Saving place: the rhetoric of landscape in American poetry

Abstract

In recent years, the experience of place has been complicated and transformed by the ever-present architecture and infrastructure of information technology. Servers and clients, routers and TCPIP protocols have taken the place, literally, of physical topographies, flora and fauna, and the autochthonous products that arise from cultures rooted in settled localities. The new place of postmodernism is not, however, one set of components in exchange for another. It is not as though computer applications and the Internet, with its globalizing tendencies, have supplanted human sensibilities regarding the physical environment or notions of home. Rather, conventional concepts of place, tied foremost to physical geography, have been shaped and augmented continuously by human goals, so much so that geographers like Edward Relph and Henri Lefebvre define place almost exclusively as the byproduct of human intentions. If place in the postmodern age is thought of, finally, as a human construct, then the study of place, in both creative and critical frameworks, becomes a consideration of motives and the implicit intentions that structure human communities and lifestyles. This is the premise that has guided both the creative and critical components of my postgraduate research. The creative work reflects specifically on place-making and the inevitable borders of experience that arise as part of human development, while the critical work considers the motives and intentions behind American place sensibility. Part I is devoted to a poetry manuscript in five sections; I also include a collection of prose pieces that serves as a regional instantiation of many themes addressed throughout the poems. Part II offers brief commentaries that focus on the poetics of liminality and on a predominantly American use of the genitive construction. Part III considers the poetry of Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams as primary source documents that reflect an evolving American place sensibility.

Date of Award	2010
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Bangor University
Supervisor	Ian Gregson (Supervisor)