Food Poetics in Modern Poetry: Stevens, Williams, and Lee
Date Issued
2014
Date
2014
Author(s)
Dahn, Alvin
Abstract
This dissertation aims to provide a theoretical reading of food in modern poetry, particularly in poetic works by Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Li-Young Lee. The distancing-channeling theory applied to the reading of poetry is based mostly on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of intensity and is employed specifically to realize how food objects as poetic devices interpret human experience in modern poetry. Through the aforementioned theory and its application, this dissertation seeks to establish a food poetics. This dissertation is composed of six major sections, with each section forming a chapter, expect for the first section of Review of Key Literatures, which consists of two subsections. The first section begins with the Introduction which leads to the two-part Review of Key Literatures: Food and Poetics. The emphasis of the literature reviews and their length reflects the challenges and complications of founding a new poetics. The first two chapters: “Chapter One: The Given Food against the Constituted Subject” and “Chapter Two: Distancing and Channeling” are the theoretical backbone of this research. While the former asserts an object-oriented critical point of view instead of an anthropocentric one, the latter establishes a system of poetic reading from this point of view supported by this dissertation and the Deleuzean thoughts that influences it. Chapter Three, Four, and Five are the demonstration of how the system of poetic reading facilitates interpretation of disparate and surreal food objects in poetry (with a focus on Stevens), scarce but succinct food objects in poetry (with a focus on Williams), and ethic or exotic food object in poetry (with a focus on Lee). The interpretive system of this research should, as its set purpose, facilitate the understanding of the relations between food and human beings in a world where objects are more powerful than their human recipients.
Subjects
food poetics
food discourse
intensity
modern poetry
Type
thesis
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