Rupture: Exposing the Instability of a State Apparatus Through Poetic Descriptions of a Natural World

Abstract

The thesis uses the critical lens of Deleuze and Guattari on the poetry of George Gordon Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Bobby Sands to illustrate the way natural elements deconstruct the power of a state apparatus by exposing it as a temporary social construct. I argue that literature creates the idea of a nation by perpetuating narratives that divide the world into borders; conversely, literature can dissolve political boundaries into natural elements beneath borders through the cultivation of desire towards wild spaces. By positioning the locus of control beneath the social construct performing on its surface, poets destabilize the state apparatus's desire to quantify, contain, and striate the world unopposed; thus, ecocentric poetry exposes lines of flight beyond confinement that would otherwise subjugate individuals into homogenous classifications. The three chapters are founded upon Deleuze and Guattari’s binary terms of smooth vs striated space to organize territorialization. Ultimately the conclusion is that smooth and striated space are not fixed in existence but perceptual, and thus a text has power to construct a subject’s interpretation of the world.