Introduction
Introduction
Frank O'Hara's poetry evokes a specific era and location: New York in the 1950s and early 1960s. This is a pre-computer age of typewritten manuscripts, small shops, shoeshines, and lunch hours: it is also an age of gay repression, accelerating consumerism, and race riots. But the poetry dislocates this cityscape into a postmodern landscape that is discontinuous, highly volatile, and constantly changing. This landscape anticipates the world of multinational companies, hypermedia, and polymorphous sexual and racial identities we live in now. This book argues that this location and dislocation of the cityscape creates hyperscapes in the poetry of O'Hara. The hyperscape is a postmodern site characterised by difference: it breaks down unified concepts of text, city, subject, and art, and remoulds them into new textual, subjective, and political spaces. This book theorises the process of disruption and refiguration that constitutes the hyperscape, and celebrates its radicality. This chapter presents an overview of those that follow.
Keywords: Frank O'Hara, New York, poetry, hyperscape, postmodernism
Liverpool Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.