Randall Jarrell, canonicity, multiplicity, travesty : the apocalyptic margins of the still, human center

Abstract

The thesis finds that Randall Jarrell's writing fails to meet the expectations of the American canon and travesties the aesthetic conventions of American literary modernism. It is often kitsch or melodramatic, it can be unbearably twee, as a novelist he failed to produce narrative, and as a poet he occasionally loses all sense of form or appropriate duration. Crucially and controversially, this analysis is read here as signifying Jarrell's success as a writer, as the flaunting of such conventions was his aim. Contrary to his reputation as a critic who stood for conservatively arch-modemist and high-canonist values, this thesis discovers a calculating maverick who made aesthetic choices rather than errors in judgement, even when it meant producing the kind of vulgar texts that he was supposed to hold in such scorn. Jarrell was committed to travesty and obsessed imaginatively with failure, even if it meant catastrophe for his canonical reception as a writer rather than a gifted and eloquent reader of Whitman and Frost.