A Study Of Louise Glück From The Perspective Of Heidegger’s Existentialism

Louise Glück(born in 1943)is an influential American writer and poet who,in 2020,was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.In fact,she had been internationally recognized long before she won the Nobel Prize,as testified by a host of important literary awards won over her career.Many critics have analyzed and appreciated her poetry.However,in Chinese academia,Glück’s works remain insufficiently studied,which is a great pity but leaves space for further exploration.This dissertation fills this obvious gap.Drawing on Heidegger’s philosophical concepts,it comprehensively examines Glück’s oeuvre,ranging from her poetry collections and poetry reviews to her most recent novel,to have a more in-depth grasp of her configuration of creative writing and her construction of the aesthetics of life.Through comprehensive and in-depth exploration of Glück’s complete works so far,this dissertation demonstrates that her unique creation of poetry and novel has realized the unity of existential philosophy and the aesthetics of life.As the author of this dissertation argues,breaking out of the limitations of self-pity and self-conceit that are normally associated with the confessional school,Glück not only focuses on revealing and complicating the inner world of the individual speaker,but also pays enormous attention to the living state and ethical dilemma of modern people struggling to come to terms with the self and the environment.Taking this troubled existence of modern human being as the thematic issue,this dissertation explores how Glück,though her poems and other works,unifies individuality with the universality of the world,with the attempt to show her unique aesthetic construction of existence.It firstly scrutinizes how Glück utilizes imagery of non-human beings such as plants,fire,and animals,which are prominent in her poetry,to register her conceptualization of the poetics of existence.It then moves on to examine the connection between the poetics of silence and Glück’s writerly anxiety by speaking to the philosophies of voice and silence.It expounds on how Glück utilizes the discourse of infants to break the anxiety of the self in her latest novel.Finally,it examines how Glück organically integrates diversified writing strategies with her profound philosophical reflections on life in the creative process.Glück organically combined the aesthetic function and educational function of literature,which has an important reference and practical guiding significance for solving the ecological crisis and humanistic crisis prevailing in the technological era and exploring the ideal pattern of human existence in the world.Few studies on Glück in the past explore this dimension.The analysis of the philosophy of existence and life aesthetics in Glück’s poems provides us with a new interpretation of her poems,and also brings us enlightenment to solve the common existence dilemma faced by all human beings.