Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Semester of Graduation
Spring 2026
Department
English
Document Type
Dissertation
Abstract
Split-Peaches: Space, Place, and Split-Presence in Emily Dickinson & Lorine Niedecker is a hybrid dissertation that advances split-presence as both a critical framework and a creative practice. Defined as a phenomenological and linguistic condition in which multiple modes of awareness coexist without resolution, split-presence reframes poetry as an inhabitable, relational space rather than a closed interpretive object . Drawing on feminist and poststructuralist theory— including Julia Kristeva’s subject-in-process, Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of space, and Adrienne Rich’s reconfigurations of interiority—the project positions poetic form as a site of spatial, epistemological, and affective negotiation. The critical portion places Emily Dickinson and Lorine Niedecker in dialogue to demonstrate how poetic form generates dynamic environments of meaning. Dickinson’s dashes, epistolary practices, and architectural imagery create threshold spaces that oscillate between presence and absence, visibility and concealment. Niedecker’s poetics of condensation, shaped by material conditions of class and environment, transforms constraint into a generative method that resists literary and cultural hierarchies. In both cases, fragmentation and compression operate not as limitations, but as strategies that destabilize binary frameworks—interior/exterior, subject/object—and invite readers into active participation in meaning-making. The creative manuscript, dodge & burn, extends and enacts this framework through formal hybridity and lyrical disjunction. Composed of fragmentary sequences, shifting speakers, and recursive spatial imagery, the manuscript resists linear narrative in favor of simultaneity and multiplicity. Bodies become landscapes, domestic spaces rupture into sites of memory and transformation, and recurring motifs—houses, forests, thresholds, ruins—serve as unstable coordinates within an evolving poetic terrain. Meaning emerges relationally through juxtaposition, repetition, and silence, requiring readers to dwell within uncertainty. Together, the critical and creative components form a dialogic structure in which theory and practice continuously inform one another. Rather than illustrating argument, the creative work performs it, proposing poetry as an immersive spatial practice grounded in tension, instability, and collaboration. This project contributes to feminist poetics, ecocriticism, and spatial theory by offering a model of reading and writing that embraces indeterminacy as a generative condition—one in which language becomes a site of ongoing negotiation, resistance, and becoming.
Date
2-6-2026
Recommended Citation
Schaefer, Samantha M., "SPLIT-PEACHES: Space, Place & Split-Presence in Emily Dickinson & Lorine Niedecker" (2026). Doctoral Dissertations. 69.
https://scholarshub.louisiana.edu/dissertations/69
First Committee Chair
Henk Rossouw
Second Committee Chair
Jennifer C. Vaught
First Committee Member
David Squires