Dafydd Sinden
Doctoral Student in Literature - Dafydd’s thesis is entitled ‘Forms of Attention during the British Poetry Revival, 1968-1995’.
Research project title
Forms of Attention during the British Poetry Revival, 1968-1995
Supervisors
Dr Alex Niven and Dr Mark Byers
Contact details
Email: d.sinden2@newcastle.ac.uk
Research interests
- Anglo-American modernist poetry
- critical and cultural theory
- intersections between philosophy and literature
- the material and social history of small presses and little magazines
A brief outline of my research project
This project interrogates the forms of attention and observation practised during the British Poetry Revival. Its central premise is that the penetration into Anglophone thought of new ideas coined by continental philosophers from the 1960s onwards (manifested by, e.g., the translation into English of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception in 1962, or Debord’s Society of the Spectacle in 1970) prompted a newfound poetic attention to the act of attention itself; and an enquiry into the nature of observation. Using an approach that is both literary-historical and theoretical, I propose that works written between 1968 and 1995 by Colin Simms, Bill Griffiths, J. H. Prynne, Peter Riley and R. F. Langley stage a tension between the primacy and facticity of phenomenal experience; and the ousting of that experience by representation, whereby each act of perception, when examined, reveals its contingency and its mediation. I aim to demonstrate how British late modernism mounted a new challenge to earlier forms of modernist subjectivism, through its laying bare of the mediating lens between self and world and its insistence that immediate experience is invariably abstracted into forms of knowledge that are historically and materially situated.
- '“We are the social strand | which is already past the twistpoint & | into the furnace”: community, intersubjectivity and reciprocal exchange in late-modernist British poetry.' "Community", SELLL PG Summer Conference, Newcastle University (June 2021)
- '“ez easy as Pound pound it out”: the fate of Pound’s ideogrammic method in ‘late modernist’ British poetry of the 60s and 70s.' New Work in Modernist Studies 2021, organised by British Association of Modernist Studies, online (December 2021)
- University College London: Dean’s List, 2016; John Oliver Hobbes Memorial Scholar, 2016; West Scholar, 2015