A Place For the Genuine: Ben Lerner's Poetics of Liminality

Abstract

Drawing from all his published works, this dissertation will explore the oeuvre of American writer Ben Lerner. The main thread of analysis will be the concept of liminality, of being on the threshold, as it emerges particularly from Lerner’s novels Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), 10:04 (2014) and from the three volumes of verses collected in the book No Art: Poems (2016). Lerner’s poems and prose works will be examined altogether, in the sense, suggested by critic Dean Katz and writer Tao Lin, to read Lerner’s work as a sort of progressing project in which prose and poems have the same importance and are in dialogue one with the other. The blurring of facts and fiction, the opposition of actuality and virtuality – as derived from Allen Grossman’s writings in The Long Schoolroom – will be used as a lens in order to try to understand what Lerner is trying to do with his writing. It seems that this being “between two mirrors,” that of the actual and the virtual, of fiction and facts, of the individual and the community, is something that allows the writer to produce a new, original work of art. Lerner acts as a sort of curator of a museum who puts together different genres and styles from this position of liminality that can be defined, to borrow Marianne Moore’s line from her eponymous and famous poem, “a place for the genuine.”