Abstract

This dissertation attempts to develop a comprehensive framework for studying Joseph Brodsky's multifaceted confrontation, in his lyric poetry, of both temporal experience and the possible ontological or linguistic structures of temporality. The central thesis of the work is that Brodsky's notion of time is mobile and plural, rather than fixed and singular. From this emerges a corollary thesis: that the adoption of each distinct temporal model or problematic gives rise to a characteristic type of poem in Brodsky's corpus. The vector from temporal problematic to characteristic poem is named a strategy. Six strategies are elaborated: athanasia, or monument-building; atomization, or the attempt to invest a moment of time with the quality of eternity; povtorenie, or the effects of grounding the human against an inhuman horizon of infinite time; apophasis, or the confrontation of absolute nothingness and the possible recourse to a temporal sublime; keddah, or the radical imaginative adoption of the point of view of time itself on historical and personal events; kataphasis, or the desire to believe in the paradox of an extra-temporal dimension to language. One chapter is devoted to each strategy. ;This study has two aims. Narrowly, the dissertation seeks to specify the much-noted but underexplored way in which Brodsky's ideas about time hold the center of his metaphysics, particularly as these ideas increasingly intersect his ideas about language. Failure to recognize the protean nature of Brodsky's inquiry has led critics to intractability, dismissing paradox as the end of questioning when, in fact, it is often Brodsky's starting point. More broadly, the strategies comprise a consistent framework, so far lacking, for studying time in lyric poetry in general, especially when a poet surpasses consideration of what Georges Poulet calls le temps humain. To this end, the dissertation draws on the work of major philosophers on temporality such as Bergson, Heidegger, Sartre, and Deleuze, in order to rigorously expose the problematic that underwrites each strategy. The study concludes by discussing how Brodsky's poetry suggests a new definition of philosophical poetry, that is, a poetry which is not just topically, but methodologically philosophical