Vivisection and The Theory of Chemical Combination

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Date

2002

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature

Advisor

John Kendall, English

Abstract

"There is an inner logic and we're taught to stay far from it. It is simple and elegant, but it is cruel and antithetic and there's no effort to reveal it." This quote written by Greg Graffin for the Bad Religion punk song, "Inner Logic" sets up my creative honors thesis appropriately. It was this type of introspection, a searching for something else--is what I wanted to do and was the outcome of this project. For my thesis I split it into two parts: my own poetry and then my own critical analysis of that poetry. Vivisection is a study of learning how things work together. This allowed me to be on both sides of the operating table-as dissector and dissected. My poetry style stems out of a lack of language that has not been contaminated by exhaustive connotations that render language imprecise and insufficient to express complex emotions in a logical way. I turned to the language of science-a virtually untouched well of "clean" words that I employed to create my own "symbol library" apart from the muddled and often confusing use of worn-out symbols. I use the mathematical to deduce feelings. The result is a manuscript of original works of poetry combined with a categorized analysis that also contains my take on poetic theories. I found that "inner logic" is the language of science.

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