英文摘要 |
This article brings into a dynamic relationship and extends three recent critical approaches to the American poet John Ashbery—approaches which may be termed ethical, historical-materialist, and book-centered. It does so through an intertextual reading of a particular poetry volume, And the Stars Were Shining (1994), from a so far insufficiently examined later phase of Ashbery’s career. My analysis of this book begins by establishing HIV/AIDS as a discreetly revealed cultural and political theme within the volume. It moves on to consider the manner in which Ashbery’s book opposes fatalistic and denigrating depictions of homosexual death with a version of what the philosopher Gabriele Taylor calls the constructive negative “emotions of self-assessment from the point of view of being an agent in the world.” After a short section linking Ashbery’s moral interrogation with a form of survivor’s guilt found in W. H. Auden, the final part of the article provides a close textual analysis of several sections of the book’s long title poem. Drawing on Ashbery’s dealings with his European forbear, Arthur Rimbaud—more specifically, the latter’s Illuminations, as historicized by Fredric Jameson—this section demonstrates the way in which the moral stance toward the world inaugurated at the scene of the HIV/AIDS disaster contributes to Ashbery’s reimagining of bourgeois responsibilities in a time of global harm. The argument provides a different perspective from Christopher Nealon’s view of the 1970s Ashbery as a poet turning arbitrarily away from spectacles of accumulation and disaster. I argue that Ashbery’s 1994 work borrows the Rimbaldian image of “le bonheur” (representing a paradoxical bourgeois condition of calm and instability) to challenge himself and his reader in their intimate historical relation to a culture of deferral and consumption. In this way, the article augments evaluations of Ashbery, notably Aidan Wasley’s, emphasizing the morally serious and political aspect in his poetry. |