Tetheren Yu
MS. Computer Science, Stanford University (Honors Cooperative Program, Artificial intelligence specialization)
MS. Statistics, Stanford University
BS. Mathematics, Emory University
Tetheren Yu (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Comparative Literature. Her dissertation is in postmodern American poetry, titled "On the Kinesthetic Page: Eye Movement, Einfühlung, and the Forms of American Typographical Poetry." The project examines self-reflexive visions of kinesthetic feelings in tracing spatial shapes among twentieth-century American typographical poets, in light of the turn-of-the-century Einfühlung psychological theory of aesthetics. I explore this primarily through typographical poets’ explicit writings on poetics as well as implicit metapoetic commentaries in their poetry, focalizing the work of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Larry Eigner, A.R. Ammons, John Ashbery, and E.E. Cummings. I argue, in particular, that we should attend to these poets’ visions of the physical bodily difficulty in tracing these spatial shapes, as this physical difficulty intensifies the kinesthetic feelings of shapes in moving one's eyes against the poem's typographical shapes.
I came to discover Theodor Lipps and this turn-of-the-century Einfühlung aesthetics while I was trying to do some background research and literature review for my dissertation that was initially just on postwar poetry, especially the poetry of John Ashbery. At the time, I felt suddenly, and continue to feel that there is something very special about Einfühlung aesthetic theory, as it is figuratively a kind of mathematics in the psychology of aesthetics, and that it brought with it a particularly lively connection with the self-conscious poetics of postwar American poets like Charles Olson. I hope this comparison might help revive and enliven both parties’ unique theories about a psychology of aesthetics through kinesthetic movement, and in particular, mount a theoretical challenge to our use of artificial intelligence in literary studies today.
Publications
I have one blind peer-reviewed article published with Textual Practice, titled "To Decompose the Gender Possibilities of the Contemporary Sestina."
My second blind peer-reviewed article is forthcoming with Poetics Today, titled "Ekphrasis in the Color Laboratory: Postwar Material Animations of Color in Primo Levi’s Chemical Imagery and John Ashbery’s 'The Skaters.'"