Underwater Frequencies: Experimental Methods Between Bioacoustics & Contemporary Poetics

这个项目将考察在当代诗学和生态科学的交叉点上产生新的、替代形式的环境‘知识’的可能性。它的目的是加入一个紧急的批判性对话，探索人文主义者-包括人文主义社会科学家-和自然科学家之间的合作实践的作用，作为一种绘制、理解和干扰生态危害再现的方式。具体地说，该项目将探索英国和北美五位二十世纪和二十一世纪诗人在提供跨学科材料绘制这些关系方面的作用。最近二十世纪和二十一世纪的诗歌生态批评沿着类似的路线对人类世及其相关的危险做出了回应。值得注意的是法里尔的《人类世诗学》、索尔尼克的《诗歌与人类世》和布里斯托的《人类世抒情》，它们以不同的方式将当代诗歌和生态批评定位为提供另一种气候‘想象’的媒介。格里菲斯的《气候变化的新诗学》同样将现代主义的正式实验与当代环境写作和围绕全球变暖的文化概念进行了对话。尽管这些方法有明显的优点，但这篇论文将采取不同的方法。这项研究将响应墨菲提出的“生态批判实践”的呼声：理论和方法之间的“真正辩证”。它还将回应《拉图尔》和《人文科学》的编辑，他们建议有必要更多地关注科学和人文研究之间的‘依恋和纠缠’：这一想法是从拉图尔更早提出的‘自然-文化’的建议发展而来的。跨学科的批判性邀请在学术工作中“重新学习多种形式的好奇心”，以回应“被破坏的星球”，这在理论和技术上都推动了这一论题。因此，这项研究被生态批评学共同面临的一场斗争所动员：文学研究如何积极促进生态关怀和补救的问题。我的方法可能最好被描述为一个方法论与实践纠缠的过程，而不是更多地将生态理论应用于文本问题。该项目将研究诗学中的近距离阅读方法，特别是那些被更好地描述为“近距离倾听”的方法：识别声音模式、言语动力学、正式和口头质地。我们将通过一系列的“案例研究”，在这些技术与观测显微镜和微音学技术之间划出比较分析和异花授粉的界线。这种跨学科的方法将有助于阐明这些学科分析模式之间存在的严重不足的连贯性。从这个立场出发，我将探索它们各自的细微差别如何在本应完全不同的领域之间开辟新的思维途径。在这样做的过程中，该项目将探索这些学科实践的重叠如何有助于说明它们与西方研究实践的“提取”逻辑之间的共同不安关系。我在这里使用的“提取”，既指资源的物质提取，也指建立在殖民、资本主义和以人类为中心的获取假设基础上的更广泛的知识生产政治。正在研究的诗人将努力使这些更广泛的提取的学科、政治和社会生态语法成为焦点。

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.