Becoming Plastic: Modernist Poetics, (Neuro)Psychoanalysis, and the Material Object

BECOMING PLASTIC: MODERNIST POETICS, (NEURO)PSYCHOANALYSIS, AND THE MATERIAL OBJECT Lauren Terry A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Nottingham Trent University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy October 2020 The copyright in this work is held by the author. You may copy up to 5% of this work for private study, or personal, non-commercial research. Any re-use of the Nottingham Trent University Quality Handbook Supplement Requirements for submission of a research degree thesis September 2019 page 2 QHS11A information contained within this document should be fully referenced, quoting the author, title, university, degree level and pagination. Queries or requests for any other use, or if a more substantial copy is required, should be directed to the author. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Foremost, I would like to thank: Dr Sarah Jackson, Dr Andrew Taylor, and Professor Andrew Thacker, for their encouragement, guidance, and belief. The Midlands3Cities Doctoral Partnership, for funding this project. The editors of Molly Bloom, Litter, Anthropocene, and The Interpreter’s House, where the following poems have previously appeared: ‘The Other Side of an Apple’, ‘Beachcombing in the Torres Strait’, ‘The Sleeping Woman is a Cubist Portrait’, ‘The Eyeless Birds’, ‘Beehive (Thimble Forest)’, ‘Cruise Ship’, ‘Orlando’, ‘Two Mothers’ and ‘The Taxidermist’s Daughter’. Alan Baker, for publishing my debut pamphlet, Museum of Lost and Broken Things. Hannah Cooper-Smithson, Tuesday Shannon, Daniel Bilton, and Beth Evans, for their counsel and good humour. Mum and Dad, for the stories. Adam, for his patience – and the provision of coffee. ABSTRACT Becoming Plastic: Modernist Poetics, (Neuro)Psychoanalysis, and the Material Object is a creative-critical thesis comprising approximately 45,000 words of critical prose and a poetry collection of sixty pages. Through critical discussion and my own creative writing, the thesis explores the continuums between human subjects and nonhuman objects in poetry – arguing that there is a disturbance of ontological categories happening in the process of poetic composition which functions to involve readers in a radical reappraisal of the material world in which they participate. The critical component of my thesis engages with the work of neglected modernist poets – such as Lola Ridge and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven – alongside those who have received considerable attention from literary critics – including Amy Lowell, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein – in order to examine the disruptive potential of the material object in modernist poetry. Arguing that these poets disturb the theoretical boundaries between subject and object via experimental poetic languages and forms, the three chapters of this thesis bring together studies in psychoanalysis (Freud, 1919; Kristeva, 1982), the nonhuman turn (Bennett, 2010), defamiliarization (Shklovsky, 1917), thing theory (Brown, 2004), and neuroscience (Malabou, 2004) to demonstrate the capacity for modernist poetry to interrogate what it is to be human or nonhuman in a world of things. Acknowledging the assemblages in which we participate, Chapter 1 reconceptualises the relationship between anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism in the texts of Ridge and Lowell. Demonstrating that the disruption of the human / nonhuman binary is accompanied by a disruption of genre, it argues that Ridge and Lowell accentuate the complex assemblages at work in the text. Building on this, Chapter 2 examines Loy’s poetry and artworks as that which actively transform both the nonhuman object and the literary text into abject things which interrogate assumptions about people, language, and objects. This chapter argues that Loy’s compositions offer a reappraisal of the literary object as we know it – its customary spatial notations, typography, punctuation, and communicative language – heralding the possibility of a thingly poetics. Advancing this investigation into the physical and psychological continuums between human subjects and nonhuman objects in modernist poetry, Chapter 3 explores the literary experiments of Stein and the Baroness through the study of neuroplasticity. Offering the first plastic reading of a modernist poem, it argues that Stein and the Baroness’s literary experiments articulate how the brain is physically and psychologically altered through sensory encounters with nonhuman objects. Synthesising studies in modernist literary cultures, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience, this thesis examines the vitality, potentiality, commonality, and plasticity of matter – contending that these poems ultimately challenge our understanding of both the modernist object and the limits of genre. The thesis also draws on my own creative practice in order to interrogate the relationship between the material object, psychoanalysis and the limits of genre – to explore the extent to which the poem itself slips between ontological categories. Aiming to accentuate the synaptic connections between my chapters, between human subjects and nonhuman objects, between theorists, between modernist and modern poetic composition, and between creative and critical writing, the thesis includes a manifesto which outlines the principles and parameters of the plastic text. Furthermore, I present a collection of my own plastic compositions – ‘Museum of Lost and Broken Things’ – which explore the physical and psychological continuums between human subjects and nonhuman objects. These poems enact the theoretical principles and formal techniques examined in each chapter – consolidating the productive connections between critical and creative matter. CONTENTS Modernist Objects: A Critical Inventory or Introduction ...................................................................... 1 The Secret Lives of Modernist Objects: Anthropomorphism in the Poetry of Lola Ridge and Amy Lowell ................................................................................................................................................... 24 ‘A Binarian’s Nightmare’: The Making of Mina Loy’s Thingly Poetics ............................................ 55 The Brain is a Plastic Thing: Gertrude Stein and The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s Neuroplastic Experiments ..................................................................................................................... 84 The Text is a Plastic Thing: A Manifesto ........................................................................................... 111 Museum of Lost and Broken Things ................................................................................................... 128 Exhibition I ......................................................................................................................................... 129 Exhibition II ........................................................................................................................................ 155 The Thesis is a Plastic Thing: A Curatorial Statement ...................................................................... 189 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................................... 194 MODERNIST OBJECTS: A CRITICAL INVENTORY OR INTRODUCTION I begin with a doll, perhaps, or a string quartet, a white cloth, or stack of butter-pats. I begin with an alphabet toy, a lampshade – an orange, thing, or manifesto. Begin again with a midbrain, a table, a rose, perhaps, or a noun, a ready-made, an advertisement, or portmanteau. I begin with this thing we name a poem, and its capacity to articulate the unnameable, unimaginable, unpalatable, or unacknowledged slippages between nonhuman objects and their human subjects in the material world. Begin with a modernist poet – Lola Ridge, Amy Lowell, Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, perhaps, or the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven – and their material, that is, language, that is, the matter of how to articulate those physical and psychological continuums between nonhuman objects and their human subjects via experimental poetic language and forms. Begin again in the whiteness of this document, with annotations or analyses of analyses on modernist things, with the volatile substance we name theory, that is, psychoanalysis, that is, the uncanny, thing-power, defamiliarization, the abject, or thing theory, that is, the nonhuman turn, that is, affect theory, neuroscience, brain plasticity, and the synaptic connections between critical and creative matter. I begin again with a doll, perhaps, or an apple. Begin with a ring pull, the leg of a clothes peg – a bottle cap, balloon clip, or six loose teeth from a comb. I begin with an egg, a vacuum cleaner, a cruise ship, a contraceptive pill, or assemblage. Begin again with a bird, a house, a cubist portrait, a red balloon, a ready-made, perhaps, a selfie stick. I begin this thesis with the aim to articulate the plasticity of the nonhuman object and human subject, that is, the plasticity of this thing we name a poem and its ability to modulate and excite synaptic connections between people, language, and things – those unnameable, unimaginable, unpalatable, or unacknowledged slippages between modern and modernist matter in the material worlds of my own poetry. Through a critical exploration of modernist composition and my own creative practice, Becoming Plastic: Modernist Poetics, (Neuro)Psychoanalysis, and the Material Object examines the formative continuums between human subjects

Load more