Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Irreverent Womanhood: The Healing Of Intergenerational And Cultural Trauma In The Chicanx And Latinx Sonic Poetry Of Amalia Ortiz And Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Yasmine A. Gomez

Theses and Dissertations

The connections between nontraditional forms of literature and spiritual activism lie within the resistive practices of Chicanx Feminism. This thesis argues that cultural healing and social change is dependent upon the recognition of trauma as a step towards enacting social justice. Additionally, this thesis focuses on the figure of Coyolxauhqui and indigenous motherhood to reveal procedures for change. Through the theory of trauma, this thesis examines the nontraditional Chicanx/Latinx poetry of Amalia Ortiz’s sonic rock opera, Cancíon, Cannibal, Cabaret, & Other Songs and Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s novel in verse, Dreaming of You.

My investigation into the breaking of gendered …

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 …

False Spring, Tobias Wray

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores queer kinship and masculinity in an extended poetic sequence. The speakers of these poems attempt to understand the ways that family shapes our sense of gendered identity, particularly how masculinity is constructed and perpetuated through a history of gendered violence in western culture. Investigating the shame of failed masculinity and unsanctioned identity through a range of aesthetic positions, these poems interrogate the tradition of English language poetry as a space where masculinity is both blurred and reinscribed.

In three sections, the collection considers the relationship between paternity and patriarchy, and how queer identity offers alternative aesthetic positions …

"History Real Or Feigned": Tolkien, Scott, And Poetry's Place In Fashioning History, Kaleigh Jean Spooner

Theses and Dissertations

Most critics of The Lord of the Rings correlate Tolkien's work to ancient texts, like Beowulf, the Elder Edda, and medieval romances. While the connection between these traditional materials and Tolkien is valid, it neglects a key feature of Tolkien's work and one of the author's desires, which was to fashion a sort of history that felt as real as any other old story. Moreover, it glosses over the rather obvious point that Tolkien is writing a novel, or at any rate a long work of prose fiction that owes a good deal to the novel tradition. …

"A Poem Containing History": Pound As A Poet Of Deep Time, Newell Scott Porter

Theses and Dissertations

There has been an emergent trend in literary studies that challenges the tendency to categorize our approach to literature. This new investment in the idea of "world literature," while exciting, is also both theoretically and pragmatically problematic. While theorists can usually articulate a defense of a wider approach to literature, they struggle to develop a tangible approach to such an ideal. By examining Ezra Pound's critical approach to poetry, especially in The Cantos, an applicable visualization of a global approach to literature becomes more transparent.

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 Waiting House, Erika Marie Mueller

Theses and Dissertations

The poems in this collection, The Waiting House, use techniques associated with an evolving elegiac tradition in their portrayal of anticipatory grief born of terminal illness and impending loss. Like the melancholic mourning of modern elegies described by Jahan Ramazani, my poems often resist consolation even as they borrow from elegiac conventions like poetic substitution and repetition. Additionally, they utilize strategies and patterns of literary anger outlined by Alicia Suskin Ostriker as common in postwar American women’s poetry, to express anger that is also anticipatory grief. Finally, this collection uses illness metaphors to question the well being of a larger …

The Small Disasters Lp, Lindsay Daigle

Theses and Dissertations

THE SMALL DISASTERS LP is a book of poems that respond to the visual and audible elements of musical albums. In this way, the ekphrastic method (traditionally, poetic representation of visual art) is simultaneously utilized and critiqued in order to explore an emotional landscape of melancholy, loss, death, and self-doubt. The poems navigate through their separate worlds as the speaker attempts to understand herself among these emotions. Three sections of poems, separated by standalone “intermezzo” poems, fluctuate through disorientation, deconstruction, and reorientation of voice and, therefore, self. The critical introduction to the book situates my investigation of ekphrasis’ value within …

Threshold, Leah V

Theses and Dissertations

This senior thesis details an exploration by Leah V into spaces and places in time—be they emotional or physical—in which an important boundary has been crossed, thereby removing the possibility of returning to that space or place. The critical introduction for this collection of poems by Leah V focuses on the esteemed voices of Robert Penn Warren and Seamus Heaney, two men whose poetry has been, and continues to be, highly influential in Leah’s own poetic quest.

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 …

“I Take--No Less Than Skies”: Emily Dickinson And Nineteenth-Century Meteorology, Kjerstin Evans Ballard

Theses and Dissertations

Emily Dickinson's poetry functions where scientific attention to the physical world and abstract theorizing about the ineffable intersect. Critics who emphasize the poet's dedication to the scientific often take for granted how deeply the uncertainty that underlies all of Dickinson's poetry opposes scientific discussion of the day. Meteorology is an exceptional nineteenth-century science because it takes as its subject complex systems which are inexplicable in Newtonian terms. As such, meteorology can articulate the ways that Dickinson bridges the divide between the unknown and the known, particularly as she relates to the interplay of nature and culture, the role of careful …

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, …

"Dae Scotsmen Dream O 'Lectric Leids?" Robert Crawford's Cyborg Scotland, Alexander Burke

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis applies a Cybernetic interpretation to a selection of poetry by the Scottish Informationist poet Robert Crawford, drawn mostly from two collections: A Scottish Assembly (1990) and Sharawaggi: Poems in Scots (1990). Crawford is contextualized by observing the poetic influences of Robert Burns, John Davidson, and Hugh MacDiarmid, as well as the philosophical influence of George Elder Davie’s The Democratic Intellect. This paper argues that, in response to the Two Cultures hypothesis put forth by C. P. Snow and the widely-held belief that Scotland is irrevocably fractured, the shifting boundaries of the many disparate Scottish cultures are mediated by …

Homophonic Translation, Appositional Writing, And The Monster, Ryan Landry Clark

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation features a combination of critical and creative work

exploring the ethics of appropriative writing and the reparative potential of homophonic translation. The opening essay examines the ethics of appropriation- based poetry and introduces the concept of what I call "appositional writing," a term to describe ethically-minded works of poetry that make use of appropriative writing methods. The next three parts of this dissertation are each appositional writing projects that make use of homophonic translation as the primary method of composition. "Arizona State Bill 1070: An Act" is a homophonic translation of the anti-immigration bill of the same name. …

George Canning, Liberal Toryism, And Counterrevolutionary Satire In The Anti-Jacobin, Martha Thompson

Theses and Dissertations

One of the most defining moments in the histories of British satire and the public sphere took place in the late 1790s in an abandoned house in Piccadilly. Here George Canning and several fellow conservatives began writing and circulating their weekly newspaper the Anti-Jacobin. Although the periodical has been critically neglected, it is a valuable model for exploring how literary (partisan) politicians attempted to form a rational and critical public sphere through their satiric poetry. Founded by George Canning and edited by William Gifford, the Anti-Jacobin seems to reflect a reactionary conservative's ideology and has been summarily dismissed because of …

Translation As Katabasis And Nekyia In Seamus Heaney's "The Riverbank Field", Gerrit Van Dyk

Theses and Dissertations

Translation has been at the heart of Seamus Heaney's career. In his poem, "The Riverbank Field," from his latest collection, Human Chain, Heaney engages in metatranslation, "Ask me to translate what Loeb gives as / 'In a retired vale...a sequestered grove' / And I'll confound the Lethe in Moyola." Curiously, with a broad spectrum of classical works at his disposal, the poet chooses a particular moment in Virgil's Aeneid as an image for translation. What is it about this conversation between Aeneas and his dead father, Anchises, at the banks of the Lethe which makes it uniquely fitting for …

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.

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 …

The “Man Walks Outside Time Now”: Verbal Representations Of Photographic Images In The Poems Of Larry Levis, Lauren Miner

Theses and Dissertations

The poet Larry Levis often employed ekphrasis as an elegiac device—particularly with his verbal descriptions of photographic images—to explore human suffering and reconcile feelings of loss. Through the ekphrastic mode, Levis could juxtapose otherwise disparate images, manipulating their temporal and spatial relationships, to achieve what he conceived an authentic portrait of the human experience. The poet, through his verbal descriptions of photographic images, does not try to evade the pain or joy of being human; instead, he confronts his grief directly and, in so doing, transcends that suffering to better understand himself and his own human position. This thesis analyzes …

First Psalm: Poems And Paintings, Ashley Mae Christensen

Theses and Dissertations

This collection of poems and paintings seeks to find the places where visual and written communication intersects, and the places where those two media diverge. The collection consists of poems and paintings juxtaposed, as if in conversation with one another throughout the pages. The collection treats each painting and poem as a separate attempt at prayer. As a reader turns the pages, similar questions are asked again and again, but in different settings and with different outcomes. This collection focuses on finding reconciliation between the oral culture of storytelling and the written culture of ideas, all within the context of …

Gesamtkunstwerk And Other Trifles: Poems, Derk A. Olthof

Theses and Dissertations

In all their various categories, the arts serve as the dominant subject matter of Gesamtkunstwerk and Other Trifles. The title itself begins with a German word-meld—gesamt (total) + kunstwerk (work of art). Thus a primary aim of these poems is to bring as many elements of art together as possible and to use their various forms (self-portraits, nocturnes, odes, etc.) as metaphorical frameworks that inform abstractions such as regret ("How to Draw Regret"), psychological disorders ("Insomnia Nocturnes") and confusion in how one should feel about living realities as opposed to inanimate objects ("Dead Starling"). Most of the poems …

Merit Beyond Any Already Published: Austen And Authorship In The Romantic Age, Rebecca Lee Jensen Ogden

Theses and Dissertations

In recent decades there have been many attempts to pull Austen into the fold of high Romantic literature. On one level, these thematic comparisons are useful, for Austen has long been anachronistically treated as separate from the Romantic tradition. In the past, her writings have essentially straddled Romantic classification, labeled either as hangers-on in the satiric eighteenth-century literary tradition or as early artifacts of a kind of proto-Victorianism. To a large extent, scholars have described Austen as a writer departing from, rather than embracing, the literary trends of the Romantic era. Yet, while recent publications depicting a “Romantic Austen” yield …

Facing God: Contemporary American Devotional Poetry, Sarah E. Jenkins

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis examines the connection between scripture and contemporary American poetry. Scripture is inherently poetic, employing devices that require analysis and explication. Poets drawing from scriptural text for narrative, language, or form are not looking to replace scripture, or even enhance it. Poets create new experiences in language, and their writing can illuminate the poetics of scripture. My thesis will examine work by three contemporary poets who have imitated, alluded to, and re-created scripture: Jacqueline Osherow's "Scattered Psalms" from 1999 collection Dead Men's Praise; Louise Glück's 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection The Wild Iris; and Morri Creech's "The Testament of Judas" …

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 …

Keeping Gardens: Poetry And Essay, Deja Anne Earley

Theses and Dissertations

This creative thesis includes two creative non-fiction essays and twenty-two poems, introduced by a critical essay that examines my work. The poems and essays share an origin in personal experience as well as an interest in language. Specifically, the poems and essays explore issues of family, relationships, spirituality, and observations of the natural world. The introductory essay discusses my interest in re-fashioning individual vision through the act of writing, relating to Helene Cixous's idea of creating a "portrait of God" through the act of art. The essay also examines the connections between the genres of creative non-fiction and poetry, in …

Dinner For One, Cheryl E. Ball

Theses and Dissertations

Dinner For One, a hypermedia poetry thesis, explores the themes of aloneness, sexuality, independence, and journeys of discovery and distance. The Chinese zodiac stamps used as navigational elements in Dinner for One and the prose poems written as postcards to oneself an others reinforce the notion of travel. The fortunes from Chinese cookies give prophecies and horoscopes, reminding us of our fate, which is beyond our conrol. Dinner For One means to question, through poetry and interactive, hypertextual reading techniques, how much faith and trust we should hold in influences outside of our lives. The poems in this thesis are …

Bayard Taylor's The Prophet: Mormonism As Literary Taboo; Calaveras County Comes Of Age; The Erosion Of Belief In The Poetry Of Clinton F. Larson, Thomas D. Schwartz

Theses and Dissertations

The three papers included in this thesis reflect my development as a graduate student during the course of my master's program at Brigham Young Universtiy. I came to Brigham Young University interested in creative writing and developed a love for research and criticism. My work in nineteenth century American literature led to the first two papers. Both deal with literary history, the first narrow in scope, devoted to a study of the significance of a single play, the second broad in scope, devoted to a study of the unifying thread of anti-sentimentalism in the writings of the major American realists. …

The Poetry Of Matthew Arnold: A Study In Versification, Douglas A. Mathewson

Theses and Dissertations

Despite the great number of published works that deal with English prosody or the more restricted subject of versification, there is a noticeable scarcity of studies that describe the practices of individual poets. One of the more apparent reasons for the meager number of versification studies is the instability of the basic criteria by which a poem is examined. Prosodists quite simply find it difficult to establish concrete principles of scansion that are acceptable to all other prosodists. Without going into discussion of the various schools of thought on metrical structure, suffice it to say that there are conflicting opinions …