Peter Doherty’s contemporary take on Emily Dickinson: a transit between sentences

• Autor(a) principal: Brigida, Marcela Santos
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Outros Autores: [e-mail]
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da UERJ
• Texto Completo: http://www.bdtd.uerj.br/handle/1/16794
• topic: Poetry; Sentence; Adaptation; Emily Dickinson; Peter Doherty; Poesia; Sentença; Adaptação; Dickinson, Emily, 1830-1886 - Crítica e interpretação; Doherty, Peter, 1979 - Crítica e interpretação; Música e literatura; Poesia – História e crítica; Língua inglesa – Sentenças; LINGUISTICA, LETRAS E ARTES::LETRAS::LITERATURAS ESTRANGEIRAS MODERNAS

This dissertation establishes Dickinsonian thought (DEPPMAN, 2005) as the ability to embrace difficulty, ambiguity and polyvalence when conducting thinking processes that preclude any form of stable synthesis. Following Jedd Deppman’s study of Dickinson’s “try-to-think” poems (DEPPMAN, 2005, p. 89), this dissertation pursues and describes the way in which Dickinsonian thought echoes in the twenty-first century through Peter Doherty. He appears here as one of contemporaneity’s main exponents of the materialisation of Dickinsonian thought, that is, of a Dickinsonian sentence. If we can understand the concept of the sentence (WOOLF, 1929; PINHO, 2015) as something material, the linguistic combination of words, and at the same time, the verdict for identities that stems from this materiality, I propose that the Dickinsonian sentence is one that is marked by a search for a poetic language suitable to the restlessness of a self-questioning mind, one that allows the poet to inhabit an in-between territory that stands between her life in Amherst, Massachusetts, and the projection of her voice through poetry, which allows for this dissertation’s approach of Doherty as her contemporary. The findings of this research are structured into four chapters. To think about how Doherty can appear as Dickinson’s contemporary and to discuss their relationship within a shared tradition, I turn to Giorgio Agamben’s “What Is the Contemporary?” (2009) and T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and Individual Talent” (1919) in Chapter 1. Besides addressing Dickinson’s and Doherty’s in their own contexts and beyond, this chapter presents the theoretical basis of this dissertation. Chapter 2, “Emily Dickinson and Music”, takes as a point of departure the assertion by Cristanne Miller (2012a) that Dickinson wrote in relation to song. Divided into four sections, it investigates Dickinson’s history with music, the influence of hymnaic and balladic structures over her writing, as musical aspects of her compositional practices, as well as remediations of her poetry by composers from the 1950s onwards. Chapter 3, “Peter Doherty and Poetry”, is dedicated to introducing Peter Doherty into Literary Studies. Its first section investigates Doherty’s history with poetry, establishing how his early relationship with this art form is reflected in his musical writings while the second section addresses the heterotelic character of Doherty’s lyrics. The third section approaches Doherty’s relationship with the Anglophone literary tradition, underlining his citations and allusions to poems and novels in his song lyrics. Chapter 4 leans over and unpacks the relationship between Dickinson and Doherty by looking at the ways her poetic project resurfaces in his. Throughout this chapter’s three sections, I turn to direct citations, thematic and imagery-related convergences between Dickinson and Doherty, and Dickinsonian thought in the works of the English songwriter. The coda of this dissertation offers a final commentary on the results obtained from the research process and presents new directions and ramifications these subjects might offer in the future