Modernist whimsy: entertaining difficulty in the work of Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, and Stevie Smith

我的论文感兴趣的是，当我们把奇思妙想放在批评话语的中心，并研究它所依附的作家和诗歌形式时，会发生什么。这是对异想天开在文学批评语境中听起来令人尴尬的回应：在现代主义时期，它经常被用作一种解雇，描述一种过于异想天开的诗意情绪或文学手法。我的研究源于威尔·梅（Will May）的一项重要观察，即异想天开也是评论家们使用的一种“权宜之计”，尤其是对女性诗人。我把他的论点看作是一个邀请，让我们关注现代主义女性诗歌的戏谑性，并探究这种戏谑性是如何被贬低的。因此，我的论文既着眼于奇思妙想在文本中发挥作用的方式，也着眼于它如何塑造我们对文本的批判性理解，作为女权主义对奇思妙想美学和批判价值的重新构建的一部分。通过对格特鲁德·斯坦、玛丽安·摩尔和史蒂夫·史密斯诗歌的分析，我的论点有两点：第一，作为一种性别审美范畴，奇想不平衡地破坏了一些诗人的接受程度，而不是其他诗人；其次，在斯坦、摩尔和史密斯的作品中，对结构的意识使奇思妙想成为一种令人担忧的模式，他们将这些紧张关系组织成一种复杂的自我塑造形式。异想天开在20世纪作为一个与困难形成对比的类别出现，这是高度现代主义的标志，其遗产继续塑造艺术概念和专业化的文学批评。正如伦纳德·迪佩文所写，困难已经“成为封圣的必要条件”。奇思妙想，作为“失败的”艺术，似乎是另一种区分严肃和丢弃的方式。然而，这篇论文的论点是，奇思妙想与批判性可检验性的联系给了这些文本和作家逃避美学和批评惯例的许可证。梅在1892年对艾米莉·狄金森（Emily Dickinson）诗歌的评论中写道，“‘异想天开’代表了一个术语，女性读者无法找到他无法解读的诗学。”在这个构思中，奇思妙想取代了困难，成为他认为具有挑战性的诗歌的性别反应的一部分。我的论点集中在异想天开所带来的挑战上，将异想天开视为自己的复杂类别，而不仅仅是一个不屑一顾的替代品。我从黛博拉·鲍曼（Deborah Bowman）在她关于现成品的论文中给出的奇思妙想的“工作定义”出发，这一定义推动了奇思妙想令人困惑的需求：“以各种可能的调性让你好奇的东西：想象一下认真对待它。”将奇思妙想作为一种双重邀请，即拒绝某些东西并接受它——换句话说，与其说是一个物体的质量，不如说是一种用它做某事的恳求——她的定义与Diepeveen对难度的体验质量的强调相一致，他将其描述为“文本与读者之间的互动”。因此，难度和奇思妙想描述的不是物体的美学属性，而是与物体的关系，以及由此产生的一系列影响。这种理解提供了我对奇思妙想作为一个批判性概念的质疑的条件，以及我将其作为阅读斯坦、摩尔和史密斯的工具的使用，建立在这个类别存在的有限的学术基础上。梅在单独的文章中讨论了奇想在“包含女性在社会中的智力角色”方面的作用（参考多萝西·帕克、摩尔和西尔维亚·普拉斯）及其作为道德借口（参考埃兹拉·庞德）的问题，我的博士将把这些观点结合在一起，以证明奇想的风险从根本上是性别的。

My thesis is interested in what happens when we centre whimsy in critical discourse and examine the writers and poetical forms it attaches to. This is in response to the note of embarrassment that whimsy has sounded in a literary-critical context: in the modernist period, it is often used as a dismissal, describing a poetic mood or literary device that is overly fanciful. My research proceeds from Will May's crucial observation that whimsy has also been an 'expedient' category for critics to use, particularly of women poets. I take his arguments as an invitation to centre the playfulness of modernist women's poetry and interrogate the ways in which this playfulness has been disparaged. My thesis thus looks both at the wayswhimsy works within texts and the ways it has moulded our critical understandings of texts as part of a feminist reframing of whimsy's aesthetic and critical value. Through analysis of the poetry of Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore and Stevie Smith, my contention is twofold: first, that as a gendered aesthetic category, whimsy works unevenly to sabotage the reception of some poets and not others; and second, that an awareness of the structures that make whimsy a fraught mode figures prominently in the work of Stein, Moore and Smith, who organise these tensions into a complex form of self-fashioning.Whimsy in the twentieth century arises as a category in contrast to difficulty, that hallmark of high modernism whose legacy continues to shape conceptions of art and professionalised literary criticism. As Leonard Diepeveen writes, difficulty has 'become the necessary condition for canonization'. Whimsy, as 'failed' art, might seem to be another means of policing this distinction between the serious and the throwaway. The contention of this thesis, however, is that the association of whimsy with critical in scrutability has given such texts and writers the licence to evade aesthetic and critical conventions. May writes in a gloss on an 1892 review of Emily Dickinson's poetry that '"whimsical" stands in for a term themale reader cannot find for a poetics he cannot decipher'. In this formulation, whimsy replaces difficulty as part of a gendered reaction to a poem he finds challenging. My argument centres on the challenge whimsy here inscribes, considering whimsy as its own complex category, and not just a dismissive substitute. I proceed from the 'working definition' of whimsy that Deborah Bowman offers in her paper on the readymades, which drives towards its puzzling demands: 'something which makes you wonder, with allpossible tonalities: Imagine taking that seriously.' Staging whimsy as a double-minded invitation to dismiss something and to entertain it - in other words, less a quality of an object than it is an entreaty to do something with it - her definition parallels Diepeveen's emphasis on the experiential quality of difficulty, which he describes as an 'interaction between text and reader'. Rather than describing the aesthetic properties of an object, difficulty and whimsy therefore describe a relationship with an object, and the set of affectsthis entails.This understanding provides the terms of my interrogation of whimsy as a critical concept, and my use of it as a tool to read Stein, Moore and Smith, building on the limited scholarship that exists on the category. Where May, in separate essays, has addressed the question of whimsy's role in 'contain[ing] the intellectual role of women in society' (with reference to Dorothy Parker, Moore, and Sylvia Plath) and its use as ethical excuse (with reference to Ezra Pound), my PhD will bring these perspectives together to demonstrate that the risks of whimsy are fundamentally gendered.