This dissertation examines poets’ public performances in order to understand the social role of the poet in contemporary America. In the twenty-first century, poetry is increasingly disseminated through live events and digital media, and a rising number of people publicly share their poems. These changes present challenges for authors looking to attain credibility in the eyes of critics and audiences. The Role of the Poet examines how four poets perform their differences from non-authors, and thus form relationships with their audiences. In constructing roles for themselves, poets also make claims about the ontology of poems—whether they are primarily written, oral, or performative works of art. Each chapter focuses on an individual poet’s strategies for performing the role of the poet, and by extension, constructing the role of the audience. The chapters examine the ways poets define poetry; they include discussions of poetry’s ontology and how public poetry performances affect the artform. Performances of authorship are shaped through the vehicles of poets’ writings, poetry readings, interviews, teaching methods, and public programs. Chapter 2 examines Robert Pinsky’s performance of authorship as authority, relating that performance to Pinsky’s canonical ambitions and his affirmation that poetry is an oral, but not performative art. Chapter 3 focuses on Billy Collins’s performance of authenticity, investigating the apparent paradox of achieving popularity while maintaining artistic integrity. Beau Sia’s political poetry is the subject of Chapter 4; his ability to affect change in his audience is considered, as well as his goal of an author-audience alliance. Lastly, Patricia Smith’s performance of authorship as a means of survival is discussed in Chapter 5. Smith performs intimacy with her audience; by sharing details of her life she models the process of writing in order to deal with various kinds of trauma. / text

L'auteur entreprend dans ce mémoire de proposer une interprétation formaliste de la signification et du statut logique de la critique que mène Quine, dans son article Two Dogmas of Empiricism de 1951, à l'encontre de la distinction classique en philosophie entre les énoncés analytiques et synthétiques. Contre l'interprétation standard qui persiste à concevoir cette critique comme un rejet catégorique de la distinction, l'auteur reconstruit la théorie de la signification quinienne afin de relever la distinction renouvelée qu'introduit Quine entre "analytique" et "synthétique" dans son dernier ouvrage, From Stimulus to Science. Par une étude comparative de la conception de Quine et de celles de Churchland et Searle sont spécifiés le sens et le statut que l'on doit assigner à sa notion de "signification". Réinterprétée à la lumière de ces considérations, la critique quinienne se révèle être une remise en question de niveau métaépistémologique de la pratique philosophique de l'empirisme logique. / In this dissertation, the author proposes a formalist interpretation of the meaning and logical status of the critique that Quine put forward against the classical philosophic distinction between analytic and synthetic statements in his 1951 article Two Dogmas of Empiricism. Against the standard interpretation that prevails in the literature, according to which this critique is categorical and without appeal, the author undertakes to rationally reconstruct Quine's theory of meaning in order to reveal the renewed distinction between "analytic" and "synthetic" as it was introduced in his last book, From Stimulus to Science (1995). The meaning and logical status that ought to be assigned to his notion of "meaning" are specified by means of a comparative study between Quine's own conception and that of Churchland and Searle. Reinterpreted in the light of these considerations, the Quinian critique proves to be a metaepistemological reassessment of the logical empiricism's philosophical practice.