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

许多当代诗歌都充满了对自然世界的描述，或者以自然世界的描述为结构，这种描述的冲动代表了评论家乔安娜·斯托纳克（Joanna Stalnaker）尝试性地称之为当代写作新“描述时代”的代表。在当代诗歌的背景下，我的博士项目转向了这些新的描述倾向。在文学研究中，描写作为一种文本现象正在被重新评估：有人呼吁“描写转向”，评论家希瑟·洛夫（Heather Love）在认识到描写在文学研究中的“名声不佳”的同时，甚至提出将其作为文学批评方法。然而，在描述理论作为语言实践发生之前，描述就已经被提出作为一种批判模型。这导致了描述在研究模型的概念应用中的一些严重问题。但无论是否进行“描述性阅读”，评论家们现在确实在寻找描述：例如朵拉·张（Dora Zhang）在2020年的《奇怪的肖像》（Strange Likeness）中，“为描述而阅读”，以打破对现代主义小说风格和形式的理解。但评论家蒂姆·迪恩指责那些新近对描写感兴趣的人是“体裁盲目性”，他们只关注散文，而忽视了诗歌和诗学。这种忽视标志着学术：如果描述是从理论上接近的，或者作为研究的中心对象，那么它往往是在基于散文的语境中进行的。迪恩指出，只有威拉德·斯皮格曼（Willard Spiegelman）在2005年出版的《诗人如何看待世界》（How Poets See the World）这一学术批评著作明确地考察了近期诗歌的描述。诗歌的描述性值得更多的批判性关注，关于描述对当代写作的重要性的问题也是如此。我的项目将表明，这是如此，因为描述保证了对本世纪特定语言的理解，这是最近的批评所忽视的。现在有这么多诗人需要描述这个世界，这表明，20世纪否认语言有能力指代它之外的物质世界的理论，已经不一定站住脚了。诗人哈丽特·塔洛（Harriet Tarlo）声称，本世纪的一些环境或生态诗歌“旨在创造一种真正的……现实本身的反映”；诗歌可能会“反映现实”，这表明当代诗人正在使用一种与许多评论家不同的语言模式。在过去的五年里，我们看到了许多关于当代诗歌及其文本与物质世界的联系的报道。这些作品都不是为了描述而读的，所以当代诗歌描述中的语言实践哲学没有被注意到。本项目将分析的诗歌是在过去十年出版的。它是由来自不同国家和社会背景的诗人用英语写的。它将考察像瓦尼·卡皮尔迪奥、马克·多蒂、朱莉安娜·斯帕尔和杰森·艾伦·派桑特这样的诗人，他们出版了以描写为主的诗集。像Blackbox Manifold这样的文学期刊和杂志也将发挥作用，像《倾斜的地面》这样的选集或《桂冠》这样的奖项也将发挥作用。这个描写新时代的诗歌是多样的、广泛的、激增的；该项目将围绕主题进行组织，并将重点放在描述的自然现象上——比如海洋或树木——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.