Presenter(s): Tucker Engle—English
Faculty Mentor(s): Forest Pyle
Session 1: Oh, the Humanities!
My project performs a comparative and analytical study of the romantic poetry of the 19th century, in particular that of Percy Bysse Shelley, with contemporary literature and digital texts of today . Examples of contemporary texts my project will examine are the 2018 film Eighth Grade (dir . Bo Burnham), the 2017 poetry book Nature Poem by Tommy Pico, and Douglas Rushkoff’s 2013 work Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, among others . I bring the cultural and literary criticism of the 20th century in as an intermediary between these two distinct literary eras and traditions . The project focuses on the work of the critical work of theorists such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Giles Deleuze, and Fredric Jameson to accomplish this end . Each of these moving parts is strung together by Timothy Morton’s concept of Hyperobjects and ecological thinking . My work shows how the internet and technologies which produce culture today have created manifested as Hyperobjects which greatly occupy the artistic bandwidth of the modern subject . The relationship with self and culture experienced by poets in the romantic period has erupted to exist everywhere in the Internet age . Through building on the work of the 20th century cultural theorists and Shelley’s poetry, I will begin to piece together what this all means for the 21st century reader and critic .