Beyond radical art: The New York School poets and the neo-avant-garde.
| dc.contributor.author | Silverberg, Mark Andrew. | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2014-10-21T12:35:33Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2000 | |
| dc.date.issued | 2000 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.other | AAINQ60668 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10222/55734 | |
| dc.description | This study of the family resemblances among the New York School poets (represented here by Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch) focuses particularly on the poets' response to the changing status of the avant-garde artist in New York between the 1940s and 1960s. Following the work of art critics like Hal Foster, I use the term "neo-avant-garde" to define those movements in the 1950s and 60s which both revive and revise the achievements of the "historical" avant-garde. These movements (New York School poetry, Pop art, Conceptual art, etc.) draw particularly on the historical avant-garde's techniques---collage, montage, assemblage, and various forms of non-organic art---but at the same time are extremely critical of what they came to understand as the avant-garde's ideological orientation, particularly in terms of its antagonistic or oppositional stance. This understanding of the avant-garde is historically specific to the United States in the 1950s and 60s where the avant-garde "outsider" (whether in the form of Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, or movie star James Dean) was fast becoming an insider and trendsetter, as corporate and consumer America went about the task of transforming "radical art" into "radical chic." At a time when "the break with tradition" had become the tradition, and when avant-gardism was reduced to a consumer novelty, a new kind of position needed to be found. The New York School poets, from their well-informed position at the center of the New York art world, responded to the compromised role of the artist through a series of neo-avant-garde strategies which this dissertation considers in detail. | en_US |
| dc.description | The introduction provides an argument for why it makes sense to talk about a New York "School" and considers the relationship between the poetry and various theories of the avant-garde. Chapter One continues the discussion of family resemblances and commonalties among the poets by considering standard conceptions and misconceptions about the New York School. Chapter Two turns to the question of the neo-avant-garde ideology by reading three New York School manifestos in order to discern an aesthetics and politics of indifference (contra the avant-garde politics of opposition). Chapter Three considers the relationship between New York School poetry and other arts, particularly painting, through an examination of the "poetics of process." In Chapter Four the question of taste is investigated by examining the New York School's use of camp to deconstruct the high/low, avant-garde/kitsch binary so essential to modernist culture. A conclusion reassesses the neo-avant-garde position in relation to avant-garde ideology and suggests avenues which the New York School poets opened for succeeding generations of practitioners. | en_US |
| dc.description | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 2000. | en_US |
| dc.language | eng | en_US |
| dc.publisher | Dalhousie University | en_US |
| dc.publisher | en_US | |
| dc.subject | Literature, American. | en_US |
| dc.title | Beyond radical art: The New York School poets and the neo-avant-garde. | en_US |
| dc.type | text | en_US |
| dc.contributor.degree | Ph.D. | en_US |
