| “Textualism: Literary Theory and the Depreciation of Poetry” is a critique of the poststructuralist notion of the text from the point of view of twentieth-century countercultural poetics. The dissertation argues that, far from reflecting the reality of language as it is used by poets, the theory of textuality instead projects the ideal of an affectless, non-referential, de-materialized, and autonomous structure onto the poetic field, thereby eclipsing it. Citing in addition to this the curious irony that much of the work now considered to be among the most textually innovative of the twentieth century actually emerged out of a sometimes deep antipathy for alphabetic literacy as a medium for poetry, the dissertation proposes a thorough displacement of the theory of textuality as a central explanatory hypothesis for the workings of poetic language. The purpose of the study is to demonstrate the shortcomings of the theory of textuality as a means of accessing poetry and to develop alternatives that emerge, not out of the rationalist project of linguistic first principles and dialectical reasoning, but from the practical thought of poetics.; The first three chapters comprise a critique of the theory of textuality. The first chapter, “Textuality and its Discontents,” examines the theory of textuality from a critical and creative point of view. In the second chapter, “Textualism as Myth,” I suggest that textualism is a story “at once true and unreal” in that it advances linguistic principles that are as dubious epistemologically as they are liberating critically. The third chapter, “Textualism as Spectacle,” traces the theory of textuality back to its roots in Romantic aesthetic philosophy from which the distinctly speculative and specular character of textualism is derived. The next two chapters, “Spectres of Orality” (parts one and two), explore the extent to which the entrenched textualism of much contemporary literary theory obscures the reoralizing trend in twentieth-century poetics. The final two chapters, “Textualism and Poetics” (parts one and two), explore the many ways that textuality and orality can be seen to interanimate one another in the work of a number of poets, among them Gertrude Stein, bpNichol, and Steve McCaffery. |
