Humor and Ambiguity in Poetry: The Case of Emily Dickinson
Humor and Ambiguity in Poetry: The Case of Emily Dickinson Eleanore Forbes Lambert, PhDDirector: Virgil Nemoianu, PhDThis dissertation explores similarities between humor and ambiguity in poetry. While there are many books and articles on humor in the work of individual poets, there are no full-length projects on the role of humor in poetry more generally. To develop such a theory, this study builds on the small handful of broader treatments (Smith, Pettersson, Rosenthal, Rourke), uses literary theories of ambiguity as a vocabulary for speaking about humor (Empson), adapts established theories of humor in fiction and drama for a poetic model (Bakhtin, Frye, Propp, Twain), and reveals parallel arguments in poetic theory and philosophy about linguistic play (Bergson, Brooks, Hulme, Kierkegaard, Lewis, Nemoianu, Plato, Vico, Von Balthasar). Following Henri Bergson's description of humor as the interplay of tension and elasticity, we entertain a definition of poetic humor as that which relieves the tension of opposition. As the case study of the dissertation, Emily Dickinson's poetry epitomizes the use of surface bleakness as a foil for humor. The dissertation's individual chapters shed light on these issues through discussions of the following points: a distinction between poetic humor and funniness; detachedness and broadminded vision as mechanisms of humor; William Empson's terms mood, poetic actions, and the reader's correct feeling as tools for analyzing poetic humor; playfulness in Dickinson's manuscripts as explored through the juxtaposition of compression and multiplicity; the role of ambiguity in elucidating the philosophical and spiritual dimensions of poetic humor; and concluding observations on cartoon-like imagery in humorous poetry and on bafflement as a process that includes both humor and ambiguity.
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