School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemThe menstrual imaginary and 'The Butcher's Daughter'( 2016)A number of important writers and artists focus on the once taboo subject of menstruation in their work, drawing attention to the topic of women’s bleeding and the female cycle. A menstrual imaginary is a latent poetic source of inspiration in women writers and artists, an imaginary domain outside of language, which is drawn on through symbolism, particularly through references to blood, to eruptions of blood, and women’s cycles, as well as all procreative functions. Whilst, Julia Kristeva theorises menstruation on the side of the abject, my work alternatively seeks to rescue women’s menstruation from the patriarchal abject. Moreover, I draw on the writings of Hélène Cixous who argues for the importance of a voice of ‘milk and blood,’ although it is mostly at a subterranean level that we can find evidence for a menstrual narrative running through her work. I use Cixous as a springboard for exploring the concept of a feminine writing in red ink, in direct contrast to her ‘white ink,’ as well as consider the domain of woman’s ‘volcanic unconscious,’ in relation to the creation of a menstrual imaginary. Furthermore, I read important classical texts such as the stories of Persephone and Demeter, Medusa, Oedipus and the Sphinx, and the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood, against-the-grain for a menstrual imaginary. I also survey a number of poets and writers who explicitly adopt menstrual imagery and blood to depict a menstrual imaginary. Finally, I write my own menstrual imaginary in the form of a poetry manuscript.
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ItemThe archaic shudder?: toward a poetics of the sublime( 2009)This cross-disciplinary investigation moves toward that sub-genre in aesthetics, the theory of creativity. After introducing my study with a re-reading of Heidegger’s essay, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, I appropriate into a collection of poems ideas from Plato, Kant, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and a range of post-philosophical theorists. Next, after Murmur and Afterclap, in the critical section of my investigation I formulate a poetics of the sublime, and move closer to my own specialist term, poeticognosis. With this term, I set out to designate a particular style of apprehending-into-language, after wonder, as it pertains (I argue) to creative producers. Section One - Murmur and Afterclap: The poetry submitted here does not arise simply out of a theoretical position or theoretical concerns, and it is not in any sense exemplary or programmatic. It is, however, related in complex ways to the issues raised later in the critical section of my investigation, and indeed has provoked necessitated my theoretical discussion (rather than the other way around). The poems contained in this section of my investigation draw from the many documents I have encountered in my attempt to shape a discourse with philosophy. In his essay, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, Kant exhorts his fellow philosophers to ‘(h)ave courage to use your own understanding!’ I have followed Kant’s advice here, but not as a philosopher might. The understanding I use in Murmur and Afterclap is a style of intuitive and extra-logical responsiveness. Undertaking my own archaic shuddering, I have attempted to maintain a reflective gaze (I use the verb in both mimetic and meditative senses). The poems that result have unfolded, after wonder, as moments of defamiliarising epiphany. Section Two - The Archaic Shudder? Toward a poetics of the sublime: I conduct this critical section of my investigation in two parts. In the first, ‘Dialectics and Logic: two modes of the genre “philosophy”’, I address the materiality of language as my most pressing concern. I take up a discussion of theoria and gnosis in order to locate genre difference, and discern the sublime as an extra-logical style of apprehending (and agree with Kant, that the apprehensions of poets may well be sublime). Next, I recuperate Heidegger’s interpretation of techné as a mode of know-how that separates both phenomenology (apprehending, seeing, knowing) and approaches to language. I speculate the sublime is an active component in creative phenomenologies at work, as thinkers apprehend-into-language, into genre, after wonder. In part two, ‘Toward Poeticognosis? Re-thinking the sublime’, I read the poetries of Carson and Hass against pseudo-Longinus’ textual and Burke’s affective sublime. Reading across this range of poetries and philosophies, my investigation into imaginative processes speculates on language, genre, phenomenologies, and on the ‘transcendental power of imagination’ (Kant). Is there any difference between thinking poets and poetic thinkers? I come to valorise a sublime process – extra-logical, gnostic, and more-than-rational – as integral to that difference. I conclude this critical section of my investigation with an appraisal of Rilke’s ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’, which I take as a historicising moment in poetic wondering. At this point, I reify my own term, poeticognosis, as a style of responsiveness to wondering that remains particular to creative production.
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ItemThe act of writing: the art of dreaming & Plague Room( 2010)There are numerous accounts of creative writers claiming to write from a dream-state, but these accounts have never been examined as scientific fact and have instead, to date, been primarily accepted or dismissed as nothing more than anecdote. This paper is the result of a wide ranging survey of neuro and cognitive science as well as applied psychology, and it examines how findings in these fields support the long held contentions of the many writers who believe that the mind writing can be more similar to the mind dreaming than it is to normal waking-thought. Beginning with a connectionist account of cognition, I discuss how the same cognitive faculties necessary for thought are also found in dreaming and writing. Understanding how conceptual spaces arise from physical stimuli and how these spaces can then be built into larger units of thought enables an examination of how brain stimulation and constraint leads to varying states of consciousness as represented by a waking-dream continuum. Expanding on these basic principles, Alan Hobson’s AIM theory of dreams is then probed to show how the elements of activation, input and modulation can be tuned to move a subject between states of consciousness. Ultimately, with dreaming and writing both understood in terms of the connectionist mind, and with the knowledge of how the elements of AIM determine a subject’s current state of consciousness, I explore the methods of Gertrude Stein, Jack Kerouac, and Robert Olen Butler to show that their writing practices sufficiently alter those tunings so as to move the mind from a waking-state into a dream-state. Turning from theory to practice, the creative portion of this thesis represents my attempts to incorporate these dream-states into my writing. Borrowing the power of the jewel center from Kerouac, the freedom of automaticity from Stein and the practice of dream-storming from Butler, I used a sustained hypnogogic state to explore potential writing spaces, trying out characters and turns of plot until finally – with the intent of meditation – I began writing and redreaming the story over the many drafts that it took to get the vision to fully coalesce. The result of these endeavors is the novel Plague Room, and it is my hope that it possesses the full strength of a dream-state and that the reader finishes wondering if what they’ve experienced was real or if it was mere reverie.