Knowing & Doing & Becoming: A Natureculture Poetics of Contemporary Matter Poetry

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on (i) a group of science-interested non-scientist poets, namely John Kinsella, Sue Goyette, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Alice Oswald, J.O. Morgan, and Denise Riley, who produce what I call matter poetry and who shift their poetics to the material and with that to the entanglement of nature and culture, following a larger cultural paradigm shift towards matter, the nonhuman, affect, the environment in theory of new materialist interventions and beyond; (ii) within this group of new materialist thinkers, this dissertation favors Donna Haraway’s “naturecultures” (2003) and introduces “naturecultures” not only as an ecocritical theorem which entangles nature and culture into one relational ontology of “naturecultures,” but as a techno-scientist natureculture philosophy in its own right.