People
ProfessorsJennifer Ashton |
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601 South Morgan Street (MC 162) |
Associate Professor |
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American literature |
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Jennifer Ashton's research interests center on twentieth-century American poetry and literary theory, particularly on the relationship between modernism and postmodernism and the legacies of the New Criticism in poststructuralism, posthistoricism, and literary applications of psychology and cognitive theory. These interests are the focus of a recently published book, From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the 20th Century (Cambridge University Press, 2006), which argues that the poetic and
theoretical commitment to indeterminacy (to the text with many meanings) is in fact a commitment to imagining the text as an object of experience (a text with no meanings), and is thus not a rejection of, but a powerfully literalized return to, the New- Critical ideal of the poem that "must not mean but be." Professor Ashton is currently at work on a new project examining how (and why) in the
discourse surrounding lyric poetry sincerity has undergone a powerful transformation from a psychological to a distinctively formal category of interpretation.
PUBLICATIONS
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From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century |
