This week, I found our discussion on the two essays to be very compelling, but I was especially stimulated by Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde. In it, she makes comments about the importance of Poetry in the grand scheme of social change, and how from a feminist perspective, it is incredibly important for the movement that women's poetry be able to consider what changes it wants to make. I found this especially compelling because of a previous discussion I had in an early class about Realist theory, as opposed to Nominalism. The ideas of each philosophy direct apply to her assertion, and they create a very interesting set of opposing viewpoints to consider.
Firstly, the one that connects and agrees with her assertion would be Realist theory, which among other things says that poets and other arts are responsible for constructing our signified concepts. Moreover, because a signified concept is too perfect to exist in real life, real life versions of the signified will always differ slightly. The real life versions of the signified will then be studied by artists, who will then create their own concepts of what the signified looks like, and the cycle continues so that artists play a pivotal role in shaping our reality. This line of thinking very positively asserts that women's poetry will slowly be able to change public perception of feminist ideas.
On the other hand, Nominalism, as framed by Terry Eagleton, represents an opposing belief that the real world is NOT based on the Signified concepts created by poets, but rather all of its particulars. Specifically, rather than having one main signified concept and a variety of different real world interpretations of it that allow for change, Nominalism believes that each variation is a completely different entity and that there isn't an overarching connecting threat between them. In this way, feminist progress made by poetry is far more based on the luck and happenstance what kind of people feel motivated by what individual poems, placing the burden on the poets to make the change in the world directly themselves. This is theory definitely helps explain why it is so difficult for it to feel like women's poetry will ever make great progress. How it all will unfold in the future of course is yet to be seen, so it the meantime, it all seems to be a matter of preference as to how you frame it.
Hmm, interesting to think about Lorde and the political power of poetry in these ways... also we might consider, in either theory, how the political and aesthetic move in reverse or discontinuous order at times as well, that is to say some art may motivate political activism and some activism may motivate kinds of art. And certainly there are delays and detours and variation to the process no matter in which direction it goes. Anyway will keep thinking about it.
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