John Clare and Embodied Aesthetic Engagement With Wild Plants

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper explores John Clare’s embodied aesthetic engagement with vegetations of wasteland landscape, from the perspectives of embodied aesthetics, which proposes that the body is the locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation during human beings’ experiencing nature. The traditional Romantic poems, in which the landscape is often presented as an object for observation or meditation, presuppose a representational distance between the human subject and the natural object; however, in Clare’s poems, the subject is always involved in its immediate environments. I will argue that Clare intensely engages with wild flowers and trees through his synaesthetic experiences and his aesthetically meaningful physical interactions. The sense of synaesthesia allows Clare to experience the fusion of his whole sensory being and the holistic sensuous qualities of the natural environment. Clare’s aesthetic experiences are therefore his intense, unified daily interactions with the environment. Clare’s embodied aesthetic engagement offers us a unique way to aesthetically get involved with the plant world in our surrounding environment.

참고문헌 (Reference)

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