Emily Meyer

Date of Award

2013

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Zamsky, Robert

Keywords

Cole Swensen, Ekphrastic Poetry, Feminist Theory

Area of Concentration

English, Art History

Abstract

The contemporary American poet Cole Swensen has authored numerous books of poetry, each of which typically traces the history of a particular object or artifact of material culture, recreating and manipulating the historical narrative surrounding its production. With varying degrees of emphasis, each collection addresses the relationship between the verbal and visual arts as it has evolved throughout Western civilization, entering a dialogue with the ekphrastic tradition of poems written about paintings. Responding to the gendered subject positions historically ascribed to each art form in this relationship, the four books analyzed at length in this thesis–Try, Such Rich Hour, Ours, and Flare–present an alternate ekphrastic model based on a feminine structure of desire which values reciprocity and intersubjectivity between the arts. While, structurally, this may be more apparent in the later work, Flare, the impulse to destabilize a normative gendered relationship between the discourses is readily apparent even in her earliest works.

Rights

The author has granted New College of Florida the nonexclusive right to archive, make accessible, and distribute for educational purposes this work in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. The copyright of this work remains with the author.

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