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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
“As Blind Men Learn The Sun”: Towards A Poetics Of Queer Mysticism In American Literature, 1860-1960, Bradley M. Nelson
“As Blind Men Learn The Sun”: Towards A Poetics Of Queer Mysticism In American Literature, 1860-1960, Bradley M. Nelson
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation seeks to play with the similarity between the queer and the mystical, and in the process, defines something I call “queer mysticism.” I include four cardinal figures of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American poetry: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Robert Duncan. Beginning with Walt Whitman, I show how each of these poets bear witness to an experience of the divine that is both immanent and immanently queer. Through historical and biographical research, I uncover their poetic inspiration in popular modes of expression and in the esoteric and arcane. By establishing a connection with a few Catholic mystics …
There’S No Space In History: Affiliation, Eros And Colonial Entanglements In North American Nuclear Poetry, 1945-Present, Marguerite Daisy Atterbury
There’S No Space In History: Affiliation, Eros And Colonial Entanglements In North American Nuclear Poetry, 1945-Present, Marguerite Daisy Atterbury
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation investigates “affiliation” as a socio-spatial poetics and spatial ontology, a departure from the past and future to the material, landed present. The author’s experience growing up proximate to federally ordered uranium mining and nuclear weapons research on Indigenous land and at Los Alamos National Labs drives this work’s aim to render visible the economic, social, and ideological structures governing social-spatial dynamics in the North American context. This dissertation argues for a poetics of affiliation as a methodology, to move beyond theoretical and discursive questions in scholarship to negotiations of the social at scales that affect systems beyond the …
Topics Of The Sky: Ashbery's Involving Search For The Poem, Tom M. Carlson
Topics Of The Sky: Ashbery's Involving Search For The Poem, Tom M. Carlson
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
An essay lived by John Ashbery's Three Poems with special attention to the possibility of cosmic relevance. This paper attempts to imagine priorities and needs proper to celestial bodies. Three Poems is the consciousness that gives possibility to the text, while Blanchot, Nietzsche, and other thinkers ground its exploration in philosophical analysis.
To See Again: Vision And Revelation In American Poetics, Emily C. Raabe
To See Again: Vision And Revelation In American Poetics, Emily C. Raabe
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
With this project, I am arguing for a particularly American visual poetics that dwells in the state of suspension implied by attention, quivering between wonder and contemplation, immobility and unfixity as it seeks to reveal, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes in his 1945 The Phenomenology of Perception, the world which is “always ‘already there’ before reflection begins — as an inalienable presence.”[1] Grounded in visual theory, the project pairs poets and artists, searching not for similitude, but rather examining resemblance, difference, and most important, relation. Susan Howe, one of my guides for this project, writes that, “immense perspectives …
"For The Voices": The Letters Of John Wieners, Michael Seth Stewart
"For The Voices": The Letters Of John Wieners, Michael Seth Stewart
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
American poet John Wieners is thoroughly disenfranchised from the modern poetic establishments because he is, to those institutions, practically illegible. He was a queer self-styled poete maudit in the fifties; a protege of political-historical poet Charles Olson who wrote audaciously personal verse; a lyric poet who eschewed the egoism of the confessional mode in order to pursue the Olsonian project of Projective (outward-looking) poetics; a Boston poet who was institutionalized at state hospitals. Wieners lived on the "other side" of Beacon Hill, not the Brahmin south slope, but the north side with its working-class apartments and underground gay bars. Though …