| My dissertation hypothesizes the birth of a new sublime in twentieth-century America, a sublime premised not on the awesomeness of God or Nature, but on the power of the commodity to mirror our desires and interests. The commodity--colorful, plastic, shrink-wrapped, warranteed--lasts more than a lifetime; in the era of late capitalism, it comes to represent what transcends ourselves. While some critics might interpret this change as yet another sign of the devolution of modern society, I believe this phenomenon is too complex to be dismissed as merely the destruction of depth and meaningfulness. Rather, the emergence of the commodity sublime speaks importantly to how we conceive of ourselves and to how we relate to each other's differences, in terms of class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity.;The poets whose work I examine--Gertrude Stein, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler--each rely on what I call the commodity sublime in order to resist the appropriation of their identities by capitalism itself (a system which transforms difference into just another market for goods and services). Thus the poets turn capitalistic rhetoric against itself, as they use figures of commodities to represent the sublimity of identity, rather than its knowability. Refusing obedience then to traditional categories, the poets experiment with identity as a rhetorical performance of excess, an endless proliferation of selves both premised on, and interested in refuting, capitalist hegemony.;Thus the Kantian sublime still lives, but in an altered form--the sublime and the beautiful now merge into one. The beautiful, as manifest in the commodity, has the power to evoke ecstatic terror, to force us to confront the mirror of the mind's own excessiveness. While Kant views the sublime as marginal to his aesthetic system because it reflects the passion of human experience rather than the truth of nature, this is the very reason why the sublime proves compelling to twentieth-century poets, those interested in the politics of identity rather than its accepted rituals. |
