Presenter(s): Tucker Engle − English
Faculty Mentor(s): Devin Fitzpatrick
Oral Session 2CS
Research Area: Humanities
The modern poetry of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens evokes the postmodern idea of blurring the subject/object dichotomy. Their poetry brings to the forefront the cruciality of the environment (and its individual artifacts) to the formation of an image, an experience, and the self. Key to this project is that third component: how the natural world and distinct components of that world play a role in the construction of selfhood. Utilizing Heidegger’s notions of reflection and poiesis, along with modern environmentalism, I take an ecophenomenologist approach to navigate the relationship between the individual and the environment. My project aims to demonstrate how the juncture of the two disciplines of phenomenology and ecology points to self formation existing as a process inextricable from the environment in which it occurs, then show how this phenomenon works in the poetry of Stevens and Williams.