Sonnet L'Abbé | University of British Columbia (original) (raw)

Books by Sonnet L'Abbé

Research paper thumbnail of A Strange Relief

Research paper thumbnail of Killarnoe

Papers by Sonnet L'Abbé

Research paper thumbnail of Good, But Not So Pretty

Canadian Literature = Littérature canadienne: A quarterly o criticism and review, 2003

Research paper thumbnail of Zoom In, Zoom Out

Canadian Literature = Littérature canadienne: A quarterly o criticism and review, 2003

Research paper thumbnail of On the Aggrecultural Poetics of Sonnet’s Shakespeare

McGill-Queen's University Press eBooks, May 15, 2022

Research paper thumbnail of Teaching As La-Ing: Thinking About the English Lit and Creative Writing Classroom on Turtle Island

English Studies in Canada, Mar 1, 2020

Research paper thumbnail of Zoom In, Zoom Out

Canadian Literature Litterature Canadienne a Quarterly O Criticism and Review, 2003

Research paper thumbnail of The 94 Calls: Colonized Sonnets LXXXI to LXXXIV

Research paper thumbnail of Infiltrate as Cells": The Biopolitically Ethical Subject of sybil unrest

Research paper thumbnail of North of Invention: Interview with Charles Bernstein and Sarah Dowling

Research paper thumbnail of Three Ecolonizations from Sonnet's Shakespeare

ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

Research paper thumbnail of Green men, plant brains and nervetrees : Ronald Johnson's object-oriented poetics of embodied mind

This dissertation is an ecocritical single-author study of the work of the American modernist poe... more This dissertation is an ecocritical single-author study of the work of the American modernist poet Ronald Johnson (1935-1998), who sustained in his work a career-long inquiry into the relationship of poetry and Nature, and into the limits of representing subjective perception in language. Johnson understood poetry as a process by which "nature looks at itself" that took, as its starting point, the biological embeddedness of the human subject in his or her own environment. The human mind, for Johnson, was the telos of Nature's evolutionary change and the chief instrument of this looking. When Johnson's Nature, not dualistically differentiated from human subjectivity, "looks at itself" through his poetry, the boundaries of epistemological and identity categories of subject and object become indistinct, a representational challenge that Johnson — who was not at all interested in disrupting, but only discovering his own model for, "the" Natural orde...

Research paper thumbnail of Expanding the Circle: New Poets to The Goose

Research paper thumbnail of Reflections on the Arts, Environment, and Culture After Ten Years of The Goose

Research paper thumbnail of Green men, plant brains and nervetrees : Ronald Johnson's object-oriented poetics of embodied mind

This dissertation is an ecocritical single-author study of the work of the American modernist poe... more This dissertation is an ecocritical single-author study of the work of the American modernist poet Ronald Johnson (1935-1998), who sustained in his work a career-long inquiry into the relationship of poetry and Nature, and into the limits of representing subjective perception in language. Johnson understood poetry as a process by which "nature looks at itself" that took, as its starting point, the biological embeddedness of the human subject in his or her own environment. The human mind, for Johnson, was the telos of Nature's evolutionary change and the chief instrument of this looking. When Johnson's Nature, not dualistically differentiated from human subjectivity, "looks at itself" through his poetry, the boundaries of epistemological and identity categories of subject and object become indistinct, a representational challenge that Johnson-who was not at all interested in disrupting, but only discovering his own model for, "the" Natural order-often negotiates through the use of plant tropes and metaphors. The figure of the plant shows up in Johnson's work where the poet, acting as an idealized Western human self, reaches to identify beyond the boundary of species identity, to greenly and leafily represent a kind of alterity that is un-othered by its observer. This dissertation proposes that Johnson's formally innovative poetry, which plays within the genre tradition of nature writing, poses figuratively what philosopher and critical plant studies pioneer Michael Marder argues: that the figure of the plant, which grows "in-between classical metaphysical categories of the thing, the animal, and the human" stands as the potential "prototype of a post-metaphysical being" ("Vegetal" 487) More importantly, Johnson's work suggests that the mindbody, particularly the human nervous system, as an object-that-knows, confounds Western metaphysics in the same way. Johnson's "nervetree" figure, I argue, moves us closer to visualizing where the human object, as embodied, ecologically-embedded subjecthood, fits in a post-metaphysical, objectoriented ecological thought.

Research paper thumbnail of Zoom In, Zoom Out

Research paper thumbnail of Two Reclaimed Territories

Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies

Research paper thumbnail of "Infiltrate as Cells" The Biopolitically Ethical Subject of sybil unrest

Research paper thumbnail of A Strange Relief

Research paper thumbnail of Killarnoe

Research paper thumbnail of Good, But Not So Pretty

Canadian Literature = Littérature canadienne: A quarterly o criticism and review, 2003

Research paper thumbnail of Zoom In, Zoom Out

Canadian Literature = Littérature canadienne: A quarterly o criticism and review, 2003

Research paper thumbnail of On the Aggrecultural Poetics of Sonnet’s Shakespeare

McGill-Queen's University Press eBooks, May 15, 2022

Research paper thumbnail of Teaching As La-Ing: Thinking About the English Lit and Creative Writing Classroom on Turtle Island

English Studies in Canada, Mar 1, 2020

Research paper thumbnail of Zoom In, Zoom Out

Canadian Literature Litterature Canadienne a Quarterly O Criticism and Review, 2003

Research paper thumbnail of The 94 Calls: Colonized Sonnets LXXXI to LXXXIV

Research paper thumbnail of Infiltrate as Cells": The Biopolitically Ethical Subject of sybil unrest

Research paper thumbnail of North of Invention: Interview with Charles Bernstein and Sarah Dowling

Research paper thumbnail of Three Ecolonizations from Sonnet's Shakespeare

ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

Research paper thumbnail of Green men, plant brains and nervetrees : Ronald Johnson's object-oriented poetics of embodied mind

This dissertation is an ecocritical single-author study of the work of the American modernist poe... more This dissertation is an ecocritical single-author study of the work of the American modernist poet Ronald Johnson (1935-1998), who sustained in his work a career-long inquiry into the relationship of poetry and Nature, and into the limits of representing subjective perception in language. Johnson understood poetry as a process by which "nature looks at itself" that took, as its starting point, the biological embeddedness of the human subject in his or her own environment. The human mind, for Johnson, was the telos of Nature's evolutionary change and the chief instrument of this looking. When Johnson's Nature, not dualistically differentiated from human subjectivity, "looks at itself" through his poetry, the boundaries of epistemological and identity categories of subject and object become indistinct, a representational challenge that Johnson — who was not at all interested in disrupting, but only discovering his own model for, "the" Natural orde...

Research paper thumbnail of Expanding the Circle: New Poets to The Goose

Research paper thumbnail of Reflections on the Arts, Environment, and Culture After Ten Years of The Goose

Research paper thumbnail of Green men, plant brains and nervetrees : Ronald Johnson's object-oriented poetics of embodied mind

This dissertation is an ecocritical single-author study of the work of the American modernist poe... more This dissertation is an ecocritical single-author study of the work of the American modernist poet Ronald Johnson (1935-1998), who sustained in his work a career-long inquiry into the relationship of poetry and Nature, and into the limits of representing subjective perception in language. Johnson understood poetry as a process by which "nature looks at itself" that took, as its starting point, the biological embeddedness of the human subject in his or her own environment. The human mind, for Johnson, was the telos of Nature's evolutionary change and the chief instrument of this looking. When Johnson's Nature, not dualistically differentiated from human subjectivity, "looks at itself" through his poetry, the boundaries of epistemological and identity categories of subject and object become indistinct, a representational challenge that Johnson-who was not at all interested in disrupting, but only discovering his own model for, "the" Natural order-often negotiates through the use of plant tropes and metaphors. The figure of the plant shows up in Johnson's work where the poet, acting as an idealized Western human self, reaches to identify beyond the boundary of species identity, to greenly and leafily represent a kind of alterity that is un-othered by its observer. This dissertation proposes that Johnson's formally innovative poetry, which plays within the genre tradition of nature writing, poses figuratively what philosopher and critical plant studies pioneer Michael Marder argues: that the figure of the plant, which grows "in-between classical metaphysical categories of the thing, the animal, and the human" stands as the potential "prototype of a post-metaphysical being" ("Vegetal" 487) More importantly, Johnson's work suggests that the mindbody, particularly the human nervous system, as an object-that-knows, confounds Western metaphysics in the same way. Johnson's "nervetree" figure, I argue, moves us closer to visualizing where the human object, as embodied, ecologically-embedded subjecthood, fits in a post-metaphysical, objectoriented ecological thought.

Research paper thumbnail of Zoom In, Zoom Out

Research paper thumbnail of Two Reclaimed Territories

Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies

Research paper thumbnail of "Infiltrate as Cells" The Biopolitically Ethical Subject of sybil unrest