BA (Imam Khomeini, Iran), MDiv (Qom, Iran), M.A. (McMaster), PhD (Trent)
Thesis: Speaking of Being: Poetry as the Psychoanalysis of presence; From Language to Lalanguge
Examining Committee:
Hugh Hodges (Supervisor), Jeffery Donaldson, Duane Rousselle
External Examiner: Ross Leckie, University of New Brunswick
Internal Examiner: Ihor Junyk
Chair: Kelly Egan
Abstract
The central question of this research is “What is poetry?” The ambiguity and unintelligibility of the question itself forces the writing to take two different approaches to it. The first approach defines poetry not by what it is but by how it is related to the human being and to the world. Seeing poetry as its relation to Being permits a definition of poetry based on its function. This approach draws on philosophical discussions of how poetry is related to the human and how Being can be extended into poetic creation. Martin Heidegger’s move from seeing poetry as the possibility of worldmaking to seeing it as unconcealment and the extension of Being, as the House of Being, marks the direction of philosophical discussions in this paper. In this sense, poetry is defined as a creative possibility, where the speaking being comes in close contact with the speaking thing and speaks of being. The second approach defines poetry not as a whole but by its essential parts, particularly the “poetic imagination.” This approach draws on long-running discussions of imagination, metaphor, metaphorical thinking, image and imaging. It also relies on Freud’s discussions of how dreams function as textual phenomena: the poetic imagination, this approach argues, is similar to dreaming. The poet’s conscious and unconscious engagements with language create an uncanny experience where the relation between object and its poetic image is simultaneously known and unknowable. The third part of this study focuses on Lacan’s move from the symbolic unconscious to the real unconscious, in order to shed light on how the real is related to its linguistic reality. This bring the discussion to a point where language is replaced by lalangue in order to knot the real directly to the symbolic.