Number 72-73, spring 2019 John Clare Cluster Guest-edited by Chris Bundock

EN:

This paper employs the concept of queer to examine Percy Bysshe Shelley's Epipsychidion. Shelley's idealism towards love was widely received in atheism, materialism and Platonism. Compared with other Romantic poets, Shelley exercised his concept of love very differently. Shelley's quest for love is particularly discussed in most of his love poems. Among them Epipsychidion is a long poem that Shelley wrote to demonstrate his philosophy of love. In his later life, Shelley worked on translating Plato's philosophy, particularly The Symposium, which partly focuses on Greek love, and further pondered on his own sexuality. Shelley started to draw on atheistic materialism and Platonic metaphysics. Epipsychidion extends Shelley's early concept of love, namely "a soul within our soul," and dramatizes his narrator's love towards a female character named Emily. Different from major perspectives from Shelley critics (Notopoulos, Wasserman, Sperry, Peterfreud) who particularly pay attention to Shelley's love affairs, heterosexuality, as well as the real identity of Emily in Epipsychidion, the paper instead focuses on this poem to testify Shelley's homosexuality. The closeted poet honestly, but vaguely, discloses his traumatic love towards his male "Emily" and eventually his potential suicide with the man. I argue that a queer reading of Shelley's poetry helps to reexamine Shelley's philosophy of love in Epipsychidion.

EN:

This essay suggests that various ideas emerging in recent ecological critique – such as the Anthropocene, the near-term extinction of humanity, and the world without us – take for granted a future human observer, even though these ideas put the existence of such a person in doubt. To take the prospect of human erasure seriously, thought must go further and think its own dissolution. It may do so in part by exploring a poetics of disappearance, a model for which this essay finds in the final stanza of John Clare's "Lament of Swordy Well."

EN:

The strategies of natural history are distancing ones, and, since Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, the genre has been the subject of powerful modes of distanced reading. A corollary, perhaps, is that any instance of natural history writing, and especially, any single entry in a natural history compilation, can seem closed to “close” reading: in the field guide as in the taxonomic systems that inform its organization, the highly codified general descriptor, structurally equivalent to every other general descriptor in the set, swallows up the situated, the particular, the near. Within this arena, John Clare’s natural history writing is, in Sara Guyer’s phrase, “hyperbolically local.” Readers have variously praised Clare’s writing on natural subjects for its decentering of an anthropomorphizing perspective, for its mimetic fidelity to an experienced local environment, for what has been described as its proto-environmental or –ecological awareness. This essay pursues the forms of local attentiveness displayed in Clare’s natural history writing in a different direction, to explore how his work engages in close, critical readings of the operations of natural history. My essay tracks Clare’s pursuit of two odd birds, “the” butter bump and “a” magpie, each of which makes a “strange noise” that reverberates through its world, traversing borders, confounding equivalencies, and sounding both the power and the limits of an already-arrived natural order of things.

EN:

This article examines the phenomenon of noon in John Clare's poetry. Drawing heavily on Deleuze's notion of the middle or the intermezzo, this article makes the case that Clare's noon or midday is an exploration of what Deleuze calls life's "meantimes (des entre-temps), between-moments," and one that importantly offers us a view into the experience of the intermezzo. For Clare, noon affords a new mode of perception, one that he repeatedly frames as a shattered vision: at noon "it seems / As if crooked bits of glass / Seem'd repeatedley to pass" (6-8). While also considering the appearance of noon in the work of Clare's contemporaries, such as Shelley and Constable, the uniquely shattered vision that accompanies Clare's experience of this seemingly ubiquitous spacetime is a way to see the world in a different way outside of our routinized or habitualized modes of everyday perception. Furthermore, against a dominant tradition that imagines thought as taking flight at dusk (following Hegel), Clare's turn to noon offers thought a different line of flight. For Clare, midday becomes an important moment of knowledge, a defamiliarized moment of shattered perception, a creative synthetic event of sympoeisis, that is, the practice of mixing and making together.