| Frederic Jameson described the literature of the early twentieth century as employing "strategies of inwardness, which set out to reappropriate an alienated universe by transforming it into personal styles and private languages." In Jameson's theory, modernist literature not only responds to a sense of alienation, but is itself alienating and resistant to traditional methods of interpretation. Reading the poetry of this period would seem to bear out such a view.; However, Jameson's account, like most major theories of modernism, does not consider that early twentieth century culture was dominated by forms of comedy. From the platform lecturers to Vaudeville, and from silent film to musicals, stand up, and the television sitcom---not to mention Dadaism, surrealism, and pop art---the comic mode might be said to have defined twentieth century culture. It would make sense, then, that modernist poetry would reveal a certain comic influence, and that its strategies are therefore similar to the strategies of popular comedy. In fact, in many modernist poems, comic elements such as absentmindedness, repetition, mechanization, animalia, juxtaposition of high and low, and wordplay are readily apparent. Indeed, as modernist poems perform textual pratfalls through an increasingly industrial and mechanized age, laughter is often an appropriate response.; This dissertation argues that in order to fully appreciate modernist poetry, one must view it through the lens of comic theory, especially as proposed by Henri Bergson in Laughter (1900), and in the context of contemporaneous works of popular comedy. Comparing the poems of Cummings, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot and John Ashbery to the comedies of Henry Wheeler Shaw, Charlie Chaplin, Groucho Marx, and Jacques Tati--- and considering the numerous biographical connections between these poets and comics---the notion that popular comedy substantially influenced modernist poetry seems quite reasonable. Such a view not only situates modernist poetry in a new way culturally and historically, but tends to render it less opaque, opening it up to a wider audience. |
