| In this dissertation, I examine French-American literary and intellectual exchange between 1920 and 2000. I focus on processes of reception and cultural transplantation in order to reveal some of the limits of exchange. By taking a historical approach, I show how and explain why certain texts, literary figures, and literary subcultures were received, used, and inevitably transformed by exchange.; I study four cases of French-American literary reception/introduction involving intersections between poetry and intellectualism. Each of these previously understudied cases speaks to 20th century debates about the intellectual and political importance of poetry. They allow me, therefore, to examine the formation of critical discourses about modern poetry and the role of poetry in society.; The first three chapters treat the ways American poets and critics have turned to French poets as they debate the intellectual value of lyricism and formal experimentation. In the first shaper I argue that, beginning in the 1920s, Paul Valéry's writing initially attracted the attention of American critics eager for a kind of intellectualism that offered an escape from ideology. But as their attitudes toward modernism changed, their appraisal of Valéry as an “exemplary modernist” took on distinctly negative connotations. In chapter 2, I claim that Louis Zukofsky's neglected critical essay from 1933 on Guillaume Apollinaire was a first attempt to validate the intellectual worth of experimental lyric for the American avant-garde. In Le Style Apollinaire, Zukofsky wrote about Apollinaire as an intellectual, scholarly lyric poet, thereby defining a lyricism that eventually represented one of the main poetic modes of the late 20 th century American avant-garde. I extend this theme in chapter 3 by studying John Ashbery's introductions of Raymond Roussel. In them, he argues that the ethical and intellectual importance of Roussel's lyric derives not from its subject matter, but from formal experimentation alone. The last chapter deals with poetry and intellectualism from the opposite perspective. There, I explore the ways two Francophone critics, Marguerite Yourcenar and Louis T. Achille, used analyses of African-American spirituals to put forth models of cultural hybridity that counter ideologically radical thinkers' ideas about racial interaction in the 1950s and 1960s. |
