Lunatic Teacher: A Hermeneutic Exploration of Teaching and Suicide in Poetry and Prose
Date
2023-12-06
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Abstract
This hermeneutic exploration seeks to interpret and understand the author’s ongoing experience as a teacher, observer, and writer through the creation of lyrical poetry and prose. It is a journey through language into poetic understanding—away from the clarity of concrete knowledge and into the fog of questions and creative intuition that rise from the inherent ambiguity of creative language and metaphoric meaning. The primary poetic forms used in this text are glosa, sestina, free verse, and micro essay. The glosa and sestina poems directly and methodically engage with previously existing texts (poetry and prose) by following the patterns and rules of said forms. The free verse poems engage directly with these texts by weaving lines, phrases, and sentences among the freely written new lines in no predetermined pattern, and by rules set only during the play of writing. The micro essays serve as meta writings that further the conversation by pulling back and analysing the language processes used in all the other writings. They are the planks of reason used to build a footpath along which we might traverse the otherwise soggy substance of the poems. All of the writing is infused with the experiences of teaching and living of the author of this text. The reader is asked to read amphibiously, living equally in the liquid language of poetry and the somewhat solid ground of the prose. This thesis strives towards eccentric, expansive, and paradoxical understandings of teaching, learning, language, and lunacy.
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poetry, hermeneutics, teaching, suicide, creative writing, teacher wellness, sestina, glosa, T. S. Eliot, Patrick Lane, Albert Camus, Stevie Smith, English language arts, Shakespeare, Hamlet, a/r/tography, poetic inquiry, Hans Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, William Butler Yeats
Citation
Perry, T. B. (2023). Lunatic teacher: a hermeneutic exploration of teaching and suicide in poetry and prose (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.