Wallace Stevens: Versions of apocalypse

grantor: University of TorontoApocalyptic writings assert that the whole of history has a single meaning, and that this meaning will be revealed only at the end of present world and the creation of a new and perfect world; they transform the plot of history into the plot of meaning. Wallace Stevens attempts to stand outside such thinking in his poetry. But Jacques Derrida's writings on teleology and apocalypse suggest the difficulty or even impossibility of putting an end to this idea of the end, as do some of the works of Paul Ricoeur and Frank Kermode. This dissertation, then, explores the paradoxes that emerge from Stevens' attempts to write of the end of the discourse of the end. His engagement with apocalypse generates a number of contradictions, gaps, and disjunctions in his texts: disruptive dashes that nevertheless speak of a desire for continuity; autumnal tropes that gesture toward finality and oblivion while turning toward the world of returning seasonal cycles; ellipses that speak silently of the disappearance of old fictions; and, in "The Auroras of Autumn," an irresolvable tension between elegiac and apocalyptic tendencies. These moments of tension reveal a poetry that remains haunted by certain structures of apocalyptic thinking even as it turns against them.Ph.D