WANDERING AROUND THE CEMETERY OF CHILDHOOD: ELIZABETH BISHOP AND THE POETICS OF AUTO-ETHNOGRAPHY

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of the poetics of auto-ethnography as the dominant artistic discourse in the works of American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Auto-ethnography, a relatively new method in humanitarian studies which arose in the middle of the 20th century along with interest in queer research, is based on (auto)biographical narration. This allows an artist to focus on his identity and its representation in the frames of certain cultural norms and conventions. Autobiographic narrative is considered as fundamental discourse of Bishop's creativity and serves as an analytical method for interpretation of poetic auto-ethnography, as an effective artistic means of searching for and determining poet‟s identity. This motivates the novelty of this article, which is the first attempt of academic analysis of Bishop‟s poetry in Ukrainian American studies. Bishop‟s early orphancy (her father died when she was an infant, her mother was in a madhouse), her understanding of personal otherness and alienation conditioned her constant physical movement in space (she did not stop traveling, she dreamed of her own home and at least some kind of stability and confidence – in the relationships and environment), and also determined her reflections over the dominants of her identity – both artistic and human. One can speak of Bishop poetry as evidence of her permanent (e)migration, embodied in the nomadic art consciousness, whose temporal settled life is in the discrete markers of Kairos, snatched up by memory from the chronologically structured recollections of everyday life. This determined the subject of the study – the poetics of auto-ethnography, based on the comprehension and analysis of the imagined landscape of the poetic space, which, formed by nomadic consciousness of the poet, contributes to the realization of the objective set in the work – mapping of memory as the decisive factor in Bishop‟s self-identification – as a poet and a person.

Authors and Affiliations

T. V. Mykhed

Keywords

Related Articles

THE VERGE BETWEEN COMMON SENSE AND HATRED TOWARDS THE DIFFERENT IN POMYRANA BY T. ANTYPOVYCH

The present paper deals with an existential issue about self-separation, even self-alienation and self-reticence in the locus which was chosen by people themselves. Current research is focused on this problem in the nove...

LITERATURE AS CULTURAL ECOLOGY

Within ecocriticism as a new paradigm of literary theory, the article deals with the interpretation of literature as cultural environment, which centres around the idea of the consonance of a human mind and the world. Th...

SLAVIC AND EUROPEAN CONTEXT IN ANDREY SHIRYAEV’S LYRICS

In article research search is directed on the detection of dominants of Slavic and European cultures in their inter-ference and influence on poetic identity of the modern poet Andrey Shiryaev. Relevance of the chosen pro...

UNSETTLING AMERICA: MODERN SEXUALITY AND THE BIOPOLITICS OF SETTLER COLONIALISM

The colonization and settlement of the Americas is a story of cultural imperialism, violence, and destruction. Recent interventions in the field of Native studies have argued that the conquest of Native peoples and the n...

MYTHOLOGYCAL SYMBOLS OF IMAGE OF THE MOON IN THE POETRY BY CHRYSTIA ALCHEVSKA AND HRYTSKO CHUPRYNKA

Mythological thinking as the basis of literary works of any artist synthesizes an ancient pagan worldview constants, plots, motifs and images of world mythology, folk-song elements and the actual author’s creation of myt...

Download PDF file
  • EP ID EP615709
  • DOI -
  • Views 106
  • Downloads 0

How To Cite

T. V. Mykhed (2018). WANDERING AROUND THE CEMETERY OF CHILDHOOD: ELIZABETH BISHOP AND THE POETICS OF AUTO-ETHNOGRAPHY. Наукові праці. Серія "Філологія. Літературознавство", 316(304), 70-75. https://europub.co.uk/articles/-A-615709