| dc.description.abstract | This thesis offers a study of the previously unexplored interplay between the writing of Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) and Anne Sexton (1928-1974) and the scientific and technological advancement of their time. Their writing, habitually characterised by its personal tone of voice and, in the case of Plath and Sexton, by its confessional structure, has been assumed to be contained from contemporary enthusiasm about the dazzling developments of new technologies and scientific advancements in the mid-twentieth century. So far, in general, enquiry into science and technology has been believed to be the territory of avant-garde projects, or of other kinds of poems that are expected to have more distance from personal feeling. My aim here, however, is to illuminate the role played by the technical dimensions of post-war American life in the three poets’ rich experiments in writing within the decidedly personal or confessional modes.
This thesis consists of six chapters, and in each chapter I discuss how in my chosen poets’ works the lyric subject is conceived as inevitably, and sometimes intimately, conditioned by scientific and technological circumstances. In doing so, my primary focus is on the ways in which the lyric ‘I’ reveals its unstable boundaries through its preoccupation and negotiation with the vigour of material, cultural and geopolitical realties of the Cold-War era. In Chapter One, I aim to establish a new argument for the relevance of the poetry of Plath to the principles and discourses of modern physics, particularly in the Cold-War contexts of the nuclear arms race and space exploration. In Chapter Two, I continue to examine Plath’s permeable subject in the light of technology and Cold-War ideology, particularly the manifestation of the containment ideology in the transformation of childbirth. Chapters Three and Four demonstrate specific relations between the poetic texts and the material and affective circumstances consequential of the revolution of modern physics. Taking as their foci the development of medical imaging technology and the discovery of human DNA respectively, these chapters offer new readings of the works of Plath and Sexton. Chapters Five and Six further the discussion of the complexity of mid-century lyric subjectivity by situating the poetry of Bishop and Plath in the increasingly mobile and interconnected society of the time. Chapter Five considers their engagement with the aesthetical implications of ubiquitous technologies of flight. Chapter Six concludes this thesis by discussing the pervasive presence of ‘foreign bodies’ in Bishop’s late poems as the signs of her lyric engagement with the technological conditions of the Cold-War era. Throughout my thesis, I reveal how the knowledge of and interest in contemporary scientific and technological advances offered new possibilities for the fluid and permeable conceptions of the lyric ‘I’ in the works of the three poets. | en_GB |
