I use a hemispheric American framework to explore how changing understandings of silence have shaped the development of experimental poetry since the 1950s. I begin by showing how silence has become a key concept in mainstream criticism's devaluation of experimental literature and art. Midcentury critics, citing such works' refusal of conventional sense-making, were the first to describe them as "silent" – unconcerned with shared cultural meaning, incapable of political engagement, and therefore negligent of the duties previously embraced by avant-garde art. Responding to these claims, writers like Mexican poet Octavio Paz, Brazilian intellectual Haroldo de Campos, and U.S. composer John Cage worked to imagine silence not as a lack of content but as a culturally mediated way of being and behaving. They challenged lyric poetry's traditional reliance on notions related to speech (voice, breath, rhythm, etc.) to reimagine avant-garde poetry as an activity whose power for opposition to the status quo lies not in speaking out but in falling silent. For example, in my third chapter I examine the ideological stakes of this silence, arguing that while U. S. cultural policy increasingly made a spectacle of inter-American cultural communication, literary silence provided a means of strategic non-communication. These changing ideas about silence suggest an alternative narrative about modernism's transition to postmodernism: one driven not by an evolving understanding of discourse but by changing conceptions of that which disrupts it. Here the "linguistic turn" is simultaneous with a "silent turn." While my dissertation focuses on the work of Cage, Paz, and de Campos, I open the discussion to include these poets' interaction with the "silent" work of writers and artists like Alejandra Pizarnik, Jackson Mac Low, Robert Rauschenberg, and others.

ETD_6334

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Vaughn Anderson

doi:10.7282/T3Q81FWS

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.