Abstract

This thesis examines John Berryman’s poetry of loss together with four different theoretical perspectives. It is the purpose of the study to involve Berryman’s poetry and critical theory in a dialogue which attempts to break down the hierarchy that positions theory as the subject and literature or poetry as the object of study. Instead, by focusing on the otherness of each discourse, that is, what could be called the unconscious of Berryman’s poetry of loss and the language of theory, poetry and theory can be seen to presuppose and mutually imply each other. Those of Berryman’s poems mainly analyzed in the thesis, and which could be called his poetry of loss are “The Ball Poem,” Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, and The Dream Songs. The four theoretical perspectives consist of Martin Heidegger’s thinking concerning the word and concept departure, David S. Reynolds’s notion of the subversive in the American Renaissance, Nicolas Abraham’s psychoanalytical concept anasemia, and Maurice Blanchot’s theory of death and poetry in his book The Space of Literature. The theoretical base of the thesis is developed primarily from Shoshana Felman’s “To open the question,” an editorial introduction to a special issue of Yale French Studies entitled Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading: Otherwise and Timothy Clark’s study Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot.