Shawna Gubera Humanities
Lyric in Public: Exploring Lyric Subjectivity and the Outdoor Advertisement Through Ekphrastic Poetry
Shawna will travel to New York and Los Angeles to collect her primary text, which will be an extensive photographic record of static advertisements displayed in public space. Using this index of images, along with personal interviews gathering individuals’ responses to advertising, she will produce a collection of lyric poetry that investigates the boundary between the poetic arts and an image-oriented culture. By means of ekphrasis, an aesthetic technique traditionally used to mediate between two art forms, these poems will render the visual constituents of advertising imagery into the temporally distinct realities of linguistic and textual representation. Her research into picture theory, iconology and lyricism will contribute towards an intent to posit and express persuasive images’ resonance within a poetic speaker’s subjectivity, and address poetry’s remarkable separation from public life.
