Botao Wu will present his dissertation at 12:30 PM on Monday, May 27, 2019 in Room 200 of the Graduate Student Centre (6371 Crescent Road).
All are welcome to attend.
Supervisory Committee:
Dr. George Belliveau (LLED),
Derek Gladwin (LLED),
Dr. Carl Leggo (LLED),
Dr. Jerry Schmidt (ASIA)
Examiners:
External Examiner: Dr. Elizabeth Yeoman (Memorial University), Dr. Heesoon Bai (SFU)
University Examiners: Dr. Samuel David Rocha (EDST) and Dr. Anthony Clarke (EDCP)
Title: Poetic Inquiry: My Journey in Language
Abstract:
This dissertation is a poetic inquiry of my experience in language. Poetic Inquiry incorporates original poetry in academic writing, which ancient poets and scholars had been doing for thousands of years. However, it’s not merely a repetition of the old tradition, but uses creative poetry in academic research in a systematic and diverse way. Poetic Inquiry is an umbrella concept to describe the various possibilities for using poetry in research. But, Poetic Inquiry is not any piece of writing with poetry in it. Poetic Inquiry “revisits the philosophical ideas of knowledge generation” (Galvin and Prendergast, 2016, p. xiv). Poetic Inquiry highlights the importance of individuality, and generally involves poetic truth-seeking and poetical examination of inner and outer experience.
The poetic inquiry of my personal experience is anchored in Chinese culture. I use eight words 春秋匪懈，享祀不忒as the frame and themes of each chapter. These Chinese words come from the first collection of Chinese poetry The Book of Songs (Shi Jing，11th century B.C.E.-6th century B.C.E.), and they mean that the Lord of Lu worshipped god and ancestors incessantly. My dissertation sums up my former experience and my family stories, and it’s a regard for my ancestors. After these eight chapters of narration, Chinese poems and their English translations, and some English poems, this dissertation closes with an epilogue. In it, I sketch my former story, and conclude that Poetic Inquiry grants ordinary people a chance to speak out their “impulses and desires” (Dewey, 1997, p. 71), and that collectively, ordinary people can revise and reconstitute the world by telling personal stories.