'For the Relief of the Body and the Reconstruction of the Mind': Adrienne Rich’s Metamorphoses
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2015
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Polish Association for American Studies
Abstract
By looking at Adrienne Rich’s poetic and political transitions, this article attempts to demonstrate how her politics of location galvanized her into writing a “whole new poetry.” The source of its newness lies, however, not so much in avant-gardist formal experimentation, but rather in its rootedness in the complexities of lived corporeal experience.It is the body that emerges in Rich’s later writingas a primary form of the subject’s locatedness – the “geography closest in.” Importantly, she views the body as a site of potentiality rather than a passive surface of sociopolitical inscriptions, and refers to corporeal materiality without falling into the trap of naïve essentialism. As I argue, such conceptualization of the body makes Rich’s workparticularly interesting from the neo-materialist perspective.
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Mąkowska, Joanna. "'For the Relief of the Body and the Reconstruction of the Mind': Adrienne Rich’s Metamorphoses," Polish Journal for American Studies, nr 9, 2015, 97-111.