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Abstract
AS FLIGHT OR EQUINOX
by
SARA RENEE MARSHALL
(Under the Direction of Andrew Zawacki)
ABSTRACT
As Flight or Equinox is a book-length poem in six parts that meditates on the inundating language and lived experience of capitalism and the market as a prevailing metaphor. In particular, its poems trace the disorienting and alienating experience of capitalism’s erasure of non-masculine bodies—their work, creative contributions, reproduction, meaning-making, ways of seeing, and ways of knowing. The work is also concerned with moving through the world either in a state of erasure or as an object subjected to violence and disregard. It attempts to make a vocabulary for the phenomenological experience of this position.
Engaging debates about the possibility of the flâneuse, a recently renovated figure, “‘An Irrational But a Real Pleasure’: Reading the Early Flâneuse” argues for additional study of the proto-flâneuse—women walkers and wanderers in late 18th and early 19th century fiction—in flâneuse discourse as a way to track the contours of her more obvious emergence in the mid-19th century. Further, I read wandering episodes from Frances Burney’s Camilla and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette to define the flâneuse as a fundamentally liminal figure—straddling the paradox of vigilance and pleasure at once.
INDEX WORDS: Poetry, 18th Century, 19th Century, British Women Writers, Frances Burney, Camilla, Charlotte Brontë, Villette, Flâneuse, Flâneuserie, Flaneur, Rebecca Solnit, Lauren Elkin, Helen Scalway, Janet Wolff, Griselda Pollock, Ingrid Horrocks, Deborah Epstein-Nord, Luce Irigaray, Elizabeth Wilson, Charlotte Mathieson, Wanderer, Walking
by
SARA RENEE MARSHALL
(Under the Direction of Andrew Zawacki)
ABSTRACT
As Flight or Equinox is a book-length poem in six parts that meditates on the inundating language and lived experience of capitalism and the market as a prevailing metaphor. In particular, its poems trace the disorienting and alienating experience of capitalism’s erasure of non-masculine bodies—their work, creative contributions, reproduction, meaning-making, ways of seeing, and ways of knowing. The work is also concerned with moving through the world either in a state of erasure or as an object subjected to violence and disregard. It attempts to make a vocabulary for the phenomenological experience of this position.
Engaging debates about the possibility of the flâneuse, a recently renovated figure, “‘An Irrational But a Real Pleasure’: Reading the Early Flâneuse” argues for additional study of the proto-flâneuse—women walkers and wanderers in late 18th and early 19th century fiction—in flâneuse discourse as a way to track the contours of her more obvious emergence in the mid-19th century. Further, I read wandering episodes from Frances Burney’s Camilla and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette to define the flâneuse as a fundamentally liminal figure—straddling the paradox of vigilance and pleasure at once.
INDEX WORDS: Poetry, 18th Century, 19th Century, British Women Writers, Frances Burney, Camilla, Charlotte Brontë, Villette, Flâneuse, Flâneuserie, Flaneur, Rebecca Solnit, Lauren Elkin, Helen Scalway, Janet Wolff, Griselda Pollock, Ingrid Horrocks, Deborah Epstein-Nord, Luce Irigaray, Elizabeth Wilson, Charlotte Mathieson, Wanderer, Walking