Abstract EN:

For over a hundred years, because of arbitrary editorial choices, the overwhelming power of what Jauss has called the "horizons d'attente" and the dignified standing of poetry itself, Dickinson has been canonized as a poet who expresses the profoundly tragic. Over and against this canonical vision, i will try to show how, on the contrary, the nature of Dickinson’s poetry is not only fundamentally perverse and comic, but also deeply anchored in its time - these two aspects being in fact intimately linked since the stuff of humor is indissociable from specific times and places. Hence, notwithstanding her reclusive lifestyle, Dickinson actually mocked many facets of nineteenth century America. The Victorian representation of death and paradise, the values of work and progress so central to the time, the civil war, thanksgiving, the Pilgrim Fathers, the conventional nineteenth century hierarchy between poet and reader represent only some of the typical aspects of the contemporary culture Dickinson’s poems and letters ridiculed. Finally, if Dickinson’s destabilizing wit was in the spirit of a specifically American comic tradition, I will show how it also embodied the revolutionary fervor, feminist above all, that characterized America during the nineteenth century.