Underwater Frequencies: Experimental Methods Between Bioacoustics & Contemporary Poetics

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This project will examine the possibilities for producing new, alternative forms of environmental 'knowledge' at the intersections between contemporary poetics and the ecological sciences. It aims to join an emergent critical conversation exploring the role of collaborative praxis between humanists-including humanistic social scientists-and natural scientists, as a way to chart, understand, and disturb reproductions of ecological harm. Specifically, the project will explore the roles of five twentieth and twenty-first century poets based across the UK and North America in providing interdisciplinary material to map these relations. Recent twentieth and twenty-first century poetry ecocriticism has tended along similar lines of response to the Anthropocene and its associated perils. Notable are Farrier's Anthropocene Poetics, Solnick's Poetry and the Anthropocene and Bristow's The Anthropocene Lyric, which variously position contemporary poetry and ecocriticism as agents for providing alternate climate 'imaginaries'. Griffiths' The New Poetics of Climate Change likewise places Modernist formal experiments in conversation with contemporary environmental writing and cultural conceptions around global warming. Despite the obvious merit in such approaches, this thesis will take a different methodological tack. The study will respond to the call for an 'ecocritical praxis' raised by Murphy: a 'genuine dialectic' between theory and method. It will also respond to the editors of Latour and the Humanities, who suggest the necessity for greater attention to the 'attachments and entanglements' between science and humanities research: an idea developed from Latour's much earlier suggestion of 'nature-cultures'. The transdisciplinary critical invitation to 'relearn multiple forms of curiosity' in scholarly work responding to the 'damaged planet' drives this thesis, both in theory and technique. The study is mobilised therefore by a struggle commonly faced by ecocritics: the question of how literary study actively contributes towards facilitating ecological care and remediation. My approach might best be described as a process of entangling methodology with praxis, rather than more customary eco-theoretical applications to textual matter. The project will examine close-reading methods from poetics, particularly those which might be better described as processes of 'close-listening': identifying sonic patterns, verbal kinetics, formal and oral textures. Lines of comparative analysis - and of cross-pollination - will be drawn between these and observational microscopy and microphony techniques, across a series of 'case-studies'. This transdisciplinary methodology will serve to illuminate the critically under-analysed contiguities between these modes of disciplinary analysis. From this position, I would explore how their individual nuances might open up new avenues of thought between supposedly disparate fields. In so doing, the project will probe how overlapping these disciplinary praxes serves to illustrate their shared uneasy relations to the 'extractive' logics of Western research practices. My use of 'extraction', here, refers to both the material extraction of resources, and to a broader politics of knowledge production built on colonial, capitalist, anthropocentric assumptions of access.The poets under study will work to draw these broader disciplinary, political and socio-ecological grammars of extraction into focus.