| A Poetics of the Blank examines important works of nineteenth-century American literature by Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar A. Poe, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson that rely on the term "blank" or the metaphor of "blankness." Critical study of this "poetics of the blank"---a practice of writing which depends upon narrative gaps, baffling silences, ineffable symbols, or irreconcilable ironies---entails recognizing various rhetorical strategies for utilizing ambiguity. The thesis employs, primarily, a critical approach using the rhetorical theory of Kenneth Burke and the pragmatic philosophy of Richard Rorty.;The first chapter of the dissertation describes the genesis of Irving's poetics of blankness beginning with his Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle . Irving seized upon the idea of a gap in time or historical blank when creating his first literary persona in post-Revolutionary America, and he experimented further with his ideas of temporal ruptures in his first major work A History of New York before perfecting, in The Sketch Book, the use of the blank as a trope in the sleep of "Rip Van Winkle" and the spectral horseman of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.";Chapter two focuses on Hawthorne's Irving-influenced story "Wakefield" as well as "Young Goodman Brown" and "The Minister's Black Veil." By stepping outside of the contexts of their lives, Hawthorne's protagonists enact dramas of ambiguity in tales the writer himself described as "blank pages." The characters' deliberate experimentation with blankness is echoed in the next chapter's study of Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and Melville's Moby-Dick. Pym's unreliability as a narrator and as an interpreter of the mysterious whiteness at the novel's end precedes Captain Ahab's own struggle with his own white wall or blank---the white whale.;The critique of Ahab's romantic tragedy, his becoming "a blankness" in Melville's words, is followed by a final chapter on several of Dickinson's lyrics that depend on the term, and connotations of, "blank." The multiple subjectivities in Dickinson's lyrics perceive a "Blank - and steady Wilderness" and help the reader to fit her vision to perceive, in turn, the "Chips of Blank" in her own eyes. |
