Abstract:
This thesis posits the existence of fractal grammars (namely, word grammars, letter grammars, and unwritten feminine grammars) in the poetry of Joan Retallack, a central figure in current US experimental philosophical poetry. With special focus on her early mature works Afterrimages (1995), How to Do Things With Words (1998), The Poethical Wager (2003) and Memnoir (2004), the thesis contextualizes her developments in lexical and intra-lexical grammars with reference to philosophers and linguists including F. de Saussure, J. L. Austin, Jacques Derrida and John Cage. Modernist and contemporary poetry and poetics focused in lexical innovation, from Gertrude Stein and James Joyce to Susan Howe and P. Inman, provide another analytic pivot point, and the thesis demonstrates how a poetics of grammarly linguistics operates in contemporary US poetry at granular and concept levels. Within its frame of fractal grammars, the thesis identifies Retallack’s non-normative performances with alphabetical and punctuational material as grammatical moves. Beyond its primary argument about the existence of fractal grammars, the principal subsequent question for the thesis is how we perceive the performance of concept-based embodiment at the lexical and punctuational levels of Retallack’s work: how her ethical play commitments manifest in the word-level and lettristic details of her poetry. Retallack’s work shows the embodiment of poetic language as a performed investigation of modern histories of language communication and, also, as a pointer for the linguistic freedoms of the present.