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Surrealism and American culture: A study of surrealism's reception in America and its resonances in the work of Joseph Cornell and the poetry of Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery

Dimakopoulou, Stamatina; (2002) Surrealism and American culture: A study of surrealism's reception in America and its resonances in the work of Joseph Cornell and the poetry of Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London). Green open access

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Abstract

Recent studies of Surrealism's American years focus on Surrealism's role in the early years of Abstract Expressionism. The interest of the encounter lies in how the Surrealists' emphasis on the social and psychic aspects of their principles evolved into forms that were meant as both an expression of and a refuge from conflict. This thesis looks at how Surrealism was alternately embraced and resisted on the margins of the development of Abstract Expressionism. Chapter One sketches the embrace and critique of Surrealism through the pages of the periodical View (1940-47), that hosted Surrealist works and writings during the Surrealists' stay in America: here I discuss how Surrealist concepts informed critical perspectives on the concept of culture rather than on artistic forms. Alongside View's attempt to open up a Surrealist perspective on American culture, I also consider how cultural politics were synonymous with a critique, within the Surrealism of the period, of the value of the idea itself of culture. This involved a rethinking of the antinomies of Surrealist thought itself, staked as it was on a critique of the promises of modernity, and on a dual intent, totalizing and destructive. Chapter Two looks back on Surrealism's interwar period: my analysis shifts onto Surrealism's approaches to the categories of subject and object, representation and reference. Surrealist principles are discussed as means that redeem as well as undermine these categories. This forms the basis for reading the role of Surrealism in the work of Joseph Cornell, and the poetry of Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery in the postwar period. Chapter Three examines the Surrealist influence on Cornell's boxes and collages at the level of the relations between forms, objects and their contexts. In my exploration of Cornell's disruption of subject/object relations, it transpires that, Cornell's involvement with the object rests on his nostalgia for a substantive relation between the self and the world. In Chapter Four, I discuss how Frank O'Hara also both assimilates and reverses the Surrealist intent. I look at how, in O'Hara's poems, the subject is subsumed by a culture where everything is reduced to the status of 'things'. The Surrealist category of the object is a reminder of objects not yet completely separated from subjectivity, objects that still contain a tangible reality. This dialectic is then shown equally to inform Ashbery's dialogue with Surrealism. Chapter Five looks at Ashbery's Surrealist affinity in the light of his ambivalent attitude towards language and representation, as well as vision. As in Cornell and O'Hara, Ashbery's approach to Surrealism rests on his nostalgia for substantive experiences and regret for the text's distance from reality. Not only criticised on the grounds of its historical and cultural specificity and its ties to the promises of modernity, Surrealism provides the terms for a reading of the paradoxes of postmodern culture against the grain. Not only anticipating the poststructuralist critique of substantive categories, the afterglow of Surrealism highlights postmodernism's difficult relations to subjective experience, aesthetic practice and cultural politics.

Type: Thesis (Doctoral)
Qualification: Ph.D
Title: Surrealism and American culture: A study of surrealism's reception in America and its resonances in the work of Joseph Cornell and the poetry of Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
Language: English
Additional information: Thesis digitised by ProQuest.
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10101796
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