Solitude and the Consent of Language: Marosa di Giorgio and Emily Dickinson

“Solitude and the Consent of Language: Marosa di Giorgio and Emily Dickinson,” examines how the Uruguayan, Marosa di Giorgio, draws from Emily Dickinson’s poetry to imagine the mind’s solitude as a recuperation of linguistic and signifying freedom within the acute context of imposed consent during the Uruguayan dictatorship. I suggest that the question at work within both poet’s oeuvre has to do with how poetic form might access the tension between what each understood as the mind’s solitude, that is, its individual interpretive processes, and the pulls of communal life, which include governmental, juridical, narrative and pedagogical systems, as they are negotiated through language. In addition to being an interdisciplinary analysis that brings together the fields of philosophy, U.S., and Latin American letters, this paper calls attention to two women writers who are rarely considered together within literary and cultural studies.