DALL'EPISTEMOLOGIA ALL'ETICA: PER UNA PO(ETICA) DELLA RELAZIONE FRA SOGGETTO E NATURA NELLA POESIA AMERICANA CONTEMPORANEA

Abstract

American nature poetry has often expressed and explored epistemological and aesthetical issues. This work aims to verify a shift toward ethical concerns in late Twentieth-century nature poetry. I consider the work of three American female poets: Mary Oliver, Louise Gluck and Denise Levertov. In order to appreciate the extent of this ethical shift, each chapter presents a close reading analysis performed within a theoretical frame drawn from Michail Bakhtin’s philosophy and ecocriticism. In their effort to represent the encounter between human and nonhuman entities these poetics assume a phenomenological perspective and subsume the rationalistic and epistemological dichotomy between subject and object into a relation of alterity. This relation revolves around the I-other polarity and constitutes the dynamic and ongoing negotiation of the subject’s identity. Thus, intersubjectivity is translated into lyric expression by several rhetorical strategies and a certain dialogical strive. Oliver, Levertov and Gluck accommodate the traditional lyric form in order to express and represent the ethical repositioning experienced in front of nature. Also, they create three different po(ethics) that explicitly involve the reader in the ethical repositioning they represent. Their work strives for a dialogical notion of both the lyrical subject and the poetic act, and for this reason it challenges the boundaries of lyric monologic expression from within.