Literary critics typically oppose chronological and anachronistic historiographical schemes. In paired readings of early modern and contemporary poets, my dissertation, “The Shock of the Old: Periodization, Poetics, and Diachronic Exchange between the Renaissance and the Avant-Garde” investigates a series of poetic texts that defy this opposition. The poetic objects I study are multiple and disparate, characterized by their participation in chronological historical schemes and by the anachronistic possibility that haunts those schemes. I name the tense coexistence between these two kinds of history the “diachronic,” drawing on the word’s contradictory literary and geological senses. I document the way that poets employ the diachronic for political and aesthetic ends. A contradiction in historical terms, the diachronic permits forbidden historical possibilities—including the capacity to transgress the supposedly tightly fortified borders of our postmodern present. “The Shock of the Old” intervenes in key debates in poetics, avant-garde studies, queer theory, and early modern studies. I begin by considering the material reproduction of poetry in early modern England: the collaborative acts of printing, circulating, and consuming poetry. Working with Jen Bervin’s Nets alongside Materias, an installation by book-artist Dianna Frid, I argue that contemporary avant-garde writers and artists revive these early modern collaborative textual practices, using them to critique the politics and poetics of their sources. Similarly, in the second chapter, I explore twentieth century work by Robert Duncan and Thom Gunn that adopts imitatio as a compositional device. Though critics like Thomas Greene have argued that imitatio is a distinctively Renaissance practice, Duncan and Gunn use it in imitations of Ben Jonson and John Donne to articulate queer identity and poetics. For them, so-called “straight time” remains requisite to queer identity and poetry, even as queer poetics works in anachronistic swerves to derange the reproductive logics of chronological temporality. Duncan and Gunn complicate the accounts of queer unhistoricists, who insist that queerness resists all forms of straight time. Duncan and Gunn articulate queer identity and poetics as a diachronic balance: proximate to and distant from their historical sources. The first two chapters document the diachronic possibility that haunts the writing, reading, and circulation of poetry. Subsequent chapters turn to form and genre. In the third chapter, I stage the “necropastoral”—an avant-garde pastoral poetics developed by Joyelle McSweeney—alongside the 2500-year history of the genre, beginning with Theocritus. Arguing for an embodied understanding of the pastoral, I show that McSweeney coordinates a return to a distinctly early modern pastoral, organized through the humoral continuity between the human body and the natural world. The chapter reconciles new historicist and new critical methods, using body theory and tropological criticism in equal measure, to document what I describe as the “logistics” of the pastoral. The final chapter takes up theories of rhyme’s capacity to bind together unlike things through the play of sound. In the prolix, hyperactive rhyming of poets like John Skelton and Harryette Mullen rhyme performs the opposite function. It exceeds the reader’s capacity to create connections, to order and organize the world: rhyme disarticulates, dismantling intelligibility. Mullen and Skelton share a formal resource without otherwise intersecting. Can we call this a diachronic link? Here, I test the descriptive limits of diachronic poetics to see whether it can describe the shared formal practices that often link poets, independent of obvious intertextuality.

Last modified

• 01/30/2019

Creator

• Toby Altman

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2H46T

Subject

• English

Keyword

• diachronic
• genre
• Poetics
• Queer
• Periodization
• form

Date created

• 2017-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright