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Umeå Studies in the Humanities 135
The Engineering of Being
An Ontological Approach to J. H. PrynneBirgitta Johansson |
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Price: SEK 180 + postage.
 beställ! SWEDISH SCIENCE PRESS Box 118 SE-751 04 Uppsala SWEDEN Telefon: +46 (0)18-36 55 66 Fax: +46 (0)18-36 52 77 ISSN 0345-0155 ISBN 91-7191-309-2 |
The English poet J. H. Prynne (b. 1936) is a central representative of a poetic movement which critics and reviewers have respectively called the ‘Cambridge School’, the ‘conductors of chaos’, and a ‘various art’.
The present thesis analyses Prynne’s writings as verbal representations of the dynamics of consciousness and as reflections of the ways in which consciousness adapts to contemporary economic and intellectual conditions. It shows how Prynn’s Late Modernist or Neo-Modernist poetry deals with such concepts as cognition, fragmentation, and stream of consciousness in ‘asyntactic’ and writerly discourse. It discusses ontological principles in Prynne, especially from the point of view of Da-sein, which was developed by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. The analysis includes a discussion of the rôle of the poet from a contemporary perspective. The thesis shows that Prynne introduces new ways of depicting living conditions in poetic discourse, formally, syntactically, and thematically. It discusses how he engineers and updates models for verbalising the Da-sein in contemporary poetry.
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