Sarah Pützer

Sarah Puetzer is a DPhil student in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Pembroke College, University of Oxford, specializing in contemporary Japanese poetry. The aim of her interdisciplinary dissertation project is to examine the intersection of text and space in contemporary Japanese experimental poetry. Her research focuses on the reader response and uses ‘poetic spaces’ by Saihate Tahi, Fuzuki Yumi, Mizusawa Nao and others as examples. Situated between the fields of comparative literature, art history and social anthropology, it will draw on theories of space, cognitive literary studies and reader-reception theory to argue that poetry, when published in physical or virtual space, takes on a more fluid form, foregrounding readers and their experiences of reading poetry. Her dissertation also suggests that poetic spaces can be read as sites of resistance that negotiate not only our practice of reading poetry, but also our perception of what poetry is.