Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Liz Lochhead And The Fairies: Context And Influence In Grimm Sisters And Dreaming Frankenstein, William Donaldson

Studies in Scottish Literature

Examines the Scottish poet Liz Lochhead's period of North American travel and her response to American second-wave feminist poetics, particularly to the anthology No More Masks! (1973) and the poetry of Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton, the treatment of myth by J.G. Frazer and Robert Graves, and the perspective on Scottish fairy tales offered by folklorists, to explore Lochhead's creative reworking of both fairy tale and classical myth in her collections Grimm Sisters (1981) and Dreaming Frankenstein (1984).

~The River~ (Poem By Raymond Carver)

The International Journal of Ecopsychology (IJE)

"[...] Felt the hair rise as something touched my boot. Grew afraid at what I couldn’t see. Then of everything that filled my eyes— that other shore hung with heavy branches, the dark mountain range behind. [...]"

"A Stranger In America": Queer Diasporic Writers And The American Politics Of Exclusion, Caitlin Stanfield

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While the academic concept of queer diasporic studies is relatively new, the epistemic future of this interdisciplinary, intersectional, and inclusive field is already imperiled. Throughout recent years, bills seeking to expunge critical race and queer theory from not only the public education sector, but from the legally-defined “general public” as well, have been proposed by legislators throughout the United States. To combat this assault upon marginalized educators, scholars, and authors, one must first understand what is at stake; the rich site of contemporary, queer diasporic poetry provides one such example. By situating these poems within their complex cultural, political, and …

The Peculiar Use Of Punctuation In A.R. Ammons' "So I Said I Am Ezra", Malek Zuraikat, Faisal Rawashdeh

Association of Arab Universities Journal for Arts مجلة اتحاد الجامعات العربية للآداب

In his poem "So I Said I am Ezra," A.R. Ammons employs a peculiar nopunctuation strategy to represent his speaker's unique terms of association with the natural elements. This kind of punctuation marks, we argue, allows for two opposed, yet interdependent, interpretations of the poem. While the one interpretation underscores the speaker's progressive but eventual isolation from Nature, the other explains his growing sense of belonging and resulting mutuality. We trace this ambivalent attitude to Nature in the poem's appropriation of the Romantic mode of poetic meditation and showcase how a twofold standpoint for thematic interpretation can be yielded by …

Trauma And Poetry. The Case Of Primo Levi, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

Most North American readers have come to know and appreciate Primo Levi by his major works in prose. His The Periodic Table (1984) catapulted Levi onto the American stage of scientific-humanistic authors, having the New York Times named it among the Best Books of the Year in 1985. Instead, American readers will likely stumble upon Levi’s poetry by accident, simply because every now and then one of his poems in translation appears in print somewhere. Compared to Levi’s prose, his poems inevitably evoke a sense of unease, for their tone, their style and their content are so unlike the familiar, …

Body, Mind, And Locale : Understanding The American Reality Through Blended Environs In William Carlos Williams' Poetry, Kelly D'Souza

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Williams Carlos Williams is a significant figure in modernist poetry. Since his poetryreflects his interest in the mind, as well as the nature of America, examining it enables readers to understand significant concepts of thought and American existence, and the shifting realities of American life during this time. For Williams, understanding these American ideals is best navigated through a largely physical and visual experience. For Williams, locale is not primarily defined through geography, but instead through the understanding and expression of the perceptions and experiences “common man” at a particular site. Man's surroundings are inherently connected to his thoughts, thus …

Mic Check : Finding Hip Hop's Place In The Literary Milieu, Victorio Reyes

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The study of Hip Hop poetics has been slowly gaining momentum as an area for scholarly inquiry. Accordingly, Mic Check rests on one critical assumption: Hip Hop is the most significant American form of poetry ever invented. To back up this claim, this project investigates Hip Hop lyricism from five critical angles: tradition, form, tone, medium, and practice. I argue that music’s foundational position in African American literature clarifies Hip Hop’s experiments with language, which operate within and extend an ongoing, centuries-old tradition of linguistic, rhythmic, and poetic experimentation. Comprehension of the longstanding literary/oral territory from which Hip Hop is …

Twentieth-Century Feminine Visionary Poetics : Vulnerable Visions Of Survival And Healing:, Lucyna Prostko

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

H.D. and Denise Levertov, two visionary poets of the twentieth century, represent both female poets’ awakening of political and historical consciousness and their engagement with the poetics of vulnerability and survival. H.D. and Levertov offer lyrical visions that dismantle the binaries of real and unreal, earthly and transcendent, and individual and communal. The subject of this project is visionary imagination and its various reverberations, limitations, and potentialities. What is at stake in feminine visionary twentieth-century poetics is the creation of imaginative worlds, the space of possibility, and the shaping of a lyrical form that encompasses the voices of survival, vulnerability, …

“Nobody” Speaks In A Bog: Emily Dickinson’S “I’M Nobody Who Are You?”, Mei Fujie

English Language Institute

No abstract provided.

'Odd Secrets Of The Line': Emily Dickinson And The Uses Of Folk, Wendy Tronrud

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Emily Dickinson and her poetry have famously been used as a defining example of American lyric poetry. The traditional scholarly perspective maintains that the lyric poem and its speaker exist in isolation and at a remove from social and political contexts. Recent scholarship on American poetry of the long nineteenth century, however, has taken a more historical and cultural turn, reconsidering how poetic and vernacular forms and genres circulated both privately and publicly. “Odd Secrets of the Line”: Emily Dickinson and the Uses of Folk joins this conversation by theorizing how Dickinson’s poetry, written during the 1859-1865 period, registers the …

"She Believes She Is Herself, Which Isn't Complete Madness:" Becoming The Female Subject Through Womanhood As Relation, Isabel Rudner

Senior Projects Fall 2020

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Dickinson At Thirty, Philip Pardi

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

When we say there are “no Mozarts in literature,” we point to an enticing fact: writers become. Pick any text you love or revere, and there was a moment earlier in the author’s life when it could not have been written. The writers we remember develop over time; they change and are changed. Their careers divide, if not always easily, into a before (often thought of as a kind of apprenticeship) and an after (a work or body of work that has a significant claim on our attention). Personal relationships, lived experiences, social and political contexts, readers real and imagined, …

The Influence Of Individualistic Ideas On American Mobility, Markus Magiera

English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

In this paper I showcase the influence of individualistic thinking ranging back as far as Age of Enlightenment on the development of mobility in America since the eighteenth century. My goal is to identify the factors that shaped the evolution of travel. In order to do so I start by analyzing texts from the early nineteenth century, where travel by foot was the common thing. Next I focus on new means of mobility; first the bicycle, and later on the automobile. I aim to convince that modernity's main instigator was the change in thinking brought forth in the Age of …

Before Nature's Nation : Ecological Thought And Early American Poetry, Joshua Bartlett

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This project examines early American encounters with the natural world through the context of contemporary ecocriticism. In readings of Puritan poets Anne Bradstreet and Michael Wigglesworth, African-American poet Phillis Wheatley, and Mohegan minister Samson Occom, it demonstrates how poetic attentions to nature transformed collective antagonism toward the “howling wilderness” into personal feelings of affection and wonder. Likewise, it develops an understanding of the “ecological” that is both methodology, a way of thinking about specific things, such as trees or stones, and epistemology, a kind of thinking that emphasizes relational perception. It then situates these experiences amidst both canonical Americanist scholarship …

A Coat Of Ashes: A Collection Of Poems, Incorporating A Metafictional Narrative - And - Poetry, Daoism, Physics And Systems Theory: A Poetics: A Set Of Critical Essays, Janet Ruth Jackson

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis comprises a book-length creative work accompanied by a set of essays. It explores how poetry might bring together spiritual and scientific discourses, focusing primarily on philosophical Daoism (Taoism) and contemporary physics. Systems theory (the science of complex and self-organising systems) is a secondary focus of the creative work and is used metaphorically in theorising the writing process.

The creative work, “A coat of ashes”, is chiefly concerned with the nature of being. It asks, “What is?”, “What am I?” and, most urgently, “What matters?”. To engage with these questions, it opens a space in which voices expressing scientific …

Book Review Of The Oxford Book Of American Poetry: The Difficulty Of Anthologizing American Poetry, Ted Olson

Ted Olson

Review of The Oxford Book of American Poetry: The Difficulty of Anthologizing American Poetry

Poetry Matters: Radical Politics In Postmodern American Poetry, Christopher J. Padgett

Open Access Dissertations

Directly or indirectly, poetry produced in the postmodern era is implicated in the politics of the time. Postmodern American poetry, then, is not reducible to a single poetic mode or to a specific set of stylistic features. In other words, a more comprehensive understanding of postmodern American poetry can be made by employing a flexible version of Raymond Williams’ notion of uneven development, a theory that insists on the synchronic existence of dominant, residual, and emergent cultural elements. As the stylistically and politically diverse work of the six poets—Susan Howe, Robert Grenier, Gary Snyder, A.R. Ammons, Sherman Alexie, and Kenneth …

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 …

Purely American: How Art From Harlem And Broadway Shaped American Culture, Emily Knocke

English Class Publications

The United States of America is a relatively young country, if you consider its foundations established in the late eighteenth century. For this reason, the art forms of visual art, theatre, and literature were already well-developed by the time America had established a unique voice. Although their beginnings were segregated by race, socioeconomic status, popularity, and a couple of streets in New York City (see Figure 1), two musical styles stick out as entirely American art forms: the Broadway musical and jazz. While Harlem Renaissance writers and artists argued for a separate but valued black culture, the unique American art …

Echoes From Heaven, Flora B. Foster

Heritage Material

No abstract provided.

Anne Sexton's Environmental Animality, Dan A. Wylie Prof

Animal Studies Journal

What does it mean to study the intersection of environment, animals and literature, at this juncture in human history? How might it manifest at the level of an individual poet’s work, with what consequences? This paper approaches these questions through the poetry of Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, Anne Sexton. Sexton’s poetry has been exhaustively studied for its psychological dimensions and forcefulness, for her treatment of madness, suicide, and family relationships in particular. Despite a high density of animal imagery, this animal element is conventionally skimmed over. This article argues that animal presences constitute a minor but unavoidable strand amongst the …

Sarah Hall's 1806 Poem, "Sketch Of A Landscape In Cecil County, Maryland, At The Junction Of The Octorara Creek With The Susquehanna, Suggested By Hearing The Birds Sing During The Remarkably Warm Weather In February 1806.", Jon Miller

Jon Miller

A Negotiation In Meaning: Identifying American Cultural Touchstones, Jayne Jaya Todai

Honors Theses

How can discussing a poem lead to a meaningful conversation? What if Americans used common poems as their nation's cultural touchstones? In my essay, I will explore how poems that serve as American cultural touchstones might develop better communicators within the United States. I will propose a template that determines which poems would qualify as these national touchstones.

Homosexuality Is A Poem: How Gay Poets Remodeled The Lyric, Community And The Ideology Of Sex To Theorize A Gay Poetic, Christopher M. Hennessy

Doctoral Dissertations

SourceURL:file://localhost/Users/christopherhennessy/Desktop/DISS/Dissertation_Hennessy._Final.doc This dissertation approaches the work of three canonical post-war gay poets in an effort to construct a discourse on sexuality and the minoritized writer that argues the lyric functions as a historically contingent, politically invested, value-laden genre in which some subjectivities might be prohibited from or find their expression made to signify in ways that re-inscribe oppression. The first chapter theorizes the possiblitites of a gay poetic and analyzes the gay poet’s subjectivity as one obsessed with the ways in which he is marginalized due to expression. In the chapter on Frank O’Hara, the poet is shown to disfigure …

Morning's Porch, Colby Gillette

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Morning's Porch continues and follows the walking, waiting, watching that begins and ends off the page. It begins "underway," with two already on the road, and ends in an eye wanting light. In between, childhood, Easter, Winter, Spring, Venice, asphalt, Summer, Fall, sunsets, moorhens, grackles, billboards, dogwoods and cottonwoods walk along the poems. They walk through the poems as they continue to walk in the world. In a similar way, the poems of René Char, George Herbert, Paul Celan, Emily Dickinson, William Blake, Arthur Rimbaud, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, William Carlos Williams and Pierre Reverdy walk through the pages of …

Combining The Names Of Ancestors With The Names Of Birds, Jessica Sierra Durham

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The following manuscript deals with a range of themes including origin, family, place, gender, sexuality and their intersections. The title, Combining the Names of Ancestors with the Names of Birds, and title poem exemplify the intersection of origin, family, place (ancestors) and gender, sexuality, movement, change and freedom (birds). Combining

their names speaks to the interplay between memory and imagination that has served as a foundation for all of the poems in this manuscript. This manuscript is split into three sections: Origin, which deals with home, with growing up in Louisiana, with the land and the water, my family and …

Behind His Father's Saying: Robert Frost's Wisdom Tradition, James H. Altman

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

It is no coincidence that Robert Frost draws on the European/American aphoristic wisdom tradition. From the fables of Aesop, to the esotericism of pre-Socratic Greek philosophers such as Pythagoras and Empedocles, to the works of moralists like Blaise Pascal and Michel De Montaigne, to Erasmus, Frederick Nietzsche and others, Robert Frost weaves diverse wisdom into his work. He does not, however, as much take verbatim the words or sentiments of those who inspire him. Rather he adapts the spirit of their thoughts for his own purposes. Why and how does he do this? What are those purposes, and their subsequent …

Critique Is Not Enough : The Empirical Imperatives Of Innovative American Poetry, Christopher Rizzo

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Critique is Not Enough: The Empirical Imperatives of Innovative American Poetryproposes that innovative modern and early contemporary American poetries redefine the relation of knowledge, consciousness, and poetic performance to lived experience. This study demonstrates how the radically different poetic projects of Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Charles Olson not only equally insist upon empirically investigative poetics, but also endeavor, each to each, to individualize their poetic methodologies, which thus challenges the generalized Enlightenment myth of rationality. In that each of these writers undertakes to redefine the relation of knowledge, consciousness, and poetic performance to lived experience, they also …

Disciplined Play: American Children's Poetry To 1920, Angela Sorby

English Faculty Research and Publications

Children's poetry is barely studied and barely taught, except as an instrumental teaching tool in colleges of education. American children's poetry, like American literature more generally, took on distinctive characteristics after about 1820, as more work was written and published by Americans. The practice of addressing adults and children together in volumes of poetry spanned the whole nineteenth century, although it was slightly more common during the antebellum period. Most scholarly work on the child like qualities of women authors stresses that, although the voice seems innocent, it is really an adult voice making an adult point. The few poems …

Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, And The Place Of American Poetry, 1865-1917 [Book Review], Mary Loeffelholz

Mary Loeffelholz

No abstract provided.