The Role Of Postmodernism In American Literature Analyzing A Few Poems By Elizabeth Bishop

In this Research paper, I have tried to analyze a few poems by Elizabeth Bishop to show how she takes up or takes in shifting identities and subject-positions in a clear dialogue with cultural norms and expectations. I have also sought to chart her poetic trajectory from alienation to alterity to show how she started by refusing to accept the ‘otherness’ about her and her various poetic personae based on such determinants as gender, sexuality, class or age, and ultimately accepted those self-same counts of ‘otherness’ in a never- ending melee with the ‘so-called’ metareality of conundrum and contingency that is provisionally called ‘life’.