Wallace Stevens` Canonicity and Textuality: American Consciousness of Fictionality

소개글

The critical investigation of Stevens as a modernist American poet is to
understand the nature of the Stevens criticism and that of his poetic practice in
essence. The analytic tools of canonicity and textuality review Stevens`
poetic and linguistic practices within the classical tradition of the modernist
American literature. Stevens` canonicity is inherent in the diverse practices and
appropriation of the major Stevens critics. Stevens` textuality is defined as
the awakened fictionality of the modernist language. There is not yet any
consensus about Stevens` poetry and poetics, but Stevens criticism since the
early twentieth century has been the center of the strong Western American
literary tradition of Humanism from Romanticism to Modernism and to the
present critical perspectives, and there is no doubt that Stevens displays the
American consciousness of fictionality as a great art-formation.

목차

1. Canonicity
2. Textuality
3. Conclusion
4. Abstract
5. Works Cited

본문내용

Stevens` canonicity is examined and exposed in the American Literary scene
as a modernist American canonized poet standing upon the classical and
traditional culture basis. The Western literary tradition attaches rich adjectives
to Stevens―romantic, symbolist, idealistic, modern, postmodern, pragmatic, and
deconstructive, etc., which ironically show his fluctuating status and "canonical
instability"1) within the American literature proper. The classical tradition of
Stevens` poetry is identified as literariness and nobleness. Literariness is the
tradition from Virgil to Eliot and Stevens, which is mythically and naturally
oriented. Nobleness is the tradition from Homer to Arnold and Stevens, which
is characterized by humanist originality and creativity.2) The arbitrary nature of
the Stevens criticism since the early twentieth century reflects the critical
debates on the Western ideas as well classified in the opposites of idealism and
materialism, of humanism and antihumanism, and of formalism and
historicism. It is noteworthy that the current condition of canonicity in Stevens

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