Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Wu, Colleen Shu-Ching

Titel

Overcoming Oneself as Subject in Dickinson's Poetry: Adorno and Heidegger

Ist Teil von

• Style (University Park, PA), 2015-09, Vol.49 (3), p.334-353

Ort / Verlag

DeKalb: Pennsylvania State University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2015

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This essay discusses what is at stake when Dickinson's poetry is situated within a social, cultural, or historical context in order to define its distinctive poetic value. The relation between Dickinson's lyric self and external contexts is one with tension and spontaneity, and thus, as I will argue, is close to a dialectical relation defined by Theodor W. Adorno. I will further explain how Adorno and Heidegger put each other's ideas into question and thus delineate a more genuine dialectical relation. Via this dialectical relation, I will interpret Dickinson's poems and show how her lyric self “has overcome himself [or herself] as subject” (Heidegger's term). Dickinson's lyric self challenges both Adorno's and Heidegger's arguments because the lyric self's resistance to social definition results from the possibility of a mediated “I” in poetry. The lyric self's resistance is thus not always socially or politically motivated as Adorno argues. The lyric self overcomes his/her subjectivity not through a prepared ground plan to interpret the world, as Heidegger suggests, but because the self is already a mediated “I” from the very beginning—an “I” mediated by the other composed in poetry as soon as “I” is written. It is an “I” mediated within poetry contending with an “I” mediated by social context.