Adrienne Rich: Keywords for the Future

Abstract

This thesis is a study of Adrienne Rich: American feminist thinker, poet, critic, and public intellectual. It argues that Rich represents an outstanding model of the conjunction of poetic and political discourses in contemporary American modernity. The study isolates four most important cornerstones of her work: the concept of re-vision, the idea of historical amnesia and its consequences, her critique of heterosexuality, and the intimacy of poetry and politics. The different chapters expand on and contextualize these four thematic clusters in a wider historical and political overview of decades, between the 1970s and 1990s, when Rich wrote and acted as a charismatic public intellectual.