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Subjectivity

Philosophy
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Subjectivity refers to the personal, internal perspective of the conscious self, shaped by perception, emotion, and experience.

Detailed Definition
Poetry is the art of subjectivity—rendering inner life in language. Lyric poetry especially explores how identity, memory, and feeling construct a unique worldview, while also questioning the stability or universality of the "I."
Example
Example in poetry:
Sylvia Plath’s "Daddy" channels raw, personal trauma through confessional subjectivity; Walt Whitman’s "Song of Myself" constructs a capacious, democratic "I"; Adrienne Rich’s "Diving into the Wreck" uses "I" to explore gendered subjectivity; William Wordsworth’s "Tintern Abbey" reflects on how memory shapes subjective experience; subjectivity appears in Ocean Vuong’s "Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong," where self-dialogue reveals fractured identity.
Additional Notes
Subjectivity (vs. objectivity) is the lens of personal experience; postmodernism shows it’s constructed by language, culture, and power; students should analyze how poems perform subjectivity—e.g., is the “I” stable (Wordsworth) or fractured (Ashbery)? Confessional poetry makes subjectivity its content; experimental poetry its problem.
Also Known As
Conscious Perspective Personal Experience Interiority Inwardness
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