Feeling-thinking : embodiment and knowledge in the poetry of Rozalie Hirs and Anne Carson

This doctoral dissertation probes a feeling-thinking impulse in the poetry of the Dutch poet-composer Rozalie Hirs (b. 1965) and Canadian poet and classicist Anne Carson (b. 1950). In more precise terms, it studies how an embodied cognition is expressed in their writings on a formal, material, and discursive level, while also considering the effects of these configurations in terms of the kind of poetic epistemology or knowledge world that is solicited. Situated in the framework of a new materialism, this dissertation mainly draws on insights from cognitive literary studies to this end, with the aim of stimulating a conversation between contemporary poetry studies and areas of scholarship (including philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science) that are interested in the many facets of embodied cognition. It first analyses Carson’s and Hirs’s hybrid poetic writings as examples of an interaction between a lyric (or ‘feeling’) and conceptual (or ‘thinking’) mode from a cognitive prototypical perspective. It then considers how the words and the background of the page constitute a field of vision or ‘screen’ that needs to be visually and haptically activated by the reader in their interpretation of the literary work. Finally, the experience of discourses in their poetry, particularly those about women, is approached as an act of cognitive world building prompted by references to the body. The analysis thus demonstrates that Carson’s and Hirs’s works of poetry enable knowledge worlds that are fully embodied: their writings are not only about the poetic subject’s embodied cognition, but this feeling-thinking is also formally structured, materially bodied forth, and discursively encouraged. As a result, Hirs’s and Carson’s poetry invites readers to approach meaning and knowing as exploratory and delayed, thus encouraging them to make full use of the brain’s plasticity in its form-generating capacity. By developing the notion of a knowledge world for poetry studies, this dissertation ultimately questions the widespread belief that poetry is above all emotive and hence little concerned with questions of knowledge.