현대 미국 아방가르드 시학에 대한 비판적 고찰

Abstract

This paper provides a critical examination of the twentieth-century poetic avant-garde, a broadly radical and innovative aesthetic practice that constitutes an important contribution to the development of modern and contemporary American poetry. This study was motivated by the recognition that Conceptual poetry, a contemporary culmination of appropriation art, not so much embodies a provocative and progressive subversion of the hegemonic norms and values as represents artistic mediocrity and moral laxity of increasingly reified and alienated avant-garde poetics. Rooted in experimental modernism of the early twentieth century and the New American Poetry of the 1950s/60s, American avant-garde poetry has developed a distinct poetic lineage, offering a powerful corrective to the privileged lyric tradition and simultaneously serving as a critique of culture and ideology. However, I argue that twentieth-century avant-garde poetics has also exposed limits and pitfalls in its formation and promotion of the collectively prescribed aesthetic vision as well as inevitable blind spots and biases particularly concerning the issues of gender and race. Finally, this paper aims at suggesting the need to move beyond the reductive dichotomies between hegemony/revolution, conformity/oppositionality, and tradition/experimentation that have been normalized by the radical rhetoric of the avant-garde and to find “what will suffice,” to borrow Wallace Stevens’ words, in the new era marked by unprecedented existential challenges.