"As We Babble about the Sky and the Weather and the Forests of Change": Nostalgia in John Ashbery's Early Poetry

Ronald S. Judy

《intergrams》 2005年 (2005/03) Pp. 1-17

https://doi.org/10.6387/INTERGRAMS.200503.0001

並列摘要

This essay argues that John Ashbery's early poetry is deeply invested in what Fredric Jameson has termed the ”art language” of nostalgia. That is, his early work is bent on colonizing the avant garde styles of yore and re-appropriating them for con-temporary audiences. Whether nostalgia is an intense ”attack” on the senses as Ashbery's narrator recounts in the opening lines of ”Mixed Feelings,” or appears as a deeply threatening sense of space in his film noir poem ”Forties Flick,” we are presented with a ”lyric consciousness” that is baffled by the richness and depth of the avant garde. By reproducing the shock in the experience of rediscovering confinement as something like an ur-history of our present unfreedom, or condition of confinement, I argue that poems like ”Mixed Feelings” and ”Forties Flick” re-write the past in terms of style alone-i. e., as a reification of the already fetishized image of the past.

並列關鍵字

John Ashbery ； poetry ； nostalgia ； pastiche ； avant-garde ； Marxism ； postmodernism ； psychoanalysis ； paranoia ； film noir ； popular culture

參考文獻

Ashbery, John.(1986).Selected Poems.London:Penguin Books.

Cohen, Keith.,Lehman (ed.)(1980).Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery.Ithaca:Cornell UP.

Colbert, Benjamin.,Lehman (ed.)(1980).Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery.Ithaca:Cornell UP.

Cooper, Travis.(1992).Ashbery's Self-Portrait.Papers on Language and Literature.28(Fall),451.

Herd, David.(2000).John Ashbery and American Poetry.Manchester:Manchester UP.