Lyric ethics: The matter and time of ecopoetry (Jan Zwicky, Don McKay, Jorie Graham)

This thesis intervenes in the burgeoning field of ecocriticism in order to critique the emphasis given to the complexities of place over time in environmental literature and to challenge the recourse to the aesthetics of realism that have determined the ethics of representation in ecopoetry. Moreover, by focusing on Canadian and American poets, it is the aim of this project to broaden the scope of ecocriticism beyond traditional national boundaries. This study argues that the structural relation of "metaphoricity," the articulatory dynamic between is/is not, constitutes an ethical relationship, understood in both spatial and temporal terms, between the human and non-human world.; By claiming that quantum mechanics reveals the metaphoricity that constitutes matter, the opening chapter "Lyric Matter" proposes that the ethical priority that is given to the equation between realism and materialism in ecocriticism undermines lyrical apprehensions of materiality that eschew linguistic totality. Rather, as the second chapter "The Matter of Poetry" points out, the metaphorical poems of Canadians Jan Zwicky and Don McKay, and American Jorie Graham, are examples of ethical attentiveness to this relational (linguistic/nonlinguistic) apprehension of matter, or "material metaphoricity." The third chapter "Lyric Ethics" challenges Emmanuel Levinas's opposition to metaphorical language by proposing that his ethics is lyrical because it is founded upon the dynamic of metaphoricity---the self and the other are articulated together, connected and yet distinct. Building on temporal concerns in Levinas's ethics, the fourth chapter "Lyric Time" extends the discussion of metaphoricity to time from three related perspectives: geology, archives, and phenomenological time. As an attempt to correct the ecocritical subordination of time to place, this chapter argues for an "archival approach" to materiality that requires openness to the irreducible temporalities of "deep time." The last chapter "Archivists of the Elemental" examines works by the three poets that deal with time and elemental matter in order to argue that "wonder" (distinct from the sublime) is a form of metaphorical apprehension that opens one to the plurality and depth of time as well as to the "exemplarity" of matter, or the degree to which matter is beside itself, irreducible to language.