Lucy Maddux Alford
(Stanford University)
Fellow des Dahlem Humanities Center
Mai–August 2012
Unfolding Presence: Poetic Attention through the Lens of the Twentieth Century
Poetic language is visually, sonically, and semantically dense, intricate, layered, structured, valanced, formed. This linguistic density amounts to a gathering and focalization of aesthetic attention, readerly and writerly. Poetry is predicated by this tension of attention. This dissertation will explore, or unfold, the relationship between poetry and attention - between poetic language and the dynamics of attention it both produces and requires.