Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

2-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Comparative Literature

Advisor

Bettina Lerner

Committee Members

John Brenkman

Sorin Cucu

Subject Categories

Comparative Literature

Keywords

Comparative Literature, Poetry, Lyric, Philosophy, Theory, Romanticism, Modernism

Abstract

Drawing on Michel Foucault’s work on the Ancient Greek practice of the care of the self, this dissertation argues that lyric poetry is a technology of the self: an ethical practice that creates potential for self-transformation through the demands it places on language and modes of attention. Lyric thus maintains a form of truth discourse overshadowed by the Cartesian conception of truth as propositional and method-driven. Unlike contemporary self-care, the care of the self, as the original Greek epimeleia heautou entails, is care inflected by concern and anxiety: the practicing subject places her thoughts, assumptions, ways of being, and—in the case of lyric—language under scrutiny as she cultivates a self capable of truth.

Lyric poetry, I contend, is not a retreat into interiority but a relational practice that places the subject under pressure and at risk. This risk arises from the interplay of language and consciousness: drawing on Julia Kristeva’s account of entry into the symbolic order and Paul Celan’s concept of language as strangeness and poetry as a “second strangeness,” the dissertation shows how lyric’s demands on language create potential for self-transformation. Niklas Luhmann’s concept of risk, as a modern way of navigating the unfamiliar through symbol and myth, further illuminates lyric’s ethical potential as a technology of the self.

Through close readings of six poets, this dissertation demonstrates that lyric’s function as a technology of the self is not governed by fixed formal criteria. In Chapter I, William Wordsworth and John Keats offer contrasting Romantic models of selfhood. In Chapter II, Charles Baudelaire and Emily Dickinson are presented as inaugural figures of modern poetry, explored through the idea of their poetry as an alternative spirituality. In Chapter III, Rilke and Graham are paired based on shared philosophical preoccupations, analyzed through Martin Heidegger’s thinking on truth as disclosure and attentiveness. Together, these pairings show how lyric produces a relational space in which a work on/of language becomes an event providing the potential for transformation of the subject through exploration of language, attentiveness and ways of being.

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