Emporium

Date of Award

3-2019

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Organizational Unit

College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, English and Literary Arts

First Advisor

Bin Ramke

Keywords

Creative writing, Poetry

Abstract

Emporium is a collection of poems whose speaker reckons herself a traveler on a twenty-first-century “silk route.” This anachronistic route as well as the market scenarios she passes through are pathways for the transnational exchange of commodities, philosophies, and literacies as well as the sites of her immersive attention, critical observation, and speculative thinking. The large-scale spatial dynamics of the route and emporia inform these sensuous-intellectual pursuits, but not to the extent of the microstructures that animate them: silken and archival objects; coins moving from hand to hand; the smell of food and sweat infusing the air. The material conditions of this travel sustain the speaker’s curiosities, shaping them toward an interrogation of the world of objects and money, as well as her own entanglement in such irresistible economies. The composition of this text has relied upon methods of annotation, quotation, and translation in order to produce writing that is unapologetically influenced by the literatures of interest to it while remaining sensitive to the history of the English idioms in which it converses. As well, it has been important to allow seepage from non-literary materials, such as psychiatric reports, advertising, grocery lists, recipe books, and the like; to push at the seams of conventional linguistic practice; and to encourage the baroque folding together of exterior and interior surfaces.

The manuscript of poems is followed by an essay which studies haptic imagery in primarily contemporary, Anglophone poetries. The haptic image is defined as the illusion of representation touching reality made manifest in poetic language, a medium not typically associated with tactile experience. The essay thus pursues the themes of materiality and sense perception that are vital to the poems, elaborating on relevant aspects of intellectual history and poetic practice that have conditioned their formal concerns or which throw them into relief.

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. Permanently suppressed.

Rights Holder

Aditi Machado

Provenance

Received from author

File Format

application/pdf

Language

en

File Size

153 pgs

Discipline

Creative writing

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