Abstract
This work is concerned with the senses of contemporary poetry and what I'm calling phenomenography, which is a critical methodology based on philosophical phenomenology but centered on textuality and not dependent on phenomenology's tendency towards universalization of privileged viewpoints. Phenomenography considers the relationship between text and perceptual phenomena, whether as a hermeneutics, as a practice of reading, textual formalism, a form of expression, or the connections between life and text. Whereas phenomenological readings of literature may be normative with respect to what matters in terms of the constitution of identity or structure of consciousness, or else sometimes base readings with tendencies towards psychologisms or ad hominem interpretations of the literary, phenomenography concerns itself with the language being used as an open and non-hierarchical process of sense-determination. The four chapters of the dissertation chart a trajectory of issues in contemporary poetics. Chapter 1 deals with language poetry and examines the importance of the situation in finding meaning in innovative linguistic forms which may not always appear to be concerned with the conveying of sense. I argue that our language use often depends on our understanding of the situations in which we find ourselves, and we can use this differential situational awareness to help navigate the often abstract formalism of language poetry. Chapter 2 invokes what I call a "synthetic ontology" of the Work to better discuss the literary compositions of translators, ranging from straightforward translations to formally constrained and innovative translations. Considering the Work as something bound to both original author and translator allows us to understand the translation as a composition and, at times, as crafted interpretation or even criticism. Chapter 3 ventures through Rob Halpern's transgressive political-erotic poetics to discuss and develop the nuances of a kind of impossible sympathy within contemporary globalized capitalism that has rendered links in the sympathetic chain unreachable. Chapter 4 reads Rickey Laurentiis' Boy with Thorns through the lens of theoretical perspectives on strangeness that risks alienation while also staking out the potential of agency within a racist and violent society.