Cultural Poetics In Adrienne Rich’s An Atlas Of The Difficult World:Poems 1988-1991

Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929-2012) has been regarded as a distinguished poetess, feminist and critic in contemporary America. In her works after 1970s, she has been paying more attention to the society and committed to helping to transform the world with her poetry and prose writings. Despite the fact that it is rather difficult for a writer to connect poetry and politics, Rich still devotes much of her poetic writings to discussing public issues such as social equality and political justice concerning sex, race and class.An Atlas of the Difficult Word:Poems 1988-1997(1991) is a volume of poetry which manifests Rich’s political pursuit to realize her dreams of democracy and to refine her poetics. Previous studies abroad are mainly textual analysis from such perspectives as modernity and narrative strategies, while the domestic research upon this work remains rather unfound. This thesis is aimed at interpreting this volume from the perspective of cultural poetics, employing its important concepts "the historicity of texts" and "the textuality of history".Combining textual analysis with social background, this study expresses Rich’s pursuit of democratic ideals, her adherence to political and cultural stance. The collection of AADW not only reveals the hatred, misery and violence in the real modern American society caused by war, poverty and discrimination, but also tests the people who are continually pursuing love and hope. Based on the close reading, this paper hopes, from the perspective of cultural poetics, to analyze how Rich exposes, in the medium of poetry, various sorts of unfair phenomena existing in contemporary American society and show her introspection to American culture, her humanist concern for the marginalized group as well as her pursuit of the art of poetry. This exploration to Rich’s cultural poetics helps to interpret Rich’s thoughts from a new perspective in her poetry and prose writing, so as to provide an academic reference for scholars who are interested in Rich’s later works.