Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Paul Celan And The Processes Of Survival In Post-Shoah Jewish Writing, Ari Savage

Theses

The following is a study of the poetry of Paul Celan as a representation of psychological and social processes present in the written works of Shoah survivors. It begins with an analysis of the place of writing in Jewish culture, then identifies three primary processes which operate in sequence: alienation, individuation, and integration. By examining Paul Celan’s highly personal and autobiographical texts in the context of his life experience as a Shoah survivor it is possible to discern the social and psychological forces at work which compel survivors to express their traumas in written form, and to gain a better …

Doc/U/Ment: Affinities In 20th And 21st-Century Documental Poetics, Katherine Payne

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents, analyzes, and builds on the existing literary genealogy of documental poetry. In 2020 Michael Leong proposed the term documental poetry to describe the turn toward source materials in 21^st-century North American poetry, seen in longform research-based poems that explicitly incorporate documentation and seek to intervene in cultural memory. Using Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance, I argue that there are clear affinities between 21^st-century poets and their 20^th-century literary forerunners, also that an expansion of the scope of documental poetics is needed. The three nodes of connection I examine are works …

The Birds That Embrace Both Illusions: An Intersemiotic Translation Of All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace By Richard Brautigan, Veronika Yadukha

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This essay analyzes the influence of various worldviews on Richard Brautigan's poetry, which form his particular language. A combination of Zen Buddhism, Japanese aesthetics, American poetic tradition, and echoes of the philosophy of absurdism are some of the core themes that serve as mechanisms for Brautigan's poems.

For each chapter of the book All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, I make an intersemiotic translation transposing Brautigan's poems into ceramic tea bowls. By combining different art forms and translating from an abstract symbolic art – poetry – to a form of applied art that is much more physically …

Womanist Poetics: Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, And Audre Lorde, Aya Telmissany

Theses and Dissertations

Today, the sentimentality associated with poetry is often condescendingly dubbed in a patriarchal society as “feminine poetry.” The first women poets who dared to attempt the pen were often met with attacks on their femaleness and harsh critiques of their writing which was likened to sorcery and witchcraft. Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Audre Lorde are three American women poets who countered these attacks and turned them inside out in favor of their own womanist poetics. They wrote about experiencing the world as women and most importantly about experiencing poetry as women. What happens to poetry when a woman appropriates …

The Artist's Diary, Anamae Gilroy

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

'Y Mi Rebelión Se Convirtió En Arte’ Raúl Salinas Y Su Poesía Política: Una Historia Literaria Chicana, Santiago Vidales

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation I present a literary history of poet and revolutionary Raúl Salinas. Born in 1934, Salinas left a major legacy for Latinx and Chicanx letters. I focus on narrating, for the first time in Spanish, the relationship between his prison radicalism and his poetic production. The time Salinas spent as a political prisoner in Leavenworth Penitentiary (1967-1972) was foundational to his political transformation and (re)education. Along with members of the Black Panthers, AIM, Puerto Rican Nationalists, and other radicalized Chicanos, these inmates formed study groups, networks of support, and established a newspaper to both combat the oppressive conditions …

The Joy Of Listening: Three Voices In The Poetry Of Wisława Szymborska, Mimi Thompson

CMC Senior Theses

One of the greatest feats that a poet may achieve in his or her lifetime is to develop a voice so characteristic of themself, it would be impossible to confuse it with that of any other poet. Polish-speaking and non-Polish-speaking scholars alike have agreed that the voice of 1996 Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska is utterly distinct, despite the fact that her poems explore a wide range of topics and are told from multiple narrative perspectives, rarely featuring herself through any personal details. How, then, is it possible for hundreds of poems, each with their own narrator, to still be “heard” …

Self, Emily Aguayo

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This is a translation of Dr. Erika Almenara’s complete published collection of poetry. The original publications span a period of over twelve years of work, with books published in 2006, 2008, and 2018. The first book of poetry in this series of translations, Reino Cerrado (Closed Kingdom), explores the profound contemplations of life and how to turn those thoughts into words and put them on paper. We see images of nature, hear faint religious overtones, and feel the distress of a woman searching for a healthy relationship, and having little luck. Para evitar los rastros (To Avoid All Traces), the …

The Function Of Poetry In The Maqamat Al-Hariri, Hussam Almujalli

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The Maqamat al-Hariri is one of the most notable examples of prose in Arabic literature. Called one of the most eloquent statements of medieval Arabic prose, it also serves as a religious, social, cultural, and political document of the Abbasid Caliphate. As a writer, al-Hariri became a famous figure in Arabic literature after writing his maqamat. This dissertation studies al-Hariri as a poet through his most important prose work, the Maqamat al-Hariri.

Chapter 1 of the dissertation provides an overview of the maqama genre, including its definition, themes, stylistic features, character types, a brief history of maqamat studies, …

Through The Scholastic Looking Glass: The Pedagogical Potential Of Textual Deformation For Poetic Studies, Taylor Dietrich

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the pedagogical usefulness of the antithetical reading model of textual deformation for the study of poetic works. No formal pedagogical plan exists for the education of students in poetic studies through textual deformance. This thesis does not go as far as structuring one in its entirety. Rather, it surveys the digital humanities landscape, showing a collective affinity within a number of textual studies approaches that advocate for textual deformance as useful for interrogating texts, and aligns the overlapping symmetries within those working methodologies with pedagogical imperatives like those embedded in Ryan Cordell’s Kaleidoscopic Pedagogy Laboratory—the intent being …

Looking At Shadows: Four French Texts In English Translation, Kalena M. Hermes

World Languages and Cultures

This project present four French texts in English translation that share the theme of loss. This theme is perhaps one of the most poignant and relevant; loss is an experience that every human will encounter, and as people we continue across time to grapple with what it means for us and how to deal with it. These four texts will bring the perspectives of four authors to light in English. When we study how other countries and cultures deal with common human issues, we are able to gain new views on these issues. This project will make these texts accessible …

Forbidden Attraction: Russian Poets Read T. S. Eliot During The Cold War, Nataliya Karageorgos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of this study is to demonstrate how the reception of T. S. Eliot, one of the leading proponents of Anglo-American modernism, shaped the aesthetics of Russian poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. In the twentieth century, Russian culture found itself in a unique situation of separation from the Western world, with which it had largely identified in the previous century. The official change of the cultural paradigm that took place in the aftermath of the October Revolution led to the advancement of the literary theory and practices of Socialist Realism, shutting off modernist tendencies and …

Poetics, Not Pragmatics: Understanding Metaphors In A Poetic Context, Savannah Marciezyk

Theses and Dissertations

The aim of this paper is to explain why the leading theories of metaphor fail when applied to metaphors which appear in poems. The ability to understand the true meaning of a metaphor in conversations relies on understanding speaker intention and extralinguistic context. This paper argues that because such material is not available to the reader of a poem, theories which rely heavily on pragmatics to explain metaphors cannot be successfully applied to metaphors which appear in poems. This paper makes use of the views on metaphor by John Searle and Paul Grice, and discusses how meaning is constructed in …

Dissidence And Displacement : Translation Theory Through The Work Of Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Darren Smith

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The purported thesis is intended to aptly discuss the ways in which the particular work of Natalya Gorbanevskaya is able to be translated through the lens of a Daniel Weissbort and how through a full understanding of certain theories allow for certain notions of displacement and loss to traverse cultural boundaries through the act of translation. After a brief introduction, it is important to discuss the necessary background information and its relation to the task of translation before moving into an in-depth analysis of the poet’s work to argue how this displacement is visible through her translated work, before concluding …

Collaboration Revisited: The Performative Art Of Claude Cahun And Hannah Weiner, Phillip L. Griffith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In its most common usage in the artistic context, collaboration refers to a practice of creation in which two artists work together to produce a single artwork or object. Collaboration Revisited: The Performative Art of Claude Cahun and Hannah Weiner focuses on the nexus of photography, writing, and performance in the work of six female avant-garde artists from the transatlantic twentieth century, informed by the important place of surrealism in that history, to reconsider this understanding of collaboration. Instead of the notion of collaboration as founded in the experience of two artists working together in each others’ presence, I examine …

Narrating Pain And Freedom: Place And Identity In Modern Syrian Poetry (1970s-1990s), Manar Shabouk

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines poetry of Daʿd Ḥadād, Sanieh Ṣālḥ, and Ryāḍ Ṣālḥ al- Ḥsīn and the dominant role of place in their poetry. My dissertation is specifically interested in nonconformist modern Syrian poetry, especially women’s poetry and poetry focused on place and space. I approach my analysis from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective and hence will draw on theoretical frameworks from Arabic studies, poetry discourse, and theory of place. Drawing on these different critical frameworks, my research analyzes representations of modern Syrian poetry with a focus on the writing of women and the poetry of nonconformity in its expression of …

Póliza: A Bilingual Anthology Of Postmodern Peninsular Spanish Women Poets, Jacqueline Osborn

Honors Projects

Within this project I endeavor to translate a series of poems from seven postmodern female Spanish poets, exploring the challenges and idiosyncrasies of not only the migration between languages, but those specifically between Spanish and English as well as those particular to poetry translation. Of course, there are inherent limits to this process. Regarding the differences between English and Spanish, such difficulties as the presence of naturally reflexive verbs, neutral pronouns, more efficient nominalization of adjectives, and the greater presence of the subjunctive tense in Spanish arise. Respecting the problem of poetry, the structure, rhythm, and even the tone of …

Beginning In Heidegger, Nietzsche, And Mallarmé, Austen H. Hinkley

Senior Projects Spring 2016

This project is focused on the theme of beginning. The first chapter is a reading of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time as an attempt at beginning a new ontology that understands itself as a construct that must be, to quote Heidegger, “critical against itself.” The second chapter is a reading of three of Nietzsche's metaphors as a way of both examining and enacting a beginning. The third chapter is concerned with Mallarmé’s revolution of poetic form in Un coup de Dés, which enacts a new beginning on which the poem reflects through its images and form. Through an understanding of …

T.S. Eliot: A Never-Ending Exploration, Kristina Krupilnitskaya

Honors Thesis

The following thesis explores the work of T.S. Eliot before and after his conversion to the Anglican Church. While the paper explores the stylistic qualities of Eliot's poetry, the main focus of the essay lies in bridging the pre and post conversion works together in order to show that both of the periods were significant in the poet's life. While many critics viewed Eliot's early poetry as a lot more exploratory and challenging, calling his later poetry banal and bland, my essay aims to show that even though the poetry had shifted in its content, its significance, complexity, and experimentality …

What The Fuck Is This?: Aesthetic Nature Of Being Or Ontology In The Poetry Of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Alexis Stephenson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

“What the Fuck is This?” examines the intersection of phenomenology and poetry arguing for an aesthetic nature of Being and focuses on how we know or experience the world instead of Cartesian absolutes. This subjective knowledge does not compete against objective knowledge but simply recognizes the use that poetic language has for communicating the subjective knowledge from experience of being as it unfolds for us. The major movements of the thesis focus on aesthetic objects, aesthetic intersubjectivity, and the aesthetic self. These are labeled “aesthetic” because a phenomenological methodology reveals a dialectic between that which is unfolding and that which …

The Heart Is A Hollow Muscle, Aviva Englander Cristy

Theses and Dissertations

This collection of poetry explores the relationship of between self and body by way of form and language. Through syntax and poetic forms, especially the sonnet, these poems investigate the interchange between the physical and the linguistics. The manuscript incorporates found text through the collage process, relying heavily on the medical texts of the seventeenth century anatomist William Harvey. The medicalized body becomes the means through which the speakers of these poems experience and express identity, considering the physical body as the body in pain, the queered body, and the body of the beloved.

Edna St. Vincent Millay: Artisan Of Violent Feminine Agency, Carolina Galdiz

Senior Theses and Projects

For decades, scholars have understood Edna St Vincent Millay in two fairly distinctive patterns as either a classical romanticist or ephemeral rebel. This dual reputation has been crafted from the obvious presence of natural imagery, sexual dynamism, feminine voice, and romantic yearning in her work. What critics have failed to see in her poetry are the potent sinister undertones that claim violence as a means to power. I will argue that Millay narrates the gendered struggle that takes place in this violence, in order to ultimately assert feminine agency in the process of forming a cultural identity. Thus, rather than …

The Relief Of The Unreal Life: Poems, Colleen Robertson Abel

Theses and Dissertations

This collection of poems takes as its subject desire in its various guises. Religious desire--the human need to find faith and to hope for an afterlife, and the doubt and skepticism in those very needs--is braided together with more earthly desires, as well as with ruminations on artistic ambition. These poems situate themselves within the rich tradition of the postconfessional, transmuting autobiographical elements to form a narrative of marriage, pregnancy, loss and birth that anchors the book. This narrative is juxtaposed with other lyric voices to explore the connections between hunger of all kinds.

Memory As Ecology In The Poetry Of Tomas Tranströmer, Richelle Jolene Wilson

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to explore how memory functions ecologically in the poetry of Tomas Tranströmer. The term ecology is useful because of its connotative associations with the natural world as well as its broader definition of being a network of relationships as they function within and relate to their environment. Throughout his oeuvre, Tranströmer positions memory as being an external presence with which he interacts primarily because he honors it as a living being and he feels a poetic responsibility to it. As such, he grapples with the challenges of representation, particularly the limitations of language. Ultimately, …

Trans-Atlantic Circulation Of Black Tropes: Èsù And The West African Griot As Poetic References For Liberation In Cultures Of The African Diaspora, Jean-Baptiste Meunier

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation, under the direction of Dr Pius Ngandu Nkashama explores the spread of African rhetorical tropes in the Atlantic world. Building on Henry Louis Gates theory of Signifying, I use the West African God of fate Èsù and the West African cultural figure of the griot as cultural referents for the persistence of African tropes in the New World and their subsequent dissemination throughout the Atlantic world. Analyzing those two West African referents and their connections to New World cultures such as Afro-Brazilian capoeira angola, hip hop and African-American poetry, I attempt to demonstrate the centrality of the trope …

A Poet Of The Sikhs: Aesthetic Embodiment In The Poetry Of A Young And Elderly Bhai Vir Singh, Todd Curcuru

Honors Theses

Bhai Vir Singh, famous 19^th and 20^th century Sikh poet, writer, and scholar is remembered for his great literary achievements and proliferation of the Pubjabi language. Raised in the Punjab, India after the fall of the Sikh kingdom to the British, Vir Singh grew up in a time of religious turmoil due to Western influence. Joining the Singh Sabha reformation movement, he dedicated his life wholeheartedly to return contemporary Sikh identity to its foundational roots as present in the Sikh holy book, the Guru Granth.

Despite his desire to return to a fundamental Sikh identity, Bhai Vir Singh …

Literary Love(R)S: Recognizing The Female Outline And Its Implications In Roman Verse Satire, Kaitlyn Marie Klein

Theses and Dissertations

The existence of a metaphoric female standing in for poetic style was only plainly discussed in a paper from 1987 concerned with Roman elegiac poetry. This figure is given the title of scripta puella or written woman, since her existence depends solely on the writings of an author. These females often appear to have basis in reality; however there is insufficient evidence to allow them to cross out of the realm of fantasy. The term scripta puella in poetry refers to a perfected poetic form, one the author prefers over all others, and a human form creates the illusion of …

Innocence Lost: The Tension Of Contrary States In Blake And Milton, Andrew M. Spratt

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Though writing more than one-hundred years apart, the poetic works of John Milton and William Blake interacted with one another to such an extent that they have become increasingly entwined within the critical imagination of scholars over the past two centuries. Despite the recognition of the influence of Milton upon Blake, and subsequent examinations of Blake’s opinions of Milton as an artist, a thorough examination of Blake’s opinion of Milton as the narrator of Paradise Lost has heretofore remained unattempted. This essay examines Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience as a lens through which to interpret the narrator of …

'Shored Against The Ruins': Edifying Romantic And Modernist Thought, Leslie Haines

All Theses

This thesis explores the continuing aesthetic, philosophical, and social influences of Romantic and Modernist poetics. I trace the influence of Romanticism and Modernism as one that allows for a medium of expression that more clearly interprets both the act of reading and writing. These artistic periods and styles mutually serve to establish and validate enlightened ways of thinking that are currently lacking in the present day. I look to the poetry, philosophy, and prophecy of artists from both eras as they fuse and diffuse demonstrating the unique points of connection and disconnection for each of the poets whose texts are …

Sensory Imagery And Aesthetic Affect In The Poetry Of Keats, Hopkins, And Eliot, Clare Louis Gerlach

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This dissertation focuses on applying a new method of analysis to selected works by three major poets, John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot. The project considers their work in light of recent scholarship by Charles Altieri on the affects, such as emotion, feelings, passion, and mood; how these affects operate in artistic works; and, specifically, examines how these authors employ the affects in their poetry to express their own emotions and, in the creation of lyric poems, turn these emotions into works of art. In addition, the project strengthens the aesthetic readings with a study of the …