The critique of symbolic representation in Emily Dickinson's poetry: Seeing things in themselves (Du Fu, China)

This dissertation explores how Emily Dickinson looks at things and life from a cross-cultural perspective. Based on my research on the typological and symbolic view of nature in the New England cultural tradition, I find that Emily Dickinson's poetry undermines this representational tendency by presenting things and life in her response to them. Although her language still employs a New England vocabulary, it ceases to assume its Calvinistic and Transcendental meanings; she speaks through a lyric voice, a representative poetic persona, to reveal her zhi, an ancient Chinese literary term, which means what is intently on the mind.; In order to show Dickinson's non-representational perception of things and life, I read her poetry together with that of a major ancient Chinese lyric poet, Du Fu. This comparative reading is conducted with the interpretative model of ancient Chinese literary thoughts of Liu Xie and Wang Guo-wei. They bring forth the concepts of wen and worlds, which see poetry in its fulfillment of the aesthetic pattern of the universe and in its manifestation of the essence of things and human emotions in the poetic situations.; Du Fu and Emily Dickinson show reverence towards life and respond to the ordinary facts with the sense of ecstasy. The lyric self in their poems speaks to readers beyond the cultural representation of their historical selves. The lyric self sees aesthetic pattern in things in a world without a self, or shares his true feelings with things in a world with a self. In this way, Du Fu and Emily Dickinson present a beautiful world or a sublime world to give peace and encouragement to readers.