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Dark Matter: Susan Howe, Muriel Rukeyser, And The Scholar's Art, Stefania Heim
Dark Matter: Susan Howe, Muriel Rukeyser, And The Scholar's Art, Stefania Heim
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Instead of describing poetry as a set of constraints or history of practices, Muriel Rukeyser calls it "one kind of knowledge." Dark Matter heeds Rukeyser's call, theorizing a poetics of the "scholar's art," in which documentary investigation, autobiographical exploration, and formal innovation are mutual, interwoven concerns. The dissertation pairs American poets Susan Howe (b. 1937) and Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), reading their hybrid works not through the received categories of American poetry, or through common generic and disciplinary divisions, but using an inductive methodology that takes its lead from the poets. Understanding Howe and Rukeyser's literary experiments as serious interventions in …
The Sadistic Reader: Gender And The Pleasures Of Violence In The Novel, Pamela Burger
The Sadistic Reader: Gender And The Pleasures Of Violence In The Novel, Pamela Burger
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This project seeks to explain the prevalence of narratives that feature sexual violence against women in the tradition of the Anglophone novel. To this end, it posits the existence of a sadistic reading practice that coincides with readers' sympathetic identification. A sadistic reader takes pleasure in the bodily violation of the woman at the center of a novel; such a reader enters the text expecting violence, and experiences a sense of narrative gratification when the inevitable violation plays out. These expectations emerge from repeated interactions with a literary tradition in which victimized heroines are routine. To explore such sadism, I …