ZYGMUNT BAUMAN AND THE CONTINUING LEGACY OF EXISTENTIALISM: AN INTERPRETATION OF COOKSHAW’S DOUBLE SOMERSAULTS

Abstract

This study analyzes one collection of verse, i.e., Marlene Cookshaw’s Double Somersaults (1999), with a view of exploring how, at the turn of the millennium, she highlights the continuing relevance of themes and issues popularized by the existentialist philosophy in the wake of the World Wars. In this regard, the analysis of this poet is contextualized by Zygmunt Bauman’s pithy critique of the experience of modernity and postmodernity in his book Modernity and Ambivalence. Drawing on the continuities and discontinuities between modernism and postmodernism, this qualitative study expands the idea that even though the sensibility of Cookshaw at the turn of the millennium understandably does not focus obsessively on the sort of alienation or nihilism that characterized her predecessors, the recognition of strains of ambivalence, a central concern in Bauman’s philosophy, in such themes as interaction with the other or hopes of salvation, does necessitate a partial leaning on the inheritance of what is most easily categorized as the early to mid-twentieth century existentialist mindset. The research scholars of existentialism will get benefits from this study.