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

许多当代诗歌充满了对自然世界的描述，这种描述的冲动代表了批评家乔安娜·斯塔尔纳克（Joanna Stalnaker）暂时称之为当代写作中的新“描述时代”。正是这些新的描述倾向，在当代诗歌的背景下，我的博士项目转向。描述作为一种文本现象正在文学研究中被重新评估：有一种“描述转向”的呼声，批评家石楠洛夫（Heather Love）在认识到描述在这一学科中的“名声不好”的同时，甚至提出将其作为文学批评方法。然而，在与作为语言实践的摹状词理论进行接触之前，摹状词已经被提出作为一种批评模式。这导致了一些严重的问题，在概念上的应用描述的研究模型。但无论是否实行“描述性阅读”，批评家们现在确实在寻找描述：例如，多拉·张的2020年《奇怪的相似》，“为描述而读”，以扰乱对现代主义小说风格和形式的理解。但评论家蒂姆·迪恩（Tim Dean）指责那些新近对描述感兴趣的人是“类型盲目”，只关注散文，忽视诗歌和诗学。这种忽视标志着奖学金：如果从理论上或作为研究的中心对象来研究描写，它往往是在以散文为基础的语境中。迪恩指出，只有一个学术批评的工作，明确审查描述在最近的诗歌，威拉德斯皮格曼的2005年如何诗人看到世界。诗歌的重复性值得更多的批评关注，就像描写对当代写作的重要性一样，我的项目将表明，之所以如此，是因为描写保证了对这个世纪特有的语言的理解，这是最近的批评所忽视的。现在，如此多的诗人需要描述世界，这表明20世纪否认语言能够指代外部物质世界的理论不再一定成立。诗人哈里特塔罗声称，这个世纪的一些环境或生态诗歌的目的是创造一个真正的[.]现实本身的反映“;诗歌可以提供“现实的反映”，这表明当代诗人正在用一种与许多批评家不同的语言模式工作。在过去的五年里，我们看到了许多关于当代诗歌及其与物质世界的文本接触的报道。这些作品都不是“为描写而读”的，所以当代诗歌描写中的语言实践哲学没有得到注意。这个项目将分析的诗歌已经出版了过去十年。它是由不同国家和社区背景的一系列诗人用英语写的。它将研究像Vahni Capildeo，Mark Doty，Juliana Spahr和Jason Allen-Paisant这样的诗人，他们出版了以描述为主的作品集。文学期刊和杂志，如黑盒流形也将发挥作用，因为将选集，如地面倾斜或奖项，如月桂。这个新时代的诗歌描述是多样的，广泛的，增殖;该项目将围绕主题组织，并将集中在描述的自然现象-海洋或树木，说-以及特定的地点。

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.