Daniel Tiffany
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Professor of English & Comparative Literature, University of Southern California

Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow - Class of Fall 2012

Daniel Tiffany is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He focuses on poetry and poetics, philosophy, the history of literary culture, and critical theory. Tiffany has published translations of works by Sophocles, Georges Bataille, and the Italian poet Cesare Pavese. His critical works include Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound (Harvard University Press, 1995); Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (University of California Press, 2000), named one of the Best Books of 2000 by the Los Angeles Times Book Review; and Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance (University of Chicago Press, 2009), named the Best Book of Poetry Criticism by the senior editor of Poetry magazine. Tiffany’s critical essays on poetry and poetics have appeared in Critical Inquiry, PMLA, Semiotexte, Modernism/Modernity, and numerous other journals. In addition, three volumes of his poetry, which has been awarded the Chicago Review Poetry Prize, have appeared in the last decade. His poems appear in journals including Tin House, Boston Review, and the Paris Review, and he has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Karolyi Foundation, in France, and is a recipient of the Whiting Fellowship.

Project Description

Inventing Cliches: A Geneology of Kitsch and Poetry

At the American Academy, Tiffany continued working on a book that draws upon Baudelaire’s poetic program of “inventing clichés” and Kracauer’s theory of the mass ornament in order to reassess our presumptions about kitsch in material culture and to test modern poetry’s resistance to the values of kitsch. Excavating poetry’s forgotten relationship to the origins of kitsch, he traces the origins of poetic kitsch from the eighteenth-century “genre wars” between poetry and the emergent, bourgeois category of literature, through the Romantic discourse of “imposture” (involving forgeries of poetic texts), to the Warholian equation of avant-garde and kitsch (contesting Clement Greenberg’s famous opposition of the two categories). Tiffany’s book examines a variety of neglected eighteenth century genres, including ballad imitations, gothic verse, pet epitaphs, and poetic melodramas. Assessing the relation between the immobility of the cliché – a means of arresting poetry – and the possibility of a progressive politics that defies the tenets of modernism will be one of the principal theoretical tasks at hand in reassessing the concept of kitsch. What is at stake in a study of poetic kitsch is the decay of the poem’s aura of originality, which would allow poetry to become – via the traits of its reproducibility – the impersonal expression of millions of souls: a mass ornament.

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