School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemSpectres of Modernism: authorship, reception and intention in Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke’s spectra hoax( 2017)This thesis draws from a range of primary materials relating to the Spectric School, a hoax poetry movement concocted in 1916 by poets Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke, to reconcile the movement’s relationship to the backdrop of modernist print culture. Specifically, it argues that Bynner and Ficke exploited a breakdown of discourses surrounding modernist conceptions of authorship, identity, and intention in their construction of the hoax movement. Additionally, this thesis considers the hoax alongside contemporary appraisals of the movement, and argues that the hoaxers’ subversion of what it meant to be an author exposes a growing disjunction during the modernist period between a culture of reviewing and modernist conceptions of authorship. Finally, this thesis considers Bynner and Ficke’s use of a hoax movement as a medium to further their poetic aims and avers that the hoaxers’ retrospective recasting of their motives alongside the development of the hoax complicate current critical valuations of the movement. Through considering Bynner and Ficke’s recasting of poetic intention, I challenge readings of the hoax that interpret it as having had a clear didactic purpose in parodying modernist poetry, and instead argue that the Spectra Hoax serves as an interface of meanings that complicates attempts to inscribe clear notions of authenticity, authorship and intentionality onto it.