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Twentieth century North American serial poetic form & ecological thinking

This thesis develops a reflexive methodology to read four North American long form poetic projects: Lorine Niedecker's North Central; Charles Olson's Maximus Poems; Robin Blaser's The Holy Forest; and Susan Howe's Souls of the Labadie Tract. The methodology, 'ecoseriality,' provides a way of reading serial structures in the 'web of life' (Jason W. More). Ecoseriality emerges through two research threads: ecological thinking (Lorraine Code, Dianne Chisholm), an interdisciplinary approach to ecological methodologies, and seriality, an extension of serial poetic form into an interdisciplinary understanding of serial qualities. The project's ecological thinking comprises a recombinant methodology primarily adapted from Moore's theories and methods for reading capitalism in the web of life, a number of philosophical approaches and concepts from Gilles Deleuze and Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, and Fredric Jameson's cognitive mapping. The project's seriality begins with Joseph M. Conte's typology of serial poetic form, Unending Design: the Forms of Postmodern Poetry, reading serial structures across genres and disciplines to refresh understanding of serial poetry and poetics. Ecoseriality develops along three primary, overlapping lines of inquiry: Moore's oikeios, adapted to read competing subjectivities and values brought to bear on relations in the web of life; Jameson's cognitive mapping, adapted into a post-Cartesian strategy for reading the imbrication between matter and meaning; and an examination of how the parts of a series relate to the whole. The project applies these foci to the four case studies, exposing fresh perspectives on the poetry and poetics of each. By reading Howe's 'cannibal cosmology' (Miriam Nichols) through Moore's theories of world-economy and world-ecology, the thesis arrives at an understanding of ecoseriality as an ethical ecological practice within the complex series of relations in the web of life. Ecoseriality thereby emerges as an oikeios for valuing complex relations in the web of life. The analysis concludes with discussion of the cosmological values of the serial poetic projects examined in relation to ecological thinking.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:767108
Date January 2017
CreatorsTtoouli, George
PublisherUniversity of Warwick
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Sourcehttp://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/114480/

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