Stanford Humanities Center
Jonathan Atkins is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford, working on poetry and poetics from the nineteenth century to the present. His overriding interest is in exploring and trying to articulate the different forms of thinking that poetry both enables and requires and that poetics facilitates, and to argue for the values associated therewith. Along these lines, he is also interested in the possibility of a legal poetics, and the theoretical and methodological connections between and among poetics, philosophy, the natural sciences, and performance.
SHC Project
To Continue to End: Verse and the Performance of the Limit
My dissertation project theorizes a specific phenomenology of language based on the principles of verse as it has been practiced over the last two centuries. The central argument is that poets writing in English during this period have crafted verse in such a way as to activate structures of performance-in-text that make the limits of language available from within, as a continuing feature of the experience of reading. Verse therefore also realizes an epistemology that corresponds structurally to form rather than to content, demonstrating that a concept of form as that which lies along the limits of language is stabler and more fundamental to meaning than is "content."
