Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Aesthetic Activisms: Language Politics And Inheritances In Recent Poetry From The U.S. South, Sunshine Dempsey

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation, Aesthetic Activisms: Language Politics and Inheritances in Recent Poetry from the U.S. South, is to illustrate how four contemporary poets incorporate and adapt literary forms and linguistic structures to emphasize the exclusionary systems of language that undergird accepted southern cultural practices. Aesthetic Activismslooks at four poets, Natasha Trethewey, Fred Moten, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, and C.D. Wright, who challenge concepts of regional literary inheritances that refuses to recognize a broad plurality of voices and histories.

Aesthetic Activisms focuses on poets whose work re-orients, or centralizes, marginalized experience through form and content, resisting essentialist …

“Poetry Doesn’T Restore Ecosystems”: Garbage And Poetry In The Anthropocene, Joseph Russell Hendryx

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the representation of material garbage in American poetry, from the development of industrial waste management in the late nineteenth century to the present day ecological crises. In the early to mid-twentieth century, garbage serves as a new Romantic nature, allowing poems’ speakers to reflect on themselves and their society through this trashed landscape. The presence of the material garbage itself, however, was never a central concern and continued to be hidden behind its various metaphorical utilizations. A.R. Ammons’s poem Garbage opened up the poetic conversation by searching for a more nuanced and worldly treatment of garbage. The …

‘Held By Thy Voice’: Navigating Time In John Milton’S Poetry, Jessica Junqueira

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation, “‘Held by Thy Voice’: Navigating Time in John Milton’s Poetry” explores how and to what extent John Milton uses the formal device of suspension in “Lycidas,” Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained. I argue that by using suspension, Milton negotiates between multiple categories of time. These moments are important because they highlight characters’ perspectives and expose the limitations of their viewpoints. Milton also employs suspension to introduce potential scenarios that reveal characters to be out of step with a providential framework. He uses suspension to connect two or more temporal categories and to reveal an individual’s position in relation …

Fugitive Verses & Faded Histories: Recovering The Poetry & Influence Of The British American Loyalists, Michael C. Weisenburg

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation traces the literary history of the British American Loyalists as they spread through the Atlantic and across the North American continent during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in order to reassess our understanding of the origins of cultural nationalism and the early literary history of the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean. As a result, it implicitly argues for a reconsideration of American literature as developing in a simultaneously hemispheric and transatlantic response to British Empire. I argue that the Loyalists, through their lived experience of the war, exile, and reincorporation back into the body politic, …

The Poetry Of Wilmer Mills, Rachael Acheson

Theses and Dissertations

This paper seeks to contextualize the work of Wilmer Mills, a late, minor Southeastern American poet, within the complex and frequently misread tradition of New Formalism, as this manifested in the United States shortly after World War II. The analysis places Mills‟s work in conversation with the formalist philosophy of former U.S. Poet Laureate Richard Wilbur, and it suggests that both Mills‟s poetry and his reception amongst fellow academics who adhered to a more progressive philosophy demonstrates the continued relevance of this older, less-often discussed strain of formalism in American poetry. An appendix presents the first checklist of Mills‟s published …

The Poetic Works Of Charlotte Smith: Philosophy, Sympathy, And Forging Community, Jessica Danielle Castillo

Theses and Dissertations

This work will focus on Charlotte Smith’s poetic works and how, over the course of her entire poetic career (the late eighteenth century/early nineteenth century), she exhibits a concrete sense of a poetic ethos regarding sympathy in her writing. I seek to account for the overwhelming focus on suffering subjects by illuminating her view of the relation between poetry and sympathy for others. I will also place her within a history of writers and philosophers who examined the epistemological and practical nature of feeling, sympathy, and emotional connection among human beings. Smith feels that poetry renders suffering visible to others, …

Going Into The Word-Hoard: The Writing Process, Language, And Its Implications In The Poetry Of Medbh Mcguckian And Paul Muldoon, Elizabeth Peele

Theses and Dissertations

As two prominent figures of Northern Irish poetry, Medbh McGuckian and Paul Muldoon are often discussed as being "difficult" and "oblique." However, I argue that this categorization of their poetry is too simplistic and overlooks the dissimilarities in their writing process and view of language, and ultimately, in their poetry itself. By going back to the fundamentals of their works, I claim that the basis for this dissimilarity is, in fact, a differing view of the founding blocks of poetic language. McGuckian sees syntax as being the important factor while Muldoon focuses on the individual lexical meaning of words. These …

Heirlooms, Candace Gayle Wiley

Theses and Dissertations

This creative thesis is a collection of poems and an essay that explores the concept of defining the self through the influence of personal and cultural heirlooms. It is particularly concerned with the inheritances that children receive, whether they are a pair of stockings or a political atmosphere. This collection consists of five sections, submitted in partial fulfillment of University of South Carolina's Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing.