Jeux Et Enjeux Des Formes Poétiques Dans Les Mystères Médiévaux, Patrick Ager

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Late-medieval mystery plays present an exceptionally rich versification. This dissertation aims to shed light on the features of these texts, which I consider to be “dramatic poems”. Scholars have long recognized that the playwrights of this period used many complex strophic forms in their works: this was noted by Henri Chatelain in his Recherches sur le vers français au quinzième siècle (1908). However, studies on the versification of medieval theatre have often been limited to mere lists and catalogues of forms, sometimes accompanied by cursory remarks. Certainly, such an approach provides a glimpse of the technical virtuosity of these poets; …

Dreamvision Songbook: Five Songs For Mixed Ensemble, Maxwell R. Lucas Mr.

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The DREAMVISION SONGBOOK is a musical dream vision: a cycle of allegorical songs for mixed ensemble (three sopranos, guitar, violin, double bass and percussion). The text for the work consists of five original English poems written by the composer. The poems take the characteristics of the medieval rondeau, virelai and ballade as a formal departure point. The five poems depict a series of episodes that weave together a dream vision; a pilgrimage in which the dreamer encounters imagery of environmental collapse, death, decay and catastrophe, but also symbols of hope and repair.

Reading The Canadian Battlefield At Quebec, Queenston, Batoche, And Vimy, Rebecca Campbell

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Early Canadian cultural history is punctuated by a series of battlefields that define not only the Dominion’s expanding territory and changing administration, but also organize Canadian time. This dissertation examines the intersection between official military commemoration, militarism as a social and cultural form, and the creation of a national literature, with specific reference to poetry. By outlining the role war has played in defining Canada’s territory and the constitution of its communities, this dissertation will also uncover both the military history of the post-colonial nation, and the construction of belonging and territory in the “empire” of Canada, from its cultural …

About Telling: Ghosts And Hauntings In Contemporary Drama And Poetry, Leif Erik Schenstead-Harris

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It is difficult to think of something as formally resistant to definition as a ghost. What is more ambiguous than something described as “haunting”? Few currents in literature have been as prominent – and as comparatively unremarked – as the current critical and literary dependence on the language of spectrality. While ghost stories in prose have gained substantial attention, in drama and poetry ghosts and hauntings have found less critical purchase.

In response, this dissertation takes up a selection of drama and poetry from Ireland, South Africa, and the Caribbean to illustrate the theoretical and critical potential of ghosts and …

Dirty Modernism: Ecological Objects In American Poetry, Michael D. Sloane

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This dissertation examines how early-to-mid twentieth century American poetry is preoccupied with objects that unsettle the divide between nature and culture. Given the entanglement of these two domains, I argue that American modernism is “dirty.” This designation leads me to sketch what I call “dirty modernism,” which includes the registers of waste, energy, animality, raciality, and the sensual. Reading these registers, I turn to what I call “ecological objects,” or representations of how nature and culture come together, which includes trash, natural resources, inanimals, and tools. Through an ecocritical mode of analysis, I introduce dirty modernism with the Baroness Elsa …

Feeling With Imagination: Sympathy And Postwar American Poetry, Timothy A. Dejong

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This dissertation examines how sympathy, defined as the act of “feeling with” another, develops within American poetics from 1950-1965 both as aesthetic strategy and as political response to Cold War culture. Re-examining the social aims of postwar poets typically either thought of as apolitical or yoked to political positions not in fact evidenced by their poems, I argue that these poets, by developing forms of sympathy that negotiate the middle space between the aesthetic conventions of late modernist poetry and the social concerns of postwar American culture, instantiate a self-questioning, often implicit form of “soft politics” that both prefigures and …