Green men, plant brains and nervetrees : Ronald Johnson's object-oriented poetics of embodied mind
department or school: Arts, Faculty of
department or school: English, Department of
data provider: DSpace
degree campus: UBCV
creator: L'Abbé, Sonnet Lynn
issued: 2013-08-23T15:09:35Z
issued: 2013
related degree: Doctor of Philosophy - PhD
degree grantor: University of British Columbia
description: This dissertation is an ecocritical single-author study of the work of the American modernist poet Ronald Johnson (1935-1998), who sustained in his work a career-long inquiry into the relationship of poetry and Nature, and into the limits of representing subjective perception in language. Johnson understood poetry as a process by which "nature looks at itself" that took, as its starting point, the biological embeddedness of the human subject in his or her own environment. The human mind, for Johnson, was the telos of Nature’s evolutionary change and the chief instrument of this looking. When Johnson's Nature, not dualistically differentiated from human subjectivity, “looks at itself” through his poetry, the boundaries of epistemological and identity categories of subject and object become indistinct, a representational challenge that Johnson — who was not at all interested in disrupting, but only discovering his own model for, “the” Natural order — often negotiates through the use of plant tropes and metaphors. The figure of the plant shows up in Johnson's work where the poet, acting as an idealized Western human self, reaches to identify beyond the boundary of species identity, to greenly and leafily represent a kind of alterity that is un-othered by its observer. This dissertation proposes that Johnson's formally innovative poetry, which plays within the genre tradition of nature writing, poses figuratively what philosopher and critical plant studies pioneer Michael Marder argues: that the figure of the plant, which grows "in-between classical metaphysical categories of the thing, the animal, and the human" stands as the potential "prototype of a post-metaphysical being" (“Vegetal” 487) More importantly, Johnson’s work suggests that the mindbody, particularly the human nervous system, as an object-that-knows, confounds Western metaphysics in the same way. Johnson’s “nervetree” figure, I argue, moves us closer to visualizing where the human object, as embodied, eco…
aggregated CHO: https://circle.library.ubc.ca/rest/handle/2429/44877
note: ???????? GREEN MEN, PLANT BRAINS AND NERVETREES: RONALD JOHNSON?S OBJECT-ORIENTED POETICS OF EMBODIED MIND ??? by ??? SONNET LYNN L?ABB? ?????????? A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF ? DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ? in ???? THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (English) ??? THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) ??? August 2013 ???? ? Sonnet Lynn L?Abb?, 2013 ii ABSTRACT This dissertation is an ecocritical single-author study of the work of the American modernist poet Ronald Johnson (1935-1998), who sustained in his work a career-long inquiry into the relationship of poetry and Nature, and into the limits of representing subjective perception in language. Johnson understood poetry as a process by which "nature looks at itself" that took, as its starting point, the biological embeddedness of the human subject in his or her own environment. The human mind, for Johnson, was the telos of Nature?s evolutionary change and the chief instrument of this looking. When Johnson's Nature, not dualistically differentiated from human subjectivity, ?looks at itself? through his poetry, the boundaries of epistemological and identity categories of subject and object become indistinct, a representational challenge that Johnson ? who was not at all interested in disrupting, but only discovering his own model for, ?the? Natural order ? often negotiates through the use of plant tropes and metaphors. The figure of the plant shows up in Johnson's work where the poet, acting as an idealized Western human self, reaches to identify beyond the boundary of species identity, to greenly and leafily represent a kind of alterity that is un-othered by its observer. This dissertation proposes that Johnson's formally innovative poetry, which plays within the genre tradition of nature writing, poses figuratively what philosopher and critical plant studies pioneer Michael Marder argues: that the figure of the plant, which grows "in-between classic…
has type: Thesis/Dissertation
date issued: 2013-11
is shown at: 10.14288/1.0074128
language: eng
degree discipline: English
provider: Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
publisher: University of British Columbia
rights: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada
rights URI: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/
scholar level: Graduate
type: Text
identifier URI: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/44877