Abstract

This study explores the relationship between reality and mind in the writings of Wallace Stevens, Martin Heidegger, and Edmund Husserl. Even though Stevensian critics have already compared his poetry with Husserlian and Heideggerian versions of phenomenology, no Stevens' critic has analyzed Husserl and Heidegger in great detail to show all the implications of such a comparison between the poet and the philosophers. My dissertation gives an extensive elaboration of the texts of Husserl and Heidegger on the problematics of reality and mind. My discussions also use other phenomenologists such as Emmanuel Levinas, Roman Ingarden, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Mikel Dufrenne. With detailed analysis of Heidegger and Husserl, I argue that these two philosophers focus on the interaction between reality and mind. In contrast with the traditional ideas in Stevensian criticism, which often assumes a facile distinction between reality and imagination, I explore, with the phenomenological principles, Stevens' attitude toward an unmediated reality. I show that even those poems which are supposed to celebrate an independent reality implicitly uphold the power of mind, and, likewise, those poems which insist on imagination show a strong awareness of the physical world. ;The introductory section maps out the ways in which wrong assumptions about phenomenology and reality/mind polarization have misled Stevens studies; the first chapter constructs a theoretical framework with analyses of Husserl and Heidegger on the question of reality; the second chapter discusses Stevens' poems which uphold the power of reality to show that such poems do not necessarily deny the esemplastic value of imagination; the third chapter shows that his poems which foreground imagination do not exclude the physical reality. The fourth chapter examines the parallel ideas in Heidegger and Stevens on death, silence, and negation to show that for both of them these three ideas are part of our very existence. The fifth and final chapter discusses the limitations of phenomenological texts and suggests that the poet and the philosophers can enlighten each other