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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.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Abbreviations
- Chapter One. Ashbery and Phenomenology
- Chapter Two. Perception and Experience
- Chapter Three. Time, Lyric, and Perception
- Chapter Four. Space
- Chapter Five. Memory: “That Stalled Moment”
- Chapter Six. Motility and Motricity
- Chapter Seven. Order and Meaning: The Transcendence of the Everyday
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Credits
- Index
About the author
Elisabeth W. Joyce is a professor at Edinboro University. She is also the author of
Cultural Critique and Abstraction: Marianne Moore and the Avant-Garde and
"The Small Space of a Pause": Susan Howe's Poetry and the Spaces Between.
