Helena Van Praet – författare

Making art relies on a process of intuitive discovery that begins prior to knowing and overrides intention. Anne Carson and the Unknown delves into the varied ways the contemporary poet and classicist Anne Carson engages with the unknown, both as a philosophical concept and as a method of creative practice. Bringing together various contemporary perspectives, ranging from the world of quantum physics to feminist literary criticism and media studies, this volume considers how contemporary poets like Anne Carson continue to show the relevance of the unknown in our turbulent times of global upheaval.It covers Carson’s unusual travelogue about the collapse of civilizations and knowledge, positions her oeuvre in the context of a wider debate on post-critique, and reads her work as an engagement with a radically formalist Classics that goes back to ancient Greek’s etymological complexity. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the volume dives into her work’s ambiguous relationships with trans experience and religion, the centrality of the psychoanalytical concept of the caesura, and her use of figures like Helen of Troy and Herakles. It also discusses the unknown as a visual mechanism in her recent creative collaboration with comics creator Rosanna Bruno. In this way, Carson provides a necessary counter to both Western scientific knowledge’s goals of predictability and rationality, and to the algorithmic certitudes sought by the engineering culture of technologists who prevail today.

A stimulating cross-disciplinary study of how poetry taps into an embodied cognition at its various levels of signification. Feeling-Thinking or Embodied Cognition in the Poetry of Rozalie Hirs and Anne Carson asks: How can we feel-think in poetry and what are the effects of this embodied cognition for the resulting poetic epistemology? Combining a new materialist approach with insights from psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science, Helena Van Praet argues that such poetry is not only about felt knowledge but that it also invites readers to feel-think on a formal, sensory-material, and discursive level.Using a comparative corpus focused on the contemporary writing of Dutch poet Rozalie Hirs and Canadian poet Anne Carson, this study uses experimental strategies such as situated conceptualizations, word streams, poetic metalepsis, networked configurations, screen thinking, and discursive cues to explore how knowledge and meaning are bodily mediated in poetry. It demonstrates that meaning is not just propositional but rather something that you do with your entire body and that poetry is the prime genre to show such an embodied cognition at work.While earlier accounts tend to be limited to the physicality of the mind or mainly focus on either feeling or thinking, this book develops a full-bodied theory of embodied cognition in poetry. Through close readings, Feeling-Thinking shows how poetry can offer us alternative conceptions of knowledge that transcend purely rational accounts, inviting us to find joy in such cognitive creation.