부산대학교 도서관

This dissertation locates in the work of twentieth-century North American poet Elizabeth Bishop a collision between questions of propriety and questions of travel that emerge from the poet's unintended exile in Brazil. Drawing on a much more comparative, intertextual archive of Brazilian and travel literature than existing Bishop scholarship, I explore how the poet's experience of traveling to Brazil and residing there for nearly two decades, from 1951 to 1971, produces the disorienting effect of the 'contact zone,' as Mary Louise Pratt characterizes these spaces of cross-cultural, cross-temporal negotiation. These contact zones arise in Bishop's work as not only geographical-cultural spaces, but also as lyric and linguistic sites of contestation between norms. I argue that the key tension that inflects Bishop's writing is one between a poetics of 'proper' restraint and formal control versus a poetics of exposure marked as 'improperly disproportionate.' This dialectic also marks the ways she judges Brazilian landscapes and expression as improper in their excess and overstatement. Citation reproduced with permission of ProQuest LLC. Abridged abstract reproduced with permission of ProQuest LLC. Full text available at URL below.