Sarah Puetzer

I am a DPhil candidate in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, looking at contemporary Japanese poetry.

The aim of my dissertation project is to examine the intersection of text and space in contemporary Japanese experimental poetry, focusing on the act of reading. Looking at recent experiments with publishing poetry in space by young poets such as Saihate Tahi, Fuzuki Yumi, Mizusawa Nao among others, I started to wonder what happens when we encounter words of poetry not in a book or magazine, but in physical or virtual spaces, such as art galleries, hotel rooms, back alleys, virtual reality, or web applications. What happens when we move our bodies along the lines of poems, when we change directions while reading, or when we interact with the words by destroying or reassembling them to read these ‘poetic spaces’.

Combining theories of space by authors such as Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja and Maeda Ai with the field of cognitive literary studies and reader-reception theory, my dissertation will propose that physical and virtual poetic spaces can be read as ‘sites of resistance’ that negotiate not only our practice of reading poetry, but also our perception of what poetry is, pushing the boundaries of its genre. Through the creation of these poetic spaces, poetry takes on a more fluid form and invites its readers to participate more fully in its (meaning) production process. Rather than emphasising the role of the poet, the readers and their experience of reading poetry are put in the foreground.

College: Pembroke College

Department: Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

Supervisors: Dr Linda Flores and Dr Juliana Buriticá Alzate

Previous Degrees: MSc in Japanese Studies (University of Oxford), MA Comparative Literature and Art (Potsdam University), BA Comparative Literature / Japanese Studies (Free University of Berlin)