This dissertation explores John Ashbery’s ambiguous relationship to external chaos through the framework of romantic irony. Throughout Ashbery’s work he enthusiastically creates and then ironically decreates his poetic constructs “so that understanding / May begin, and in doing so be undone.”
Ashbery’s work reflects two contradictory conceptions of romantic irony: for Friedrich Schlegel repeated acts of creation and decreation lead to a broader and richer, albeit more fragmented, sense of the universe as well as the self, while for G. W. F. Hegel and Søren Kierkegaard these acts are ultimately abstracting and isolating. As I illustrate in my second and third chapters, Ashbery also modifies these conceptions in order to fit his own postmodern poetic agenda. Rather than seeing a Romantic “I” in opposition to a noumenal world, as does Schlegel, Ashbery adopts a post-Nietzschian understanding of both the self and the world as textual constructs. And, whereas Hegel and Kierkegaard see the teleological progression of history as an alternative to the desultory movement of romantic irony, Ashbery suggests that their “end theory” is guilty of the same imaginative isolation that they criticize in Schlegel’s romantic ironist.
Chapters Four and Five address Ashbery’s development of Schlegel’s vision of romantic ironic art as an “artfully ordered confusion.” Chapter Four explores Ashbery’s repeated return to and reevaluation of romantic ironic forms, such as novelistic inclusiveness, dialogue, and the aphorism, each of which functions both as a means of engagement with the world and abstraction from it. Ashbery’s use of dialogue also refutes Wittgenstein’s conception of language as fundamentally social and free from solipsism. Chapter Five considers Ashbery’s turn to contemporary chaos theory as a potential middle ground between the two versions of romantic irony with which he wrestles throughout much of his career. |
