Critical High Camp: The Political Dimension in Ashbery’s A Worldly Country

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Title:	Critical High Camp: The Political Dimension in Ashbery’s A Worldly Country
Other Titles:	批判性坎普：約翰．阿什伯里的《世俗的國度》政治維度
Authors:	Brink, Dean
Contributors:	淡江大學英文學系
Keywords:	John Ashbery;camp;ideology;discursive vectors;Bakhtinian dialogism;約翰．阿什伯里;坎普;意識形態;話語載體;巴赫金的對話主義
Date:	2011-02
Issue Date:	2011-09-12 02:11:17 (UTC+8)
Publisher:	武漢市：華中師範大學
Abstract:	This essay argues that John Ashbery’s A Worldly Country (2007), both in terms of its title and its poems, has brought the political dimension, often intimated in the tone of his earlier poems satirizing America (“Soonest Mended” and “Sunrise in Suburbia”), into the foreground. Moreover, recognizing this dimension allows criticism to overcome reductive and dismissive readings of Ashbery as simply entertaining — readings which often depend on associating his openly gay sexuality with inconsequential aestheticism. Rather, here it is argued that the campy mode evident in his voice, as it modulates and fuses various intertexts and joins disparate discursive vectors with ties to the social realm, is not simply formal semantic play designed to inhibit closure. Contrary to Susan Sontag’s influential definition of camp as exhibiting an absence of critical social concern, Ashbery takes the camp mode and develops imagery and attitudinal stances that embody a heartfelt critical presence and ultimately intimates a political dimension in his poetry. It is argued that the difficulty in framing this political dimension derives from the hermeneutical focus dominating literary studies: a Saussurean legacy in poststructuralism that focuses, like New Criticism, on referential signification, so as to preserve and regulate bourgeois discursive horizons and conforming consumption. This legacy tends to inhibit us from considering social relations, firstly, in a Bakhtinian sense of reliance on implied others to prepare our critical articulations, and secondly, in a Foucaudian sense of discursive practices that are interactive and relational, often leaving the referenced object about which a discourse emerged tertiary. Similarly, insofar as we allow ourselves to be immersed in consumer societies today, we can see Ashbery’s poetry as sometimes being misunderstood as vapid buffoonery, when it is more often a politely self-deprecating language satirizing American society, especially during these times of imperialist extremes.
Relation:	外國文學研究=Foreign Literature Studies 33(1)，頁71-84
Appears in Collections:	[Graduate Institute & Department of English] Journal Article

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