Reciprocal Reflections: The Lyrical Dialogue of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath

In her introduction to The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir asks how it is that the reciprocity that exists between individuals and groups cannot be recognized between the sexes. Beauvoir envisions a social space in which the statement 'I am a woman' will b e received as an affirmative part of a reciprocal relationship rather than as a limitation. My theoretical exploration emerges from such problematisations and will investigate the manners in which a mutual sense of reciprocity can be achieved. The project will have an ontologic-ethical as well as an epistemological focus, asking not only how sexual difference is, but what it is. The project will employ the relation between self and other as a dynamic space in which Heidegger's reciprocal reflection may be realised as a practice which allows being to be present in its presence, opening up to the freedom of the in-between. The theoretical structures essential to the project will be investigated cotextually with the combined works of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Pl ath, whose oeuvres contain challenging and problematic metaphorisations of sex and gender, both in terms of the material body and of more abstract notions of femininity and masculinity, and whose lyrical dialogue offers a mutual reciprocity necessary for the reconstruction of sexual difference. In this, the project is interdisciplinary, comprising a radical (re)comprehension of sexual difference as well as of the normative reading of the Plath-Hughes canon. Based on these discussions the project will exam ine the dialogue as time-space in which a community can be engendered, in which men and women might make an escape from the categories in which they have hitherto been placed and engage in the reciprocity of Mitsein. The project will address an internatio nal readership of students and scholars of gender studies, comparative literature, and philosophy/theory in Europe and in the US, and will be founded in a network already established through my dissertation work.