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'Pour garder l'impossible intact' : the poetry of Heather Dohollau

Date
30/11/2009
Author
O'Connor, Clémence
Supervisor
Evans, David Elwyn
Keywords
Heather Dohollau
Contemporary French poetry
Poetry and philosophy
Poetry and memory studies
Poetry and place
The return
The after-image
Poetry and visual arts
Ekphrasis
Haptic gaze
Poetry and rhythm
Bilingualism and translation
Welsh and Breton identities
Poetry and mourning
Benjamin
Derrida
Heidegger
Blanchot and poetry
The idiom
The limits of language
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Abstract
This dissertation offers the first extended study of the work of the Welsh-French poet Heather Dohollau, whose substantial œuvre in French, published since 1974, has recently received international critical recognition. My thesis centres on the idea of traversée, which originates in Dohollau’s experience of exiles, returns and bilingualism. My chapters elucidate five interconnected themes which all relate to that overarching paradigm. Chapter 1 focuses on Dohollau’s trajectories as reflected in poems on the memory of place, concentrating on South Wales and the island. The quest for place is also a quest for the past, which is handled as an after-image capable of upwelling into the present. Chapter 2 investigates the visual-verbal bilingualism towards which Dohollau’s texts on specific artworks (or ekphrastic texts) seem to strive. Dohollau revitalizes the ekphrastic tradition and challenges its conventional connotations of power struggle (W. J. T. Mitchell) in favour of a poetics of hospitality. Chapter 3 is dedicated to Dohollau’s ethos and practice of slowness. It undertakes a close-reading analysis of her syntactic and sound-related rhythms, connecting them with Derrida’s différance. The idea of poetry as a foreign language is discussed in chapter 4: Dohollau’s adoption of French as her main poetic language in the mid-1960s, her handling of motherhood and daughterhood, and her quest for a poetics of mourning and fidelity are examined in their interrelations. The concluding chapter explores the boundaries between language and the unsaid. Dohollau has been uniquely placed to engage with postwar reassessments of language and its limits (Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot), poised as she is between languages and media. As her poems show, such limits constitute a poetic resource in their own right. Her carefully cultivated liminal stance has given her important insights into the creative process as a passage into words from an unwritten, yet not utterly inchoate other of the poem.
Type
Thesis, PhD Doctor of Philosophy
Rights
Embargo Date: 2022-09-20
Embargo Reason: Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations. Electronic version restricted until 20th September 2022
Collections
  • French Theses
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/791

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