Wordimage: lyric ekphrasis and subjectivity in the twenty-first century

My dissertation challenges how we conceptualize the relationship between verbal and visual within the ekphrastic encounter. Beginning with the modernist lyrics of H.D. and Marianne Moore and extending to the contemporary poetry of Natasha Tretheway, Sharon Dolin, Siri Hustvedt, Mark Doty, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, I argue that the voice, form, and content of the ekphrastic lyric is a productive site for understanding the poetics of aesthetic politics. Dominant theories of ekphrasis such as the rivalry between the sister arts and models of confrontation between poet and painter foreclose on the possibilities of the mode as a political space in which the differences between word and image allow poets to engage in new ways with the solitary, embodied, and viewing lyric voice. While feminist and conceptual poetics have privileged the fragmented, multi-vocal poem as the most political form for negotiating subjectivity, my focus on more humanist lyrics engaging fixed forms and lyric selves illuminates an aesthetic for the 21st century in which modern problems connecting vision and identity such as the gaze, the loss of aura, the uncanny double, and viewer passivity, become transformed into opportunities for rethinking subjectivity and desire.Ph. D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Anne Keef