Encountering Birds: A Phenomenology of Jizz (original) (raw)
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Thinking with Birds: John Clare and the Phenomenology of Perception
Romanticism, 2020
John Clare's bird's nest poems create much of their dramatic interest by emphasising the vulnerability of the birds, the fragility of the eggs, and the interdependence of the surrounding ecosystem. This essay draws on concepts from French phenomenology to discuss the poet-speaker's embeddedness in a particular moment within that ecosystem and the extent to which his own vulnerability facilitates empathy with the birds he meets. Clare foregrounds the tension between pre-reflective processes, which Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls 'operative intentionality', and the categorical concepts or expectations that fail to account for these. He establishes the birds' own perceptive acts as part of what is given within operative intentionality, without claiming that his understanding is adequate to thinking with a bird or conceptualizing the delight of discovery. Jean-Luc Marion's concept of 'saturated phenomenality' provides a means of describing the surplus of what phenomenologists call 'intuition', to which Clare's bird's nest poems often attest.
Environmental & Architectural Phenomenology, 2023
In this essay, I continue my examination of plant and animal encounters in place. In a previous essay, I described a spectrum of encounters with birds ranging from obliviousness to heightened contact (Wood 2023). I explained how, in the most intensely heightened encounters, I captured the bird’s jizz, that unique quality of a living being that allows an identification in a flash of insight. Here, I explore the theme of jizz in more detail. What does jizz offer the science of ornithology? Is jizz identification reliable? Is jizz with its poetic images and flashes of insight unsuited to an analytical, rational approach to ornithology?
Amongst the numerous poets who have taken interest in birds, Ponge and Perse share a similar ambition : to achieve, though multiple sketches and various approaches — empirical observation, anatomy, erudition, and language — the transcription not only of the bird's efect on man, but also that of the essence of the bird, starting from his phenomenal appearances. Poetry thus stands as a way to total the whole collection of the bird's modes of appearance to restore its living content — both in intensity and complexity. We would like to demonstrate how the poets claim to aesthetically reconstruct the bird by dints of writing, but also how they collide with the limits of man's understanding of the animal when trying to transcend the barrier that Jacob Von Uexküll saw between animal worlds and human world. « This is too rough. The bird's state of mind must be very diferent » (Francis Ponge, The rage for expression).
Ornithology of desire : birding in the ecotone and the poetry of Don McKay
2007
In this dissertation I develop a vocabulary and a strategy for reading birds and ecology in Don McKay's poetry. Stressing the importance of understanding such sciences as ornithology and ecology when adopting an interdisciplinary ecocriticism, I posit science textbooks, field guides, and extra-textual experience as valid intertextual referents. At base, my dissertation follows McKay's taxonomical and ecological specificity and argues that such accurate knowing, combined with an awareness of its epistemological limitations, invites readers to reconsider human-nonhuman relations. Individual birds populating McKay's poems exist both as birds that live independently of human language and as symbols of a human desire to name and know the world without possessing it. I begin by highlighting the need for sustained critical work on Don McKay, a poet whose work-long admired by awards juries and fellow poets-has only recently begun to receive the attention it deserves. After outlining the risks involved for literary critics who linger in the ecotone between disciplines, I make an argument for taking seriously the "eco" in ecocriticism by linking the philosophical concerns of the historic science-and-literature debate to the methodological concerns of contemporary ecocriticism. Focusing on two biological aspects of avian ecology-flight and song-I then examine how they function in the English literary canon and how McKay resists the canon by redeploying certain conventions by inflecting them with his "poetic attention" and species specificity. Reading flight in McKay's poems, I demonstrate how McKay provides a strategy for recognizing a human desire to fly as an anti-ecological version of the will to power; reading birdsong, I develop a way of measuring phenomenological distances between poet and bird, language and world. Between chapters, I include what I am calling Ecotones, fictional accounts of a literary critic struggling to enact the interdisciplinary ecocriticism outlined in this dissertation. Each Ecotone-Field Marks, Field Guides, Field Notes-focuses on different versions of "field," highlighting the intellectual risks and benefits associated with occupying a space between. Finally, since McKay is a living writer at the most prolific phase of his career, I conclude by suggesting how future studies of McKay's work, including on what he calls "geopoetry," might productively benefit from the strategies I develop here.
Toward an (Avian) Aesthetic of (Avian) Absence.
Science, broadly defined, seeks to bring humans epistemologically closer to the physical world by empirical means; philosophy and history of science remind that the apparatuses deployed by scientists (scientific method; mathematical formulae; language) always already maintain a distance. Certain literary/artistic endeavours do not fundamentally differ in their attempts to bring humans closer to the world via language/symbolism. After laying a framework for negotiating the shifting tensions between distance and proximity when contemplating literature's place in ecological thinking, I offer in this essay a series of comparative readings of bird poems complemented by an analysis of a book for young readers. Informing my readings of texts by British, Canadian, and South African writers is a thought experiment: what happens when we consider birds as works of art? For the first half of my argument, I offer readings of poems that sound an alarm regarding humans' carelessness and that posit faulty birdwatchers as exemplars of respectful poetic attention. For the remainder of the essay, I focus on texts about penguins as a critical case study for the first half's thought experiment. The texts that privilege distance and absence as preferable modes of engaging with birds also enable an understanding of birds as works of art independent of human designs.
" Birds have Proustian capacity for making remembrance " – a post-pastoral reading of John
the question of anthropomorphising animals Abstract. The article proposes discussion of John Lewis-Stempel's Meadowland (2015) developed along two perspectives. One is the post-pastoral reading as suggested by Terry Gifford. He offers a contemporary interpretative mode that draws from both the rich history of British pastoral and countryside writing and from recent ecocritical devices. Additionally, this paper aims to point out the manifold functions of anthropomorphism and presents it as the long-established strategy of making sense of the 'outer' nature. Both animating non-humans in literary representation and post-pastoral depiction of British countryside prevail to be an expression of spatial proximity, and apparently an indispensable prerequisite for coexistence , for sharing material place. Far from causing confusion or misunderstanding , anthropomorphisation has an enduring power of organizing human experience and expressing intercon-nectedness. In historical terms, it remains a fact that people have always responded to the natural world, and that they have seen animals respond as well, thus turning them into agents.
The Biological Unconscious, Memory and Identity in Charles Fernyhough's A Box of Birds
Word and Text: A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics, 2023
This essay proposes to critically engage with dominant materialist and narrative models of human identity, addressing the old, 'tired' question of subjectivity from a twenty-first century perspective. Drawing on contemporary neuroscientific theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis, I aim to read Charles Fernyhough's A Box of Birds (2012) as a creative reflection on the nature of memory, consciousness and the unconscious. As I shall demonstrate, what lies at the heart of Fernyhough's reflection is the Platonic allegory of the mind as an aviary. Taken up and re-interpreted by different characters in the novel, this allegory permits Fernyhough to experiment with contemporary discourses of neuro-subjectivity, tracing a richer, more dynamic relation among mind, brain and body.
Exploring Birds as Glorified in the Romantic Poetry
Global academic journal of linguistics and literature, 2022
English Romantic poetry contributes profound love and genuine reverence of the poets to nature. Birds constitute a part of nature, and love for nature is one of the perpetual features and themes of the Romantic poetry. This article, which aims at exploring birds how English Romantic poets glorify them in their poetry, comprises five poems of four celebrated English Romantic poets, namely Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats. This article concludes that the Romantic poets glorify birds as a blithe spirit, a light-winged fairy, an ethereal minstrel, a blithe newcomer , a wandering voice, a darling of the spring, Christian soul and so on.