To turn the Being round and round, And pause at every pound : En fenomenologisk undersökning av kroppen och rummet som narrativa element i fem dikter av Emily Dickinson

Sammanfattning: This essay seeks to investigate how bodies can be understood as a narrative element in five poems written by the American poet Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886). Using phenomenology as understood by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Elizabeth Grosz as a theoretical framework and a corporeal narratology as drawn up by Daniel Punday, the essay explores how the bodies of the characters within the fictional world are portrayed, which bodies are present and what places and types of situations they occupy. All in order to see how the narrative as a whole is affected in each poem. The essay uses the terms body and space, as being defined by the theoretical underpinnings, to structure the analysis. The study shows that the body indeed can be understood as a way of structuring the narrative in the poems. Mainly, the present bodies are used as a way of organizing spatiality and form a specific perspective. The degree of activity of the different bodies are also dependent on normative and conventional aspects. The use of narratology when analyzing poems of this sort requires flexibility, especially since the study focuses on elements that are not always explicitly portrayed.