Klaces, Caleb ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-7293-5256 (2026) ‘What is the Matter?’ Some Material Entanglements of Fatherhood and Away From Me. Doctoral thesis, York St John University.

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Abstract

This PhD comprises a critical review and a portfolio of original creative writing made up of the novel Fatherhood (2019) and the poetry collection Away From Me (2021). These books are interested in what human intimacy can feel like in a globalised age of ecological crisis and climate change – and each circulates a disaster. In Fatherhood, this is a flood. In Away From Me, it is the earthquake dreamt up by the economist and philosopher Adam Smith, in a famous thought experiment designed to explain the workings of sympathy.

In the critical review, I define a distinctive approach to critical reflection on creative practice. This approach makes space for what Stacey Alaimo calls the ‘material entanglements’ of writing and reading, by using footnotes to flesh out situated contexts for ideas that might otherwise appear disembodied. The critical review is an experiment in applying this approach. Each chapter is guided by the question, ‘What is the matter?’

In Chapter Two, on Fatherhood, I discuss the postcard as a material form that I associate with the rift of parental divorce. I use DW Winnicott’s ‘potential space’ of creative activity to open a discussion of how language is figured in the novel as something which both connects and distances. I look at places where apparent linguistic failure opens out onto new possibilities for communication.

Chapter Three is a close reading of Grande Cretto (large rift or crack) by Italian artist Alberto Burri (1915-1995). The work is a memorial for a town in Sicily destroyed by an earthquake; it contains the town it memorialises. In this chapter I recount my own visit – unwell, on a family holiday. This was the year after Fatherhood was published, when Away From Me was taking shape. I read the sculpture’s failure – to cover up what is inside, to be silent – as its most successful gesture.

Chapter Four focusses on two aspects of the collection Away From Me: the list as a poetic form and the motif of the little finger. I close read John Ashbery’s ‘Into the Dusk-Charg’d Air’, a list poem from the 1966 collection Rivers and Mountains. I show how Ashbery’s poem reworks the seventeenth-century English topographical poem in the post-war era of decolonization. I read Adam Smith’s model of the origins and limits of sympathy against a contemporary news story and recent poetry criticism. I find a surprising pattern: an individual, when faced with the reality of a distant person’s suffering, figures their own body as under attack.

The final chapter narrows the scale to an individual poem. I offer a faithful account of how I wrote ‘Middlemarch’. This entails thinking about insides and outsides, derangements of time and place, and the incremental development of a poetic form. There is also – and this is just as significant – a spilled cup of coffee.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Status:	Published
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General)
School/Department:	School of Humanities
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/15753

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