"A Serpentine Gesture": John Ashbery's Poetry

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.

Author: Elisabeth W. Joyce
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Published: 12/15/2024
Series: Recencies Series: Research and Recovery in Twentieth-Century
Pages: 258
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.59d
ISBN: 9780826367297