Persephone's Debt: Ecopoetics, the Post-Pastoral, and the Call for New Subjectivities
Abstract
“Persephone’s Debt: Ecopoetics, the Post-Pastoral, and the Call for New Subjectivities” is an interdisciplinary research-creation project. This Doctoral Thesis comprises two parts: a Creative Dissertation and a Scholarly Exegesis.
The Creative Dissertation, entitled Persephone’s Abecedarium: An Alphabet Play comprises an adaptation of the ancient Homeric “Hymn to Demeter” (7th C., BCE), the first written adaptation of the oral myth on record. This manuscript deploys both traditional and experimental poetics to animate my interpretation of the “Hymn” as a model of an ecological cosmology performed through and by poetic devices such as metaphor, and as a literary work imbued with a keen proto-feminist consciousness.
The Scholarly Exegesis elucidates the platforms from which I newly situate considerations of the “Hymn” within the contemporary theoretical disciplines of ecological criticism/ecopoetics, the post-pastoral, feminist poetics, and avant-gardist practice. Moreover, I discuss what I have termed “The Poetics of Childhood,” posited here as an inexhaustible reservoir or toy box for experimentalist poetic practice. I engage and respond to the call sent out by diverse contemporary scholars such as Rosi Braidotti (posthumanism), Michael Christopher (biopolitics) and Val Plumwood (critical ecological feminism) who urge that thinkers within the Humanities can contribute to critical re-conceptualizations of human subjectivity that problematize the destructive tradition of rationalist (Cartesian) subjectivity, particularly in response to ecological crisis.
To dramatize the conceptual formulation of subjectivity as a condition of interconnectedness in both human and non-human spheres, the Creative Dissertation presents the early life of the protagonist Kore re-imagined through a researched lexicon of actual sounds and diction used by English-speaking, and predominantly female infants and children. I attempt to dramatize the shift from infants’ (speculative) experiences of non-differentiation or symbiosis with the mother or caregiver to their early stages of individuation within social and linguistic communities. The lexicon of infant/child speech is employed as a tactic through which to propose new language for the conceptualization of subjectivity as a condition that comprises, paradoxically, both separation and interconnectedness, or in Kore’s words, the life-long struggle to ethically contend with the “We-I.”
Description
Keywords
Literature--Canadian (English)
Citation
Harris, E. (2017). Persephone's Debt: Ecopoetics, the Post-Pastoral, and the Call for New Subjectivities (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/27312