Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Ekphrasis: An Exploration Of Poetry Inspired By Art, Caitlin Cacciatore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Ekphrasis: An Exploration of Poetry Inspired by Art” is an Open Educational Resource (OER) that occupies the underdeveloped niche of freely available teaching and learning materials about the interdisciplinary poetic medium of ekphrasis. Ekphrastic poetry is a form dating back to Book XVIII of the Iliad, experiencing a revitalization in the latter half of the 18^th century, when demand for written descriptions of paintings was in high demand, and again taking on a new, modern meaning in the early 19^th century, with poems like John Keats’ 1819 “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Ekphrasis is …

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 …

There’S No Space In History: Affiliation, Eros And Colonial Entanglements In North American Nuclear Poetry, 1945-Present, Marguerite Daisy Atterbury

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates “affiliation” as a socio-spatial poetics and spatial ontology, a departure from the past and future to the material, landed present. The author’s experience growing up proximate to federally ordered uranium mining and nuclear weapons research on Indigenous land and at Los Alamos National Labs drives this work’s aim to render visible the economic, social, and ideological structures governing social-spatial dynamics in the North American context. This dissertation argues for a poetics of affiliation as a methodology, to move beyond theoretical and discursive questions in scholarship to negotiations of the social at scales that affect systems beyond the …

Some Notes On Birds: Language And Attention In The Age Of Social Media, Aimee Lamoureux

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Technology, social media, and its affiliated distractions are now an ever-present part of our daily lives. Attention is a commodity, one which tech companies value because it delivers them bigger and bigger profits. Their products are intentionally designed to be additive, to demand more and more of our time and attention throughout our day. However, attention is not simply a commodity, but the way in which we connect with the external world and attend to our everyday experience. The world that we create in the mind is the world that ends up forming the reality of our everyday lives. Complex …

A Difference In Rhythm: John Burroughs As Rhythmanalyst, Jennifer Macdonald

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Nature writer John Burroughs wrote about the rhythms of life in nature, people, and places, sharing his experiences of his surroundings for readers to learn from, get inspired by, or escape through. In this literature review, using Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis, in which rhythm is the “interaction between a place, a time, and an expenditure of energy” (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 15), I explore some of Burroughs’ writing, asserting that Burroughs himself was a rhythmanalyst. Burroughs is typically read as a literary naturalist who hoped to relay any scene as it truly was (to perfect the “art of seeing things” or …

The Lodge In The Wilderness: Ecologies Of Contemplation In British Romantic Poetry, Sean M. Nolan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that contemplation is often overlooked in studies of British Romantic poetry. By the late 1700s, changing commercial and agricultural practices, industrialism, secularization, and utilitarianism emphasizing industriousness coalesced to uproot established discourses of selfhood and leisure, and effected crises of individuation in Romantic poetry and poetics. Closely reading poems and writing about poetry composed between the 1780s and 1830s by William Cowper, George Crabbe, Robert Bloomfield, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Stuart Mill, I probe the relationship between aesthetic, ethical, and emotional responses to depictions of toil, idleness, and leisure. I argue that ecologies …

Disaster And Hope In The Comic Universe Of 'Gardening In The Tropics', Molly Mosher

Dissertations and Theses

In this paper, I explore ideas of dominion and how Western canon has helped propagate ideas of human domination of the natural world. Using Joseph W. Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival, I trace a line from the advent of the literary tragedy to the climate crisis. To contrast, I use his idea of comedy as the antidote to domination — a way of thinking that might inspire collaboration with the natural world. I will explore the comic with, predominately, Olive Senior’s Gardening in the Tropics, alongside Jamaica Kincaid’s gardening studies and Mona Lisa Saloy’s essay on environmental destruction. To …

Textframe: Cosmopolitanism And Non-Exclusively Anglophone Poetries, Michael N. Scharf

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project proposes a replacement for some institutional-archival mechanisms of non-exclusively anglophone poetry as it is produced under racial capitalism and archived via its universities and grant-bearing nonprofits. The project argues specifically for the self-archiving of non-exclusively anglophone poetry, and by extension of poetry, in a manner that builds away from US-dominated, nationally-organized institutions. It argues that cosmopolitanist norm translation, as advocated by various critics, can function as part of a critique of institutional value creation used in maintaining inequalities through poetry. The US-based Poetry Foundation is currently the major online archive of contemporary anglophone poetry; the project comprises a …

Through The Mouth: An Essay On Appetite And Ecocide, Iemanja Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an exploration of mourning and resilient joy in the midst of ecocide. Resisting the pervasive classification of the human as inherently destructive, I look to appetite as an aesthetic procedure that includes a material desire for intimacy with the more-than-human. My study considers the intersections of aesthetic production (primarily twentieth-century poetry and visual art), climate science, geology, cultural studies, theory within the contemporary nonhuman turn, and Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. I employ an interdisciplinary approach, which helps me explore the various ways that literal and figurative appetite can be a way of sensing and exploring …

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 …

To Be Everything: Sylvia Plath And The Problem That Has No Name, Alanna P. Mcauliffe

Student Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores, in depth, how the poetry of Sylvia Plath operates as an expression of female discontent in the decade directly preceding the sexual revolution. This analysis incorporates both sociohistorical context and theory introduced in Betty Friedan’s 1963 work The Feminine Mystique. In particular, Plath’s work is put in conversation with Friedan’s notion of the “problem that has no name,” an all-consuming sense of malaise and dissatisfaction that plagued American women in the postwar era. This notion is furthered by close-readings of poems written throughout various stages of Plath’s career (namely “Spinster,” “Two Sisters of Persephone,” “Elm,” “Ariel,” “Daddy,” …

Muriel Rukeyser's "The Book Of The Dead": An Analytical Appreciation, Emily Cogan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Muriel Rukeyser’s poetry has always focused around a particular event be it something of global proportions such as the Spanish Civil War (Mediterranean) or the Japanese occupation of Korea (The Gates) or, as with The Book of the Dead, a specific disaster closer to her home, America. Her poetry, however, never exists purely in the realm of politics; she never aligned herself with any particular political party and consequently her poetry is never simply a call to arms or a manifesto in verse. Throughout the body of Rukeyser’s work there are echoes and allusions to …

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 …

Between The Cloud And The Page: Repetition And Textuality In Post-Conceptual Poetics, Michael Kirby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

These three chapters take as their focus the emergent movement of post-conceptual poetry. The first chapter, “What is Post-conceptual Poetry?,” attempts to delineate the varying definitions of post-conceptualism offered by four critics (Felix Bernstein, Diana Hamilton, Vanessa Place, and Robert Fitterman). Finding none of these to be satisfactory, I turn towards the delineation of my own definition of post-conceptualism in the second chapter, “Beckett contra Sade: Two Kinds of Repetition,” which asserts that post-conceptualism may derive a sort of cohesive political agenda from its rejection of both Sadean and Beckettian repetition. “Between the Cloud and the Page,” the third chapter, …

The Strains Of Confessional Poetry: The Burdens, Blunders, And Blights Of Self-Disclosure, Lara Rossana Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When a provocative style of autobiographical verse had emerged in postwar America, literary critics christened the new genre “confessional poetry.” Confessional poets of the 1960s and ’70s are often characterized by scholars of contemporary poetry as a cohort of writers who, unlike previous generations before them, dared to explore in their work the personal and inherited traumas of mental illness, family suicides, failed marriages, and crushing addictions. As a result, the body of work these writers produced is often experienced as a collection of stylized, literary self-portraits. What can these self-portraits reveal to us about the connection between confessional poetry …

Archives Of Transnational Modernism: Lost Networks Of Art And Activism, Anne Donlon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Archives Of Transnational Modernism: Lost Networks Of Art And Activism considers the work of several intersecting figures in transnational modernism, in order to reassess the contours of race and gender in anglophone literature of the interwar period in the U.S. and Europe. Writers and organizers experimented with literary form and print culture to build and maintain networks of internationalism. This dissertation begins to suggest some of these maps of connection, paying particular attention to people who played key roles as hubs within networks. British radical Sylvia Pankhurst's 1920s publications, which have not been much considered in terms of literary contribution, …

Musical Landscapes: Theophile Gautier And The Evolution Of Nineteenth Century French Poetry, Dana Milstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Theophile Gautier's first edition of Emaux et camees (1852) marks the juncture at which Romantic, Neoclassical, and nascent Symbolist poetic theories converged under the umbrella ideology of "Parnassianism." Emaux et camees synthesizes the aesthetics promoted by these diverse groups, primarily by 1) using "musical" and "painterly" language, 2) emphasizing correspondences among arts, and 3) paradoxically demanding an attention to form and the artist's labor while also emphasizing art's inutility during a century characterized by Progress. Gautier's Emaux et camees bridges painterly and musical poetics to create a new model for poetry.

While the vocabulary of painting captivated many nineteenth century …

Paris And Havana: A Century Of Mutual Influence, Laila Pedro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation employs an interdisciplinary approach to trace the history of exchange and influence between Cuban, French, and Francophone Caribbean artists in the twentieth century. I argue, first, that there is a unique and largely unexplored tradition of dialogue, collaboration, and mutual admiration between Cuban, French and Francophone artists; second, that a recurring and essential theme in these artworks is the representation of the human body; and third, that this relationship ought not to be understood within the confines of a single genre, but must be read as a series of dialogues that are both ekphrastic (that is, they rely …

"She Said Plain, Burned Things": A Feminist Poetics Of The Unsayable In Twentieth Century Literary & Visual Culture, Leah Souffrant

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the way silence, blank space, and other forms of creative withholding attempt to translate the unsayable, or to convey the unsayability of language in artistic form. Through a study of the works of Sylvia Plath, Jean Rhys, Rachel Zucker, Marguerite Duras, Anne Carson, and visual images, this work observes the connection between women's writing in the 20th century and the communication of painful subject matter through attention to absence. This study attends explicitly to how formal qualities in artistic works attend to ontological concerns through an examination of the intersection of concerns with phenomenology, feminism, and formal …

The Vastness Of Small Spaces: Self-Portraits Of The Artist As A Child Enclosed, Matthew John Burgess

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A tent of bed sheets, a furniture fort, a corner of the closet surrounded by chosen objects--the child finds or fashions these spaces and within them daydreaming begins. What do small spaces signify for the child, and why do scenes of enclosure emerge in autobiographical self-portraits of the artist? Sigmund Freud's theory that the literary vocation can be traced to childhood experiences is at the heart of this project, especially his observation that "the child at play behaves like a writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or rather, re-arranges the things of this world in a …

Wordsworth, Ruins, And The Dialectics Of Melancholia, Colin Dekeersgieter

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The concept of melancholia as it pertains to Romantic poets is often relegated to its simpler meaning of gloomy or depressed. This work provides an analysis of the motifs of melancholia in the work William Wordsworth as an allegory of the artist's relationship to their art. I am interested in melancholia as the tension between the melancholic's acute awareness of his temporal actuality and the grave desire for transcendence as a poet. Operating within this dialectic fractures Wordsworth's interiority as he struggles to ground himself in both realms. This dialectic is most often reconciled when the poet finds a …

Bellevue, Sean Edgely

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Mythopoeia: A Biography, David Corliss

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Angels And Demons: Christina Rossetti’S Goblin Market As A Social Critique Of The Victorian Ideal Of The “Angel In The House” And The Pre-Raphaelites’ Response To That Ideal, Melissa Adams

Theses and Dissertations

Christina Rossetti’s poem Goblin Market presents a subversive critique on the socially constructed dichotomy of Angel versus Demon as depicted in Pre-Raphaelite artwork, Dante Gabriele Rossetti’s poetry, and Coventry Patmore’s poem Angel in the House. An analysis of Goblin Market in relation to Patmore’s poem and the Pre-Raphaelite paintings The Annunciation, Ophelia, Lady Lilith, Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses, and Sibylla Palmifera and Dante Gabriele Rossetti’s poems “Soul’s Beauty” and “Body’s Beauty” illustrate the ways in which Rossetti presents a counter-image that breaks down this socially constructed dichotomy. This is additionally supported by an exploration …