Linguistics and the Analysis of Verbal Art in the Poetry of Evie Shockley

Speaker: Dr. William Scott (Pitt English)

This presentation focuses on some possible ways that linguistics can enrich the analysis of poetry by exploring the formal analysis of verbal art. Although there was a burst of scholarship in this field among both linguists and literary scholars from the mid-1950s up to the end of the 1960s, this research (often dubbed “stylistics”) has been forgotten, for the most part, as the two disciplines increasingly grew apart from one another since that time. Scott’s current research project, “Braided Language: Syntax and the Poetry of Evie Shockley,” reinvigorates this cross-disciplinary field of study through linguistic analysis of a large number of Evie Shockley’s poetic works. It thus seeks to provide scholars of poetry, literary historians, and poets themselves with the theoretical and conceptual tools they need to expand their knowledge of the nuances of poetic language. Scott’s main theoretical claim is that our present knowledge of the workings of language—and of poetry in particular—can be advanced by allowing the different methods and insights of these two disciplines to inform one another in a reciprocal, constructive, and generative manner. The colloquium is therefore addressed to an audience interested in a) the broad interface of linguistics and poetics—specifically, the syntactic design of poetic utterances, as well as b) the innovative forms of verbal art that can be found among contemporary, English-language poets, particularly African American poets.