Modernist Poetry and the Poetics of Temporality: Between Modernity and Coloniality

Abstract

Whereas scholars of modernist and postcolonial poetics tend to focus on either canonical or peripheral figures, this dissertation weaves a twined theoretical framework, and engages a group of poets from both the center and the margins through the lens of the “Modernity/Coloniality” school of thought. The first chapter revisits the 20th century debate between modernist and postcolonial scholars around the figure of W.B. Yeats. Beyond a purely modern or postcolonial reading, it argues that Yeats’s poems can be read as ‘dark meditations’ through which the Irish poet both anticipates the promise of a postcolonial, modern world, and yet remains attached to the lasting structures of its twinned dark excess, coloniality. The following chapter of Modernism and Poetics of Temporality reevaluates the impetus that drives the young Nicaraguan poet Salomón de la Selva to write his first poetry collection, Tropical Town, while living in the United States. The chapter concludes that Tropical Town’s exoticism and stylistic deficiencies are the product of political and cultural asymmetries. The third chapter, “Modernist Acceleration and the Poetics of the Instant” engages in several readings of poems around the discourse of temporality—from the post-romantic mode of Wallace Stevens, the confessional poetics of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, to Derek Walcott’s postcolonial poetry. This chapter’s operative hypothesis is that as a literary mode the poetics of the instant affords novel ways of conceptualizing rhythmic mediation, individuation, and literary representations of temporality beyond the strictures of standardized critical protocols. The dissertation’s conclusion, “The Gothic Third World: Photography and the Poetics of Exclusion,” constellates Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer’s theories of photography and the accelerated processes of modernization that took place in the Third World during the last decades of the 20th century. Reading photographs in constellation with Benjamin and Kracauer’s theories, it examines how critics and poets re-inscribe cultural products, and elaborates a poetics of exclusion as a tentative discourse on the utopian potential of the photographic image.