Steven Rizzo

Date of Award

2012

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Zamsky, Robert

Keywords

Abraham Lincoln Gillespie, Technopoetics, Modernism

Area of Concentration

English

Abstract

Since his death in 1950, the experimental poet Abraham Lincoln Gillespie has largely been left out of literary-critical histories of modernism. Along with artists like Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, Gillespie was intimately connected to the artists, publications, and innovative aesthetic of the Parisian expatriate scene of the late 1920s and early '30s. Yet his work stands out among even the more experimental products of the expatriate communities in the interwar years: his heavy use of neologisms, idiosyncratic punctuation, peculiar graphic elements, and non-normative syntax make assimilation of his work into the received pictures of modernism difficult and problematic. But what little scholarship on Gillespie has been executed seems content with explaining his difference and absence from historical narratives of modernism by relegating him to the status of "minor" or "marginal." In arguing for a serious reevaluation of Gillespie's status and particular value as a poet, my project works to unmask deeper, more fundamental habits of criticism and show how they maintain received notions of what constitutes the "centrality" of some works while suppressing or forgetting other works which do not conform to the narrow set of "central" values. I find such habits implicit in the critical use of modernist memoirs from the interwar years, in critical discussions of the native context for Gillespie's writing, and in Gillespie's historical relationship to the avant-gardes of the later twentieth century. In each case, my consideration points to alternative ways of considering Gillespie and his relation to modernist artistic production, the importance of historiography as a institutional means for intervention against the habits and structures of canon-making and -enforcing, and to Gillespie's misunderstood engagements with technology, music, and academic institutions.

Rights

This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

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