A Study On Chronotope In John Ashbery’s Poetry

John Ashbery(1927-2017)is an American poet.He has published more than 20 poetry collections and won almost all of America’s poetry awards.Time-space has always been one of the major themes in his poetry.This thesis is dedicated to the analysis of three chronotope of city,the pastoral,"self-portrait in a convex mirror" by applying Bakhtin’s chronotope theory in his poetry collections including Double Dream of Spring(1970),Houseboat Days(1977),Your Name Here(2000),Chinese Whispers(2002),Self-Portrait in Convex Mirror(1974).Bakhtin put forward chronotope,which reveals that in the literary artistic chronotope,spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out,concrete whole.Chronotope affects the literary works’ genres,plots and characters and is also closely connected to the society and culture.In this thesis,I’m committed to the analysis of the time-space by chronotope theory in the poetry of John Ashbery.The introduction part presents Bakhtin’s chronotope theory,the chronotope form of American avant-garde poetry,the life of John Ashbery,as well as the literature review of Ashbery’s poetry at home and abroad.The main body of the thesis is divided into three chapters.The first chapter is devoted to analyzing the chronotope of city mainly from the poetry’s form,content and to conclude the city time-space is finite and spontaneous.The second chapter explores the unknown and infinite time-space in the chronotope of the pastoral and the third chapter studies the coexistence of closed and open space-time in the chronotope of "Self-Portrait in Convex Mirror".The conclusion part summarizes three different chronotopes and their relationship with each other as well as the chronotope theory.Only in the chronotope of arts can man come into being.