Gary Snyder´s Poetics of the Unconscious in The Back Country
Abstract: Gary Snyder is a well-acclaimed contemporary American poet. Substantial critical attention has been paid to his ecopoetics due to his epithet, the poet-laureate of deep ecology, and his poetics of the unconscious is largely ignored. The thesis explores his poetics of the unconscious manifested in his poetry collection, The Back Country, from a psychoanalytic perspective. The thesis approaches the collection respectively from the angles of Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, and Jacques Lacan. The Back Country shows Snyder’s substantial understanding of the unconscious and it is a crucial force that shapes his poetics.
Keywords: Gary Snyder, The Back Country, the unconscious
Contents
Abstract 1
摘 要 1
Introduction 2
1.1 Gary Snyder and The Back Country 2
1.2 Literature Review 3
1.3 Snyder’s Revelation of the Poetics of the Unconscious 3
1.4 Psychoanalysis as the theoretical Foundation 4
2 The personal Unconscious in The Back Country 5
2.1 The Power-Vision and Freud’s Models of the Human Psyche 6
2.2 Meditation and the Unconscious 7
2.3 Simplicity of Snyder’s poetic Language and the Dream-Work 9
2.3 The uncanny Feeling toward the Mother 11
3 The collective Unconscious in The Back Country 13
3.1 The archetypal Images in The Back Country 13
3.1.1 The archetypal Images of the Mother 13
3.1.2 The archetypal Images of the Trickster 15
3.1.3 Archetypal Images and Cultural Transmission 17
3.2 Snyder’s Comprehension of the collective Unconscious 18
3.2.1 Jung’s famous Dream 18
3.2.2 The rise of Poetry from the collective Unconscious 19
4 Snyder’s Poetics and Lacan’s Challenges 21
4.1 The Inadequacy of Language 21
4.1.1 Unspeakable Buddhist Experience 21
4.1.2 The Koan in Poetry as the Vehicle of Experience 22
4.2 The Making whole Force of the Poet and Poetry 23
4.2.1 Wholeness with Nature and Wholeness with the Unconscious 24
4.2.2 The Integration of Snyder’s Poems and Speakers 24
4.2.3 The Speaker as The “Other” 25
4.2.4 The Speaker as Snyder’s ideal Persona 26
5 Conclusion 27
Work Cited 29
Acknowledgements 30
