"Poetic Attention" reveals how John Ashbery's ties with past literary traditions elucidate his own personal aesthetic. Starting with a review of Ashbery's critical reception, the thesis shows how Ashbery's poetry and its reception are polarized in two major post-Romantic approaches to poetry: the Romantic, and the "objectivist" tradition of modernism. Beginning with a look at how Ashbery's early poetry reflects both paradigms, I focus on moments where both are simultaneously active. I demonstrate how impressionism, as a sensibility with certain methodological, epistemological, and technical concerns and devices having to do with the conjunction of consciousness and the world in perception, best describes the interaction between Ashbery's Romantic and modernist strains. Impressionism helps us understand how Ashbery negotiates the Romantic desire for resolutions to spiritual crises and the modernist focus on objects in and of themselves by treating a searching attentiveness to those objects as a value in itself.

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There are two traditions in English poetry: elevated and down-to-earth. The former is characterized by formal style, use of verbal associations, and philosophical subject matter. The latter is informal, uses worldly images and makes specific points. When elevated style uses common language, i.e. words drawn from specialized contexts, those words bring with them the down-to-earth spirit. They convey an effect of honesty, indicting the abstraction of elevatedness as an evasion. John Ashbery calls up that effect to discredit it, to show that down-to-earth poetry's implied access to the world is delusive and his personalized internal view is honest. Amy Gerstler accepts the indictment, letting it bring her poems to an epiphanic connection with reality. This distinction reflects their generational difference, between Ashbery's postmodernists who see no possibility of understanding reality, and Gerstler's post-postmodernists who instinctively hope for that understanding while accepting postmodernist epistemological pessimism.

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Gekürzte und überarbeitete Fassung von: Diss.--Neuere Fremdsprachliche Philologien--Berlin--Freie Unversität, 1988.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 264-276). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 264-276).

Thesis (M.A.) (English)) -- University of Pretoria, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references. Available on the Internet via the World Wide Web.

Sadness in literature has often been thematically interpreted as an indication of literary originality. Notions of solitude, silence, and alienation contribute to the idea that melancholy benefits the introspective work of the artist. But it is also possible to explore sadness as a more complex literary phenomenon, one that expands the dimensions of affect and influences possibilities of aesthetic and ethical renovation that gesture beyond the usual themes of melancholy and solitude. Sadness thus does not come to be conceived as merely an aspect of mourning, but as a structure of loss that is intrinsic to our concept of the world's composition and insufficiencies. The energies that surround the experience of sadness measure the degree to winch many writers have been able to develop their sense of unhappiness into a way of charting the difficulties and transformative power of their own labours. As well, sadness in literature can be seen as illuminating a loss that writers generate in order to achieve through their art the possibility of aesthetic and even social reparation.