Poststructuralism and Robert Lowell’s Idea of Literary Representation

Abstract
Robert Lowell serves as a touchstone case for criticism on confessional poetry and poetry in general because Lowell’s poems negate the definition of writing as literary representation and simple celebration of personal aura, which greatly differs from his real life or the biographical depiction of his life. The distinction between Lowell and the lyric "I" appears especially conspicuous when Lowell defies the possibility of literary representation in his poems.
Presenter Biography

Colleen Shuching Wu received her PhD in English from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her research interests are nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, poetry and poetics, critical theory, and literature and philosophy. Her articles have appeared in Style, Comparative Literature Studies, Nineteenth-Century Prose, Plath Profiles, and others. She is also a winning poet, and her first Chinese poetry collection was published in Taiwan in 2003.