Gertrude Stein, spatial form, and prose poetry : how Stein uses the linguistic hybridity of prose poetry to present space as process

My project explores how a language-based strand of prose poetry, indebted to the formal experiments of Gertrude Stein, can be used to stage space as a flux of becoming. It investigates the dynamics of this kind of prose poetry through critical reflections on my own creative practice as it has developed out of a close analysis of Stein’s poetic innovations. My poetry engages with the problematic histories and geographies of my own local landscape and so, in this project, I have looked to Stein for poetic strategies to challenge static and exclusionary ways of conceptualising place. I build on the work of scholars Steven Meyer and Linda Voris to argue that it is primarily as a radical empiricist that Stein experiments with the prose poem, turning it into an active textual field within which she can stage spatial relations as processual. I add to Meyer’s and Voris’s findings my own original analysis of how Stein exploits a linguistic hybridity in the prose poem to develop a newly plural ‘deixis’. By offering the reader fresh, dynamic ways to orientate themselves deictically in the text, Stein makes the prose poem into form where experience can be encountered as it emerges from the ‘yet-to-be-determined’, and where ‘place’ can be re-made in a flow of becoming. As well as thus advancing the understanding of Stein’s poetics, my project also adds to critical discussion of the prose poem. Prose poetry is frequently described as a hybrid form by its current theorists, but my project refines this definition by contributing a new linguistic account of this hybridity and its significance.

Grantor dc:publisher

Oxford Brookes University

Year dc:date

2023

Author dc:creator

• Campbell, Susan Jeanne

Contributors dc:contributor

• Goody, Alex
• Munro, Niall
• Chan, Mary Jean

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved

Language dc:language

en

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.24384/ydsk-2d25

OAI identifier oai:identifier

tle:0210884a-e089-4011-9df2-825949458e3f:d6bd9758-527a-46cd-bfe2-c433766e8fca:1