The Engineering of Being: An Ontological Approach to J. H. Prynne

Description

The English poet J. H. Prynne (b. 1936) is a central representative of a poetic movement which critics and reviewers have respectively called the ‘Cambridge School’, the ‘conductors of chaos’, and a ‘various art’. Prynne has been a fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, since 1962. Between 1961 and 1996 he produced eighteen sequences and volumes of poetry and a number of essays and papers. The present thesis analyses Prynne’s writings as verbal representations of the dynamics of consciousness and as reflections of the ways in which consciousness adapts to contemporary economic and intellectual conditions. It shows how Prynne’s Late Modernist or Neo-Modernist poetry deals with, and develops, such concepts as cognition, fragmentation, and stream of consciousness in asyndetic, ‘asyntactic’, writerly, and receivable discourse. Furthermore, the analysis includes a discussion of the rôle of the poet from a contemporary perspective. The study examines Prynne’s writings in the light of their various conceptual frameworks and strategies. It discusses ontological principles in Prynne, especially from the point of view of Da-sein, which was developed by Martin Heidegger. The discussion hinges on Heidegger's analyses of German poetry. Further theoretical frameworks for this thesis are provided by William Wordsworth; the Projectivist poet Charles Olson; representatives of the Frankfurt School, including Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer; Roland Barthes; and, finally, the Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning, and certain Chinese poets. The strategies of interaction between consciousness and the environment as predicated by these frameworks are to some extent cognate with Heideggerian ontological approaches. They reveal various aspects of the dynamics underlying Prynne’s work. The thesis shows that Prynne introduces new ways of depicting living conditions in poetry, and that Prynne’s poetry is innovative in the sense that it considers and incorporates economic, philosophical, and scientific aspects formally, syntactically, and thematically. In the light of the artistic and poetic strategies developed by the intellectuals mentioned above, the thesis discusses how Prynne engineers and updates models for verbalising the Da-sein in contemporary poetry.