{"title":"The Surface of the World: W. H. Auden and the Umwelt","authors":"Lorenzo Bartolucci","doi":"10.1215/00267929-11060455","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n Before alighting on his vocation, the poet W. H. Auden grew up among doctors and went to Oxford University to study not literature but the natural sciences. This article pursues the ramifications of that background through the development of Auden’s career, focusing on his biographical and intellectual adjacency to the biologist Jakob von Uexküll. Several close readings illustrate the resonance between Uexküll’s theory of the Umwelt and an epistemological shift at the heart of Auden’s poetry, wherein the idea of the self is reconfigured in terms of the embodied experience of inhabiting a place. In this way, a new perspective takes form on the transdisciplinary scope of literary history, its broader cultural relevance, and the mutuality between the poetic and the scientific imaginations of our own day.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2024-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-11060455","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"N/A","JCRName":"LITERATURE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Before alighting on his vocation, the poet W. H. Auden grew up among doctors and went to Oxford University to study not literature but the natural sciences. This article pursues the ramifications of that background through the development of Auden’s career, focusing on his biographical and intellectual adjacency to the biologist Jakob von Uexküll. Several close readings illustrate the resonance between Uexküll’s theory of the Umwelt and an epistemological shift at the heart of Auden’s poetry, wherein the idea of the self is reconfigured in terms of the embodied experience of inhabiting a place. In this way, a new perspective takes form on the transdisciplinary scope of literary history, its broader cultural relevance, and the mutuality between the poetic and the scientific imaginations of our own day.
诗人奥登(W. H. Auden)从小在医生中间长大,进入牛津大学学习的不是文学,而是自然科学。本文通过奥登职业生涯的发展来探究这一背景的影响,重点关注他与生物学家雅各布-冯-乌克斯库尔(Jakob von Uexküll)在传记和思想上的关系。通过几篇精读文章,我们可以看到乌克斯库尔的 "环境 "理论与奥登诗歌核心的认识论转变之间的共鸣,在奥登的诗歌中,自我的概念从栖息地的身体体验角度进行了重构。这样,一个关于文学史的跨学科范围、其更广泛的文化相关性以及当代诗歌与科学想象力之间相互关系的新视角就形成了。
期刊介绍:
MLQ focuses on change, both in literary practice and within the profession of literature itself. The journal is open to essays on literary change from the Middle Ages to the present and welcomes theoretical reflections on the relationship of literary change or historicism to feminism, ethnic studies, cultural materialism, discourse analysis, and all other forms of representation and cultural critique. Seeing texts as the depictions, agents, and vehicles of change, MLQ targets literature as a commanding and vital force.