Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Subjects Of Economy: Social Documentary Poetics And Contemporary Poetry Of Work, Michelle B. Gaffey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although the term “documentary” originated in film and photography studies, it has been used to describe a range of compositional and research strategies in discussions of twentieth and twenty-first century poetry as well. A study of such documentary poetics, however, requires us to distinguish between documentary poetics in general and social documentary poetics in particular. To illustrate this distinction, I discuss five contemporary books of poetry and photographs: C.D. Wright’s and Deborah Luster’s One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, Cynthia Hogue’s and Rebecca Ross’s When the Water Came: Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina, Chris Llewellyn’s Fragments from the Fire: …

Emily Dickinson: 19th Century Poet In A 21st Century World, Stephanie Merrigan

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

This capstone will discuss what channels mediate public access to literary content in the case of Emily Dickinson’s poems and letters. The discussion continues with how this was a problem for Dickinson while she was alive due to her reclusiveness and unorthodox punctuation. The capstone then looks at the other aspects of this in the roles that editors, the merchandise now made with lines from Dickinson’s work, and digital technologies play in that circulation, but also how they have played a role in making Dickinson a pop culture icon in the 21^st century.

"Life Will Be A Brief, Hollow Walk": The Future Of Humanity Through Maternal Eyes In Tracy K. Smith's Life On Mars, Mallory Lynn Bingham

Theses and Dissertations

Tracy K. Smith's Pulitzer Prize winning collection of poetry, Life on Mars, has been celebrated and analyzed as an elegy to Smith's father by many reviewers and scholars. And while this reading is valid and has been openly endorsed by Smith herself, our understanding of this collection and Smith's father is incomplete without Smith's treatment of motherhood and religion, two previously unexplored fields in relation to Life on Mars that complete our picture of Smith's father. Smith uses her own new role as a mother and her religious questions about the afterlife and her father's fate to address her father's …

Violet Is One Letter Off From Violent, Audrey E. Spina

Master’s Theses and Projects

The poems in this creative collection, Violet is one letter off from violent, aim to add to the critical conversation in contemporary poetry about violence, women’s anger, patriarchal oppression, and physical and sexual assault, specifically drawing on analyses from the poetry of Rachel McKibbens, Tarfia Faizullah, Emily Skaja, Erika L. Sánchez, Tracy K. Smith, Safiya Sinclair, and Paisley Rekdal. My myriad speakers, who take both first and third person points of narrative view, reclaim and reproduce their own stories in ways that are complex, vulnerable, and angry as a result of living under and through traumatic experiences in domestic and …

Between The Lines: Reflexive Misogyny And Remediated Forms In A Secret Online Group Of Women Poets, Rae Elizabeth Snobl

MSU Graduate Theses

This thesis examines an online, secret writing community for 1,800+ women-only poets called “The Retreat.” Analysis of two years of Facebook posts and interviews with group members revealed a noticeable membership split between those publishing through conventional literary venues, the “traditional poets,” and social media poets. These “Instapoets,” as labeled by popular media each had between 10,000 to 125,000+ followers on sites like Instagram and Facebook—significant numbers when seen in the context of readership and monetizing. Yet, their digital, snippet poems did not hold to the literary norms of poetry, both in form and publishing method. This led to a …

"Wake Up In Moloch:" Modernity, "Howl," And The Beats' Spiritual Quest, Felix Freeland

English Honors Theses

This capstone seeks to shed light on the spiritual nature of the Beat Generation's philosophy, using Ginsberg's poem "Howl" as a primary text. By first comparing Beat spirituality to the transcendental poetry of Whitman and then comparing their belief to Kierkegaard's idea of Faith, I demonstrate that Beat spirituality is a reaction to and protest against the ethics of secular, American Modernity.

Emily Dickinson, The Tyrant, And The Daemon: A Critique Of Societal Oppression, And The Significance Of Artistic Truth, Debra Kue

Masters Theses

This thesis argues that art, for Dickinson, was an alternative system of salvation which her society could not provide her. Unwilling to surrender herself to the mold of her society, the institutional practice of Christianity and gender expectations, Dickinson chose to take ownership of her life through art, which allowed her to develop a personal language to combat the oppressive forces of the world around her. As a conscious “revolutionist of the word” Dickinson embarked on a path of self-discovery that enabled her to conduct a life in self-imposed exile as a means to emancipate herself from the constraints of …

How To Fight Like A Poet: The Socially Engaged Poetics Of Anti-Colonialism In Appalachia., Grace A Rogers

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

Colonialism has played a large and complicated part in the history of Appalachia. Upon European contact, almost all Indigenous people were violently removed from the region along with the cultural, agricultural, and linguistic traditions they cultivated in the mountains. The white colonizers who stole the lands were then economically exploited by the wealthier colonizers to the North and East. In light of the complex dynamics of language, place, and exploitation in the Appalachian Mountains, poetry shows promise as a means of linguistic resistance as well as an intellectual and archival practice that might lead to better understanding the multi-dimensional history …

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 …

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

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

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.

Selections From & The Process Of Creating "My Blue Scarf: The Story Of Ruth, A New Play", Abigail Jane Ayulo

Honors Projects

My Blue Scarf: The Story of Ruth, A New Play, provides an adaptation of the Hebrew Book of Ruth that is focused on minority and female voices and experiences. It employs Hebrew poetic verse forms to pay homage to the story’s origins. This style contributes to diversity of voices in English-speaking theatre outside of Western poetics. My Blue Scarf shares a well- known and multicultural story to contribute to the diversity of contemporary American theatre and promote conversation about cross-cultural relationships in a time of division and prejudice. This project consists of eight selected scenes from the larger play and …

Forgotten Diary, Heather J. Richardson

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

N/A

The Object Memory Palace, Amra Causevic

Theses and Dissertations

I am interested in orchestrating instances of potentiality or concrete possibilities that proposes the futurity of play through means of touch, activation, assembly, and interaction within art spaces. The installation mentioned is composed of found objects and repurposed materials that address themes of place, memory, object-ness, and the archive, through gestural means of poetics and map making. It is an invitation to create new logics and find moments of empathy, connectivity, and hopes for a collective.

It's The Funerals I Missed Which Haunt Me The Most, Arno Goetz

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

What makes a photograph great? This is the central question which guides my research, and I answer this question in two parts. The first element is the structure of the photograph, which Robert Adams addresses in his collection of essays, Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values. With the guiding principle that structure can provide harmony in an image, I develop a collection of guidelines for composing images and name them the “Rules of Clarity.” The purpose of these rules is to help photographers create harmonious compositions, free from distractions. When a photograph has few distractions, it …

The Poetry Of History: Irish National Imagination Through Mythology And Materiality, Ryan Fay

English Honors Theses

The thesis culminates in the twentieth century and yet it begins with the Ulster Cycle, a period of Irish mythological history that occurred around the first century common era. Indeed, since the time frame was before the arrival of the Gaels, Normans, or Christianity, the extent of this mythology’s relevance today is whatever extent it is conceptualized as “Irish.” As such, the first chapter locks onto an aspect that could feasibly transcend time and resonate with modern Irish society: gender. Of course, the epistemological dynamics of gender^[1] in the first-century common era are vastly different than the twentieth century …

Beat The Church Crowd, Evelyn Alston Tyer

Honors Theses

Beat the Church Crowd is a collection of poems that explores a variety of topics and themes, from personal family legacy and natural disasters to bestiary, ekphrastic, and southern locale poems. It is divided into four sections: “Blue Danube,” “Anecdotes,” “Urban Legends,” and “Something Worth Protecting.” While the subject matter and forms of the poems vary, the common thread weaving each poem to the next is the slight touch of the macabre.

The Hair You Wished To Comb, Sarah Barch

Honors Theses

This thesis is a collection of poems exploring gender and trauma in Greek mythology by retelling classical stories in a female voice.

Harvest: Poems, Brittney Allen

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Louise Glück wrote, “the actual making of art is a revenge on circumstance.” The risk, she goes on, is in the possibility of shame. Writing poetry then becomes an act of courage, purchased with sacrifice or loss. “Courage, in this usage, alludes to a capacity for facing down the dark forces.”

In Harvest, a poetry chapbook, the speaker takes revenge on the circumstances of her life by being blunt, bare, and brave on the page. She contends with a male-dominated society and abusive childhood as she moves into adulthood and the supposed saving grace of a marriage. The speaker confesses …

Deconstructing The "Woman Of Sentiment": Parody As Agency In The Poetry Of Phoebe Cary, Scottie Garber-Roberts

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The work of nineteenth-century American poet Phoebe Cary presents a complex puzzle of exigence and purpose that combines social structure, political climate, and personal history. Known for her somber and spiritual sentimental poetry, Cary shocked readers and reviewers alike when she published her collection Poems and Parodies in 1854, which contained a series of scathing and hilarious parodies based on popular sentimental poetry. In my thesis, I work to untangle the various contextual elements surrounding Cary’s writing in order to gain a better understanding of the dual nature of the poet and her work. Through an examination of nineteenth-century American …

The Typewriter And The Literary Sphere: An Analysis Of Turn-Of-The-Century Literature, Emma K. Holdbrooks

Honors Theses

My thesis explores the typewriter’s impact on early 20^th century American literature. By providing authors with the means to produce work accurately and effectively, the typewriter changed the process of writing. Typewriters also created job opportunities for women, who often served as typists. The typist became the foothold position that changed America’s perception of women in the work force and helped usher in a new social concept, “the New Woman.” To illustrate my claim, I show how the typewriter allowed poets like E. E. Cummings to experiment with spacing. Cummings made the typewriter’s standardization of text and spacing into …

Tectonic, Rebecca E. Holifield

Honors Theses

Tectonic is a collection of original poems accompanied by a critical preface.

The Roadmap: Exploring T.S. Eliot’S The Waste Land With World War One Literature, Matthew Bennett

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Through careful analysis paired with poetry, war memoirs, and novels from the same period, one can break down T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to recognize the impact of The Great War on the world's modern memory while pondering the possibility of memory as a tool to overcome trauma.

The Poetic Process: A Poetry Collection, Kirsten Noelle Litz

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The Poetic Process is a creative thesis analyzing the use of different poetic forms but focuses more on the application of them through a series of creative work.

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 …

Entre Países, Jared Steiman

Honors Theses

This collection of original poems deals with the unique experience of transnational family, particular to the international and interracial tensions of the years 2014-2020. The works focus on intimate portraits of life in the United States South, the Mexican South, and the relationship between. Love and loss feature prominently. Injustice is sewn throughout. Accompanying the original poems are a number of translations of Octavio Paz and Rosario Castellanos, as well as a craft essay detailing the process of creating this body of work.

Brilliant Women: Prose And Poetry, Amelia Fisher

MSU Graduate Theses

This collection of creative writing explores themes and subjects relating to feminism, sexuality, performativity, societal woes, popular culture, and the different ways we communicate. The individual pieces often examine women’s empowerment and lack thereof. These stories, essays, and poems are introduced by a critical work situating the contents of the thesis within greater literary traditions, such as Viktor Shklovsky’s defamiliarization, which I claim can function on the structural level as well as the story level, and his theory of the Chronotope; time and place are significant threads I follow from one genre to the next to create a cohesive collection …

Skin: Stories, Poems, And Essays, Amanda G. Hadlock

MSU Graduate Theses

This thesis begins with a critical introduction which analyzes the use of objective correlative and varying points of view in creative writing in order to generate dialogue on cultural issues. I relate theories from Edward T. Hall, T.S. Eliot, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Lubomír Doležel to my own writing. Additionally, I situate my own multi-genre writing with work of contemporaries such as Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine. My hypothesis is that writers can use an objective correlative (Eliot) from the top of the cultural iceberg (Hall) as an entry point to representing deeper, more fraught cultural issues. Additionally, by experimenting with …

The Green Poem: An Original Play In Two Acts, Emily Arancio

College Honors Program

An original play in poetic dialogue based on the philosophy of Lucretius.

The Powerful Presence Of Dams In Appalachian Poetry, Zoe Hester

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Contemporary Appalachian poetry offers a lens through which we can see the immense impact that the Tennessee Valley Authority has had in Appalachia. In this thesis, I explore the powerful presence of dams in Appalachian poetry by analyzing three poems. Jesse Graves’s “The Road into the Lake” centers on personal and familial loss, Jackson Wheeler’s “The TVA Built a Dam” mourns the loss of communities, and Rose McLarney’s “Imminent Domain” focuses on the ecological destruction that has occurred in Appalachia and around the globe as the result of the construction of TVA dams. Ultimately, all three poems serve as eulogies …

Plato's Ban: Why The Poets Are Exiled, Seth J. Gerberding

Honors Thesis

This thesis examines Plato’s ban of poetry in the Republic. In particular, I draw a link between Plato’s method for finding the truth, dialectic, and his banishment of the poets. There are three parts to this thesis. First, I analyze dialectic as a process, understanding what the science searches for and how it does so. Second, I analyze poetry and its metaphysical standing and how that influences psychology. Finally, I argue that the design of dialectic has an inherent weakness, a weakness that allows poets and rhetoricians to corrupt former students of dialectic. In Plato’s perfect state, there is no …