Deleuzian Time-Image in Emily Dickinson: Dash/Death between Immortality and Eternity

초록

Emily Dickinson is famous for syntactically innovative punctuation in using the dash. The dash makes her a lyric cubist because it deconstructs traditional grammar and word order. It becomes a syntactic bridge between immortality and eternity. This essay explores why Dickinson’s time is analogous to Gilles Deleuze’s time-image. The dash overarches her syntactic and thematic goals. Through repetition of the dash and images of death, Dickinson continuously crystalizes her poems in the realm of time. Her poems echo several features like crystal images. The dash overarches not only the path of space-time but also the path of reality. In her poems, the poet struggles with time and timelessness or the actual and the virtual. This struggles allow us to interpret multiplied meanings. The poet attempts to build a metaphorical house in her poems. The house serves as the dwelling space for death and immortality and for possibility and paradise. The former pair waits for eternity, and the latter pair stays there. By scrutinizing a complex syntactic suspension via the dash, this essay also highlights why crystallized images parallel the syntactic function of the dash.

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