| Summary: | 博士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 外國語文學研究所 === 106 === In this study the poetic works of Mark Doty are examined using the theoretical methodology of “palimpsestuous reading” proposed by Sarah Dillon and the concept of “palimtext” by Michael Davidson. Doty’s poems make extensive intertextual and interdisciplinary references to art, music and works of other poets and writers; therefore his works cannot be properly interpreted without investigating the intricate layering. In this dissertation, I try to return to the originary texts and explore how their established meanings can be erased like the previous text of a palimpsest, and then investigate the gaps existing between the various superimposing and superimposed texts. Equally important, I relate the palimpsested poetic texts and analyze the new meanings that Doty re-inscribes for both the originary text and his own poems.
Each chapter focuses on a close reading of one poem with special attention to what Doty himself called “hot links” in his works. The first chapter discusses “Demolition” from My Alexandria and how through the intertextual references made to Oscar Wilde, Robert Lowell, Robert Gould Shaw and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Doty re-accesses the history of the depleting gay community at the height of AIDS epidemic. In the second chapter on “Nocturne in Black and Gold” from Atlantis, I unpack the array of allusions, including the epigraph from Saint Augustine of Hippo, the title from James McNeill Whistler and the references to Keats’s letter and Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and argue how these literary and artistic fragments serve as unguent for healing. Third chapter on “Notebook/To Lucian Freud/On the Veil” from School of the Arts addresses the corporality of the body traumatized by AIDS. As both “Demolition” and “Nocturne in Black and Gold” were written when the then incurable AIDS was ravaging in US, I contextualize the social-cultural meanings of the disease and how they are implicated into Doty’s poems. In the third chapter, I argue that Doty’s poetry published in the post-AIDS era cannot escape the self, which has been traumatized by the modern plague.
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