In the Midst of the Spectacular: Performance, Media, and Criticism in Frank O’Hara

Abstract

This thesis repositions Frank O’Hara as a writer whose sustained engagement with different media forms reveals a neglected chapter in the history of thinking about media. Scholars of O’Hara typically discuss his relationship to media in terms of poetry and painting, while those who do consider his writings on other media—particularly the performing arts—often do so by way of analogy, describing his work as ‘theatrical’, ‘cinematic’, or as emulating the kinaesthetics of dance. This overwhelming focus on the metaphorical affinities between O’Hara’s poetry and the arts has, I argue, ultimately led scholars to overlook the key role that his detailed critical engagement with these mediums played in shaping his aesthetics. In this study, I address this oversight by considering the generative relationship O’Hara fostered between his writing and a host of performance media, arguing that it was these media that enabled him to see past the ‘high-low’ art dichotomy and explore the intersections between traditional and emerging cultural forms. Situating O’Hara between what scholars describe as the first media age and the later age of mediatization, I argue that his writing on performance acts as an intermediary between two opposing conceptions of the arts, reconciling a modernist formalism with a burgeoning multimedia convergence culture. The first of its kind to consider O’Hara’s relationship to a variety of performance contexts, this study uncovers a sense of O’Hara as a writer who sought to reimagine the relationship between these media forms. I begin by arguing that the persistent tendency to use ‘theatricality’ as a metaphor for O’Hara’s lyric self has led critics to miss the centrality of his engagement with actual theatre. Developing a more thoroughly historicized account of his ‘theatricality’, I consider how his early participation in Harvard’s theatre scene, as well as his interest in the medium of opera, actively shaped his understanding of ‘the self’ as being produced through the act of roleplaying. Further expanding this discourse of intermedial exchange, my second chapter challenges the long-standing assumption that O’Hara’s writings on film are little more than a quasi-camp celebration of popular culture. Instead, I argue that film for O’Hara is less an object of naïve enthusiasm or appropriation than a critical interlocutor, one that sheds light on the United States’ cultural, political, and historical formations over time. Finally, in my third chapter, I deepen the engagement with the problem of medium-specificity by considering O’Hara’s role as a poet-critic. Examining his writings on the New York City Ballet choreographer George Balanchine, I argue that O’Hara uses poetry as a critical lens, complicating the formalist rhetoric surrounding Balanchine’s work by opening it up to new imaginative horizons. It is this attention to the relationship between the arts which, I claim, ultimately makes O’Hara a preeminent critic of the mid-century medium.