A Study of O’Hara’s Poetry in the Light of Merleua-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature

Journal of Language and Translation

دوره 13، شماره 4، بهمن 2023   

نوع مقاله: Review Papers

شناسه دیجیتال (DOI): 10.30495/ttlt.2023.708113

نویسندگان

Bahare Aarabi¹؛ Negar Sharif^{* 1}؛ Farid Parvaneh²

¹Department of English Language and Literature, Central Tehran Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran

²Department of English Language and Literature, Qom Branch, Islamic Azad University, Qom, Iran

چکیده

The present research paper seeks to apply Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s eco-phenomenology to the selected poems composed by Frank O’Hara, the prominent figure of the New York School of Poetry. 'Eco-phenomenology' is where philosophy and ecology meet. This relatively new vogue of criticism deals with environmental issues from a phenomenological perspective. Dismantling Cartesian dualism and proposing the philosophy of 'chiasm,' Merleau-Ponty has contributed substantially to environmental ethics and has proved himself an inseparable part of eco-phenomenology.
Although the New York School of Poetry is considered urban in nature, this article intends to study several poems composed by Frank O’Hara, in the light of eco-phenomenology in order to challenge the reductive features of being urban and unaware of the natural environment, ascribed to this poetic movement, by binging to the fore a fissure within this poetry that expresses an awareness of a broader phenomenological world, comprising both the humans and the non-humans. Conducting textual and contextual analyses, this study applies the chiasmic ontology of Merleau-Ponty to the selected poems with the focus on the mutual participation between human flesh and the ‘flesh of the world’ at moments of perception in order to manifest the depth of O'Hara's engagement with the natural environment.

کلیدواژه‌ها

Chiasm؛ Eco-Phenomenology؛ Embodiment؛ The Flesh of the World؛ Urban Poetry

مراجع

Abram, D. (2010). Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. 1 Vol. In: Toronto: Random House.

Abram, D. (2012). The spell of the sensuous: Perception and language in a more-than-human world. Vintage.

Brossard, O. (2009). " The/profile of a city/exploding": Frank O’Hara’s Aesthetics of Shock. Caliban. French Journal of English Studies(25), 215-228.

Campbell, R. (2015). A Little Reminder of Immortal Energy: Frank O’Hara’s Poetics of Colour.

Carman, T. (2008). Merleau-ponty. Routledge.

Cran, R. (2016). Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture: Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, and Bob Dylan. Routledge.

Emmerling, L. (2003). Pollock. Taschen.

Gray, T. (2010). Urban Pastoral: Natural Currents in the New York School. University of Iowa Press.

Langer, M. (2003). Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Eco-Phenomenology back to the Earth Itself, 103-120.

Mattix, M. (2011). Frank O'Hara and the Poetics of Saying'I'. Fairleigh Dickinson.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). Cezanne's Doubt Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Northwestern University Press Evanston, Ill.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The visible and the invisible: Followed by working notes. Northwestern University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2007). The Merleau-Ponty Reader. Northwestern University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Eye and mind. In Theatre and Performance Design (pp. 243-245). Routledge.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2013). Phenomenology of perception. Routledge.

Mildenberg, A. (2017). Modernism and Phenomenology: Literature, Philosophy, Art. Springer.

Morris, D. (2010). Empirical and phenomenological studies of embodied cognition. In Handbook of phenomenology and cognitive science (pp. 235-252). Springer.

O'Hara, F. (1995). The collected poems of Frank O'Hara. Univ of California Press.

Rapatzikou, T. G. (2017). James Schuyler’s Flower Poems and the Urban Pastoral Aesthetic. Contesting Environmental Imaginaries: Nature and Counternature in a Time of Global Change, 28.

Schreyach, M. (2013). Pre-objective Depth in Merleau-Ponty and Jackson Pollock. Research in phenomenology, 43(1), 49-70.

Smith, H. (2000). Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara: Difference, Homosexuality, Topography. Liverpool University Press.

Whalen-Bridge, J., & Storhoff, G. (2009). The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature. State University of New York Press.

Widger, E. (2017). Walking women: Embodied perception in romantic and contemporary radical landscape poetry. Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, 9(1), 1-31.