Simulations/shape-shifting surrealism: Rikki Ducornet's poetry of feminist intersubjectivity

UnrestrictedThis dissertation consists of two components. The first is a collection of poems, collectively titled Simulations, which seek to examine the liminal spaces between the reader and the writer, text and meaning. I explore the anxieties behind the impetus, both on the part of the reader and the writer, to control the written text by ascribing meaning, form, plot or structure to it. These poems often directly engage with the texts of other writers, ranging from Benjamin Franklin to Darwin to Lewis Carroll, playing with ideas of authorship and authorial intent. By emphasizing the reader s power over the text, this work is especially concerned with exploring reading as a method of rewriting.; The second component is a meditative long essay on the work of poet, novelist, and visual artist Rikki Ducornet. I examine Ducornet's poetry as an extension and reformulation of the original surrealist theories and techniques as conceived and practiced by early male members of the surrealist movement. Ducornet's poems, for example, with their many images of mutilated and maimed female bodies, recall Hans Bellmer's Poupées, often criticized for objectifying women's bodies and eroticizing female pain. Yet Ducornet uses these same surrealist methodologies as tools for socio-political critique, to re-envision female agency and intersubjectivity. In exploring Ducornet's work, I will also trace a genealogy of feminist writers and artists who co-opt and reinvigorate surrealist techniques with a political and artistic impetus, underscoring surrealism's relevance and utility today both as an aesthetic and political practice