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Oscillations – on Subject and Gender in Late Modernism
Author(s) -
Pape Lis Wedell
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0730.1998.tb00110.x
Subject(s) - subject (documents) , deconstruction (building) , poetry , modernism (music) , philosophy , metaphysics , literature , epistemology , western thought , aesthetics , linguistics , art , computer science , ecology , library science , biology
Oscillations presents an attempt to correlate two different aspects of late modern thought: the problem of the subject and the problem of gender. As the latter is considered a derivation of the former, the article attaches the greatest importance to discussing the subject as a classical modern figure of thought which, as terminal term, has prevailed in Western thought for centuries. Hence the discussion has 20th century critique of metaphysics as its frame of reference (primarily Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida). The deconstruction of the subject is, however, not only dealt with in philosophical terms. On the contrary, it is the principal matter of the article to show that poetic language of late modern poetry with its fundamental non‐determinability is the privileged scene of this operation. Thus the article elaborates a rather detailed analysis of one of the texts in the Danish poet Inger Christensen's work, alphabet . It is argued that in its polysemic movements the poem displays a decentred subject figure that fluctuates in its interchange with nature and the universe as a whole. Thus poetic language does not deal with deconstruction of the subject (something which would transform it into philosophical discourse), it has the capability of showing it.