The English Department discusses its inaugural master\’s theses

The Department of English at the College of Education for Humanities, University of Samarra, discussed the master’s thesis submitted by the student Aya Alawi Khalaf, entitled:

Elegies of the End: An Eco-critical Study of Jorie Graham’s Selected Poems.

The study centers on the radical transformation of the concept of the “elegy” in the poetry of Jorie Graham, as she reconfigures it from mourning the individual to expressing a form of planetary grief that aligns with the context of the Anthropocene.

It further aims to trace the chronological development of Graham’s poetry and to analyze how the planetary crisis is reflected in her poetic language, demonstrating her shift from elegizing individual death to articulating the loss of environmental and moral stability.

To achieve this, the study employs linguistic techniques based on fragmentation, the disintegration of poetic imagery, and the construction of repetitive structures that mirror the state of dispersion and anxiety experienced by contemporary humans in response to hyperobjects.

The findings reveal the poet’s success in transforming the structure of the poem into a non-linear system inspired by Chaos Theory and the Butterfly Effect, where past and future intersect to shape a troubled present confronted with slow violence and a collapse in moral time.

In conclusion, the study finds that this poetic experience represents a form of aesthetic resistance, as it rejects simplistic solutions or conventional consolation, and instead positions the reader before their ethical responsibility as a witness to planetary collapse, thereby contributing to a redefinition of the function of poetry in confronting the crises of deep time.