A June 10, 2022 Tallinn University (Estonia) press release (also on EurekAlert but published on June 16, 2022 on behalf of the Estonian Research Council) provides information on a fascinating PhD thesis examining poetry in a very new way,

In addition to searching for the meaning of poems, they can also often be described through the emotions that the reader feels while reading them. Kristiine Kikas, a doctoral student at the School of Humanities of Tallinn University, studied which other sensations arise whilst reading poetry and how they affect the understanding of poems.

The aim of the doctoral thesis was to study the palpability of language [emphasis mine], i.e. sensory saturation, which has not found sufficient analysis and application so far. “In my research, I see reading as an impersonal process, meaning the sensations that arise do not seem to belong to either the reader or the poetry, but to both at the same time,” Kikas describes the perspective of her thesis.

In general, the language of poetry is studied metaphorically, in order to try to understand what a word means either directly or figuratively. A different perspective called “affective perspective” usually studies the effects of pre-linguistic impulses or impulses not related to the meaning of the word on the reader. However, Kikas viewed language as a simultaneous proposition and flow of consciousness, i.e. a discussion moving from one statement to another as well as connections that seem to occur intuitively while reading. She sought to identify ways to approach verbal language, that is considered to trigger analytical thinking in particular, in a way that would help open up sensory saturation and put their observation in poetic analysis at the forefront along with other modes of studying poetry. To achieve her goals, Kikas applied Gilles Deleuze’s method of radical empiricism and compared several other approaches with it: semiotics, biology, anthropology, modern psychoanalysis and cognitive sciences. [emphases mine]

Kikas describes reading in her doctoral thesis as a constant presence in verbal language, which is sometimes more and sometimes less pronounced. This type of presence can be felt like colour, posture or birdsong [emphasis mine]. “Following the neuroscientific origins of metaphors, I used the human organism’s tendency to perceive language at the sensory-motor level in my close reading to help replay it using body memory. This trait allows us to physically experience the words we read,” explains Kikas. According to her, the sensations stored in the body evoked by words can be considered the oneness of the reader and the words, or the reader’s becoming the words. Kikas emphasises that this can only happen if the multiplicity of sensations and meanings that arise during reading are recognised.

“Although the study showed that the saturations associated with verbal language cannot be linked to a broader literary discourse without representational and analytical thinking, the conclusion is that noticing and acknowledging them is important in both experiencing and interpreting the poem,” summarises Kikas her doctoral thesis. As her research was only the first attempt in examining sensations in poetry, Kikas hopes to provide material for further discussion. Above all, she encourages readers in their attempts to understand poetry to notice and trust even the slightest sensations and impulses triggered while reading, as these are the beginning of even the most abstract meaning.

I was able to track down the thesis ‘Uncommonness in the Commonplace: Reading for Senseation in Poetry‘ to here where the title is in English but the rest of the entry is in Estonian. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to download the thesis, which I believe is written in English.

Particle fiction

This is a somewhat older thesis and is only loosely related in that it is about literary matters and there’s a science aspect to it too. Tania Hershman, “poet, writer, teacher and editor based in Manchester, UK,” adds this from the about page on her eponymous website, Note: I have moved the paragraphs into a different order,

… After making a living for 13 years as a science journalist, writing for publications such as WIRED and NewScientist, I gave it all up to write fiction, later also poetry and hybrid pieces, and am now based in Manchester in the north of England. I have a first degree in Maths and Physics, a diploma in journalism, an MSc in Philosophy of Science, an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing.

…

My hybrid book, And What If We Were All Allowed to Disappear, was published in a limited edition by Guillemot Press in March 2020. It is now sold out but can be read in electronic form as part of my PhD in Creative Writing, ‘Particle fictions: an experimental approach to creative writing and reading informed by particle physics’, available to be downloaded from Bath Spa University here: http://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/10693/.

…

You can download her PhD thesis (Particle fictions: an experimental approach to creative writing and reading informed by particle physics). This abstract offers a few highlights,

This two-part document comprises the work submitted for Tania Hershman’s practice-based PhD in Creative Writing in answer to her primary research question: Can particle fiction and particle physics interrogate each other? Her secondary research question examined the larger question of wholeness and wholes versus parts. The first of the two elements of the PhD is a book-length creative work of what Hershman has defined as “particle fiction” – a book made of parts which works as a whole – entitled ‘And What If We Were All Allowed to Disappear’: an experimental, hybrid work comprised of prose, poetry, elements that morph between the two forms, and images, and takes concepts from particle physics as inspiration. The second element of this PhD, the contextualising research, entitled ‘And What If We Were All Allowed To Separate And Come Together’, which is written in the style of fictocriticism, provides an overview of particle physics and the many other topics relating to wholeness and wholes versus parts – from philosophy to postmodernism and archaeology – that Hershman investigated in the course of her project. This essay also details the “experiments” Hershman carried out on works which she defined as particle fictions, in order to examine whether it was possible to generalise and formulate a “Standard Model of Particle Fiction” inspired by a the Standard Model of Particle Physics, and to inform the creation of her own work of particle fiction.

Enjoy!