Metacognitive poetics: Modernist reflections on the performance of thinking

This dissertation demonstrates how modernist poets dramatize the dynamic, complex mental dispositions and sensibilities necessary for readers to comprehend the notorious difficultly of modernist literature and handle the maelstrom of modernity. Beginning with, perhaps, the most philosophically overt poet to write in the twentieth century, chapter one demonstrates how Wallace Stevens dramatizes human cognition as a musical, tense, and sensuous experience. Chapter two extends these themes of Stevnesian cognition by examining the implications of where Stevens locates his thinking. Chapter three focuses on the ways in which female poets Sara Teasdale and Mina Loy dramatize human cognition as an embodied experience and, consequently, help subvert the oppressive legacy of Cartesian dualism. Chapter four returns to Stevens, and pairs his work with T.S. Eliot, to examine the way silence shapes their understanding of thinking. These chapters demonstrate the ways in which modernist poetry enables readers to achieve the cognitive temperaments necessary to most productively engage modernist literate and navigate modernity.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2018

Author dc:creator

• Penn, Darren

Contributors dc:contributor

• Newcomb, Tim
• Nelson, Cary
• Mahaffey, Vicki
• Blake, Nancy

• Poetry
• Modernism
• Poetics
• Modernist
• Modernist poetry
• Modernist literature
• Wallace Stevens
• Mina Loy
• Sara Teasdale
• T.S. Eliot
• Maritime
• Oceanic
• Silence
• Music

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2017 Darren Penn

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/99500

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/99500