UM professor explores link between poetry, philosophy

ORONO – Jennifer Anna Gosetti, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Maine, is one of an increasing number of international scholars challenging the traditional distinctions between philosophy and poetry, and between the written and the visual.

Gosetti recently presented her research in these areas at two international conferences. Her paper, “Confirmations of Life in a Phenomenology of Poetic Images,” was featured at the International Congress of Phenomenology, June 26-28, at Thomas Aquinas University and the Polish Academy of the Sciences in Rome.

She presented “The Written and the Visual Image: Beyond Ekphrasic Aesthetics with Rilke and Cezanne,” at the International Association of Philosophy and Literature Conference, June 4-8, at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

Gosetti, a published poet, works within the framework of the Continental tradition since Kant. Continental philosophy developed in Europe and includes areas such as phenomenology, deconstruction, aesthetics and existentialism, and philosophers like Derrida, Foucault, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Marx and Habermas.

Phenomenology is the study of the structures of human consciousness, and involves the description of experience for self-conscious beings.

Gosetti said literature and art, like phenomenological philosophy, not only describe experiences, but also make apparent the ways in which experience itself is made possible.

“Confirmations of Life” explores the connections between philosophy and poetry, arguing that both are necessary for the study of experience, and thus for adequate self-understanding.

“The divide between philosophy and poetry, in which poetry is presented as subordinate to philosophy, is ancient, dating back to Plato. Philosophy tries to provide an understanding of reality as a correlate of rational knowledge, but we need a richer set of perspectives on reality in order to fully account for it.

“Ordinarily, we don’t see life as a spectacle unfolding before us. But when we look at the world poetically or aesthetically, it appears to us in a richer, more manifest way. We notice our own involvement in the way it appears. As such, poetry is as valuable as philosophy for understanding reality,” Gosetti said.

Furthermore, the efforts to unite philosophy and poetry are opening up fresh interpretations of the history of philosophy.

“For instance, the works of philosophers like Plato, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard are not only philosophical arguments, but also are constructed aesthetically, in a poetic or literary manner. Recognizing that allows us to appreciate the history of philosophy as far more complicated than a strict epistimological demand for clarity would allow,” Gosetti said.

Aesthetics, or the philosophy of art, has long used painting as the primary mode for understanding art. It has treated paintings as spatial, not temporal objects, which can be discerned through the visual sense. Poetry, on the other hand, has been considered temporal, not spatial.

In “The Written and the Visual Image,” Gosetti explores the relationship between the paintings of Paul Cezanne and the poetry of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke in order to challenge this traditional distinction between poetry and painting.

Rilke studied Cezanne’s work and credited it with giving him a “grasp of the real.” Rilke and Cezanne are seen to illustrate the connections between the visual images of painting and the visually imagined images generated by poetic language.

“In modern painting and modern poetry we begin to notice something special. Painting has ceased to be satisfied with representing space – it also wants to condense time into a spatial object. Likewise, poetry has ceased to be satisfied with presenting events as unfolding in time – poetry wants to be as solid as an object. Therefore, traditional models of understanding art based on painting alone are inadequate. Art must be looked at as an unfolding of experience in a multisensory way,” Gosetti said.

For Gosetti, poetry and art create a “third level” of reality that cannot be reduced either to the words or images themselves or to the objects to which the words or images refer. This third level enriches our philosophical understanding of reality.

“In poetry and in visual art, elements such as words, colors, lines or poetic images are juxtaposed so that our experience of reality is not reducible to one or another of those elements. Rather, those elements are joined together, creating a new level of reality and giving us a new experience. That third layer is the human layer, opening up to us the richness of the world that art and poetry are gifted to bring to our awareness.

“Because I write poetry, it makes me more sensitive, as a philosopher, to what artists and poets are trying to do. It helps me understand how something constructed out of words can evoke that third level of reality in someone else,” Gosetti said.

Gosetti has a book manuscript, “Heidegger, Hoelderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language,” under review at Indiana University Press.

Gosetti holds a doctorate in philosophy from Villanova University and a master’s degree in poetry from Columbia University.