"This New Age of Description: Description, Poetry and the Contemporary Practice of Language"

“描述的新时代：描述、诗歌和当代语言实践”

• 批准号: 2711145
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University College London
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2022 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2711145
• 关键词: New; Age; Description; Poetry; Contemporary

Much of contemporary poetry is filled with or structured by descriptions of the natural world, this urge to describe representative of what critic Joanna Stalnaker has tentatively called a new 'age of description' in contemporary writing. It is to these new descriptive tendencies, within the context of contemporary poetry, that my PhD project turns. Description as a textual phenomenon is being re-evaluated in literary studies: there are calls for a 'descriptive turn,' and critic Heather Love - while recognising description's 'poor reputation' in the discipline - has even proposed it as literary-critical method. Description has, however, been proposed as a critical model before engagement with a theory of description as practice of language has taken place. This has led to some serious issues in the conceptual application of description to research models. But whether practicing 'descriptive reading' or not, critics are indeed now looking to description: Dora Zhang's 2020 Strange Likeness, for example, 'read[s] for description' so as to disrupt understandings of style and form in the modernist novel. But critic Tim Dean has accused those newly interested in description of 'genre blindness,' of exclusive focus on prose and neglect of poetry and poetics. That neglect marks scholarship: if description is approached theoretically or as central object of study, it has tended to be within prose-based contexts. Dean points to just one work of academic criticism that explicitly examines description in recent poetry, Willard Spiegelman's 2005 How Poets See the World. Poetry's descriptiveness deserves greater critical attention, as do questions about description's importance to contemporary writing.My project will suggest that it is so because description underwrites an understanding of language specific to this century, something overlooked in recent criticism. The need to describe the world now guiding so many poets suggests that the 20th-century theories that deny language's capacity to refer to a material world beyond it no longer necessarily hold. Poet Harriet Tarlo has claimed that some of the environmentally or ecological poetries of this century 'aim to create a true[...] reflection of reality itself'; that poems might offer a 'reflection of reality' demonstrates that contemporary poets are working with a model of language different to many critics. The past five years has seen numerous accounts of contemporary poetry and its textual engagement with the material world. None of these works 'read for description,' so the practical philosophies of language in contemporary poetry's descriptions go unremarked. The poetry this project will analyse has been published over the past decade. It has been written in English, by a range of poets of differing national and community backgrounds. It will examine individual poets like Vahni Capildeo, Mark Doty, Juliana Spahr and Jason Allen-Paisant, who have published collections dominated by description. Literary journals and magazines like Blackbox Manifold will also play a role, as will anthologies like The Ground Aslant or prizes like The Laurel. The poetry of this new age of description is varied, broad, proliferating; the project will be organised around theme, and will focus on natural phenomena described - the sea or trees, say - as well as on particular locales.

许多当代诗歌都充斥着对自然世界的描述，或由对自然世界的描述构成，这种描述的冲动代表了批评家乔安娜·斯塔尔纳克(Joanna Stalnaker)暂定地称之为当代写作中的一个新的“描述时代”。正是在当代诗歌的背景下，我的博士项目转向了这些新的描述性倾向。作为一种文本现象的描述在文学研究中正在被重新评估：有人呼吁“描述转向”，批评家希瑟·洛夫在承认描述在该学科中的“糟糕声誉”的同时，甚至提出将其作为文学批评方法。然而，在作为语言实践的描述理论出现之前，描述已经被提出作为一种批评模式。这导致了将描述概念应用于研究模型中的一些严重问题。但是，无论是否进行“描述性阅读”，评论家们现在确实在寻找描写：例如，张朵拉2020年的“奇形怪状”，“读[S]作描写”，颠覆了人们对这部现代主义小说风格和形式的理解。但批评家蒂姆·迪恩(Tim Dean)指责那些新近对“体裁盲目”的描述感兴趣的人只专注于散文，而忽视了诗歌和诗学。这种忽视标志着学术：如果从理论上或作为中心研究对象来探讨描述，它往往是在基于散文的背景下进行的。迪恩指出，只有一部学术批评作品明确研究了最近诗歌中的描述，那就是威拉德·斯皮格尔曼2005年的《诗人如何看待世界》。诗歌的描述性值得更多的批判性关注，关于描写对当代写作的重要性的问题也值得更多的批判性关注。我的项目将表明是这样的，因为描述支持对本世纪特定语言的理解，而这一点在最近的批评中被忽视了。如此多的诗人需要描述现在的世界，这表明，20世纪那些否认语言有能力指代物质世界的理论已经不再成立。诗人哈丽特·塔洛声称，本世纪的一些环境或生态诗歌“旨在创造对现实本身的真实反映”；诗歌可能提供“对现实的反映”，这表明当代诗人正在使用一种与许多批评家不同的语言模式。在过去的五年里，人们对当代诗歌及其与物质世界的文本接触进行了大量的描述。这些作品都不是为了描述而阅读，因此当代诗歌描述中的语言实践哲学没有被提及。这个项目将分析的诗歌在过去十年里出版了。这本书是由来自不同国家和社区背景的一系列诗人用英语写的。它将考察Vahni Capildeo、Mark Doty、Juliana Spahr和Jason Allen-Paisant等诗人的个人，他们出版了以描述为主的诗集。文学期刊和像Blackbox Manifold这样的杂志也将发挥作用，像Ground Aslant这样的选集和像The Laurel这样的奖项也会发挥作用。这个描述的新时代的诗歌是多样的、广泛的、不断增长的；该项目将围绕主题组织，并将重点关注所描述的自然现象--比如海洋或树木--以及特定的地点。