| This dissertation takes as its starting point Clement Greenberg's claim that the struggle for dominance between poetry and painting constitutes the central dynamic of modernism. Greenberg couches this claim in terms of art forms, but I also consider how the struggle between word and image manifests itself as a struggle between two institutions, the literary academy and the art world, as these institutions become ever more entrenched over the course of the twentieth century. I show, further, how this interartistic struggle reflects the contest between two tendencies at work in the wider social world in the modern era, the trend toward professionalization and the trend toward marketization. Finally, I claim that art's exceptional autonomy relative to other social institutions enables it to portray the clash of the cultures of professionalism and the market in utopian terms, as a struggle to sustain these cultures' respective ideals of disinterestedness and openness. These ideals are in fact sustained in and by the struggle itself. Therefore, the artists best suited to depict this crucial dynamic of modernism and modernity must have a high tolerance for inner conflict, or as I term it, "ambivalence." I find this heightened capacity for ambivalence in this discussion's central figures, the poets Marianne Moore and John Ashbery, and the artist Joseph Cornell. The poets are distinguished by their strong ties to the visual arts and the art world, while the artist has a notably "literary" bent. Each of the three is also in his or her own way sexually anomalous. Thus, in their work, these modernists forge the link between social and artistic ambivalence that gives the struggle between word and image its meaning. |
