Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'American Feminist poetry'

This thesis consists of a critical study, ‘“A Noisy Situation”: The Feminine and Feminist New Absurd in Twenty-first Century British and American Poetry’, followed by a poetry collection, 'Send Shells'. The critical study is a guidebook to the New Absurd, and thereby informs the reading of 'Send Shells'. Chapter One introduces the New Absurd as a descendant of male-dominated Absurdism; feminine and feminist humour is explored through Sam Riviere, Heather Phillipson, Selima Hill and Luke Kennard. Chapters Two, Three and Four focus on individual poets: Jennifer L. Knox’s 'A Gingo Like Me', Emily Berry’s 'Dear Boy' and Caroline Bird’s 'The Hat-Stand' 'Union' and 'In These Days of Prohibition'. The following themes are investigated: culture, class, and elitism; reality and imagination; feminine humour and sadness. Chapter Five explores apocalypse and technology through Maxine Chernoff, Jane Yeh, and Anne Carson. Chapter Six analyses failures to communicate through Rebecca Perry, Crispin Best, Rachael Allen, and Sara Woods. In conclusion Kayo Chingonyi, Rishi Dastidar, Mona Arshi and Anne Boyer are read to explore poets utilising the New Absurd, a prominent and influential movement in modern poetry, which does not have a specific membership, and might be seen as an aesthetic rather than a school.

This thesis materialized out of an urgency to legitimize more creative, plural, and curious ways of thinking critically about the implications of 9/11 specifically, and global terrorism generally. This thesis actively grapples with the question: how has feminist poetry written by Arab American women post 9/11 complicated, resisted, and re-imagined the creation of one homogenizing national narrative of the event? The data used in order to answer this research question comes from an analysis of the poetic work of five Arab American women, each of whom write explicitly within an anti-imperialist feminist framework. My thesis analyzes these poems in conversation with one another in order to synthesize and establish a pattern. In doing so, I extract three of the most prominent commonalities between the poems: (1) An insistence on dehomogenizing the Arab and the Arab American in direct contrast to the Western stereotypes that polarize and essentialize the Arab “other” (2) a desire to re-negotiate the politics of identity and visibility and (3) an ability to teach a way of suturing solidarity that is anti-imperialist, necessarily plural, and embodied as art. This thesis serves as a reminder that the groundwork for building more imaginative, creative, and generative coalitions has already been laid. It concludes that in learning from places of artistic re-visioning, it becomes more possible to chart connections and provoke loyalties that are resonant, resilient, and revolutionary.

This research work is a detailed feminist reading of the poetry of a selected group of Kurdish women poets which has been written in Sorani Kurdish. The poets come from two different locations, but are originally from Iraqi Kurdistan. A group of them live in the diaspora and the rest are home-based. Thus, it is the study of the Sorani-written poetry produced by Kurdish women poets locally and externally. The study chooses the time extending from 1990 to 2009 as its scope. There are clear reasons for the selection of this time as it stands for the most hectic period when Kurdish women’s poetry flourishes at a fast pace in southern Kurdistan. The study argues that the liberation of southern Kurdistan in 1991 from the overthrown Iraqi Ba’th regime plays a vital role in the productive reemergence of Kurdish women’s poetry after decades of silence and suppression being inflicted by the male-dominated Kurdish literature. Reliance on Anglo-American feminist criticism, Showalter’s gynocritics and some limited theories about the relation between gender and nationalism for the thematic analysis of the poetry of Kurdish women poets is another influential aspect of this study. The study justifies the importance of these theories for giving Kurdish women’s poetry the literary and social value it deserves and placing it within the larger repertoire of Kurdish literature. It is these theories that reveal the misjudgment and misapprehension of Kurdish women’s poetry by Kurdish male critics. Meanwhile, an extensive thematic analysis of the poetry of diasporic and home Kurdish women poets forms the core content of this work. The work studies the poetic texts of seventeen Kurdish women poets, seven from the diaspora, and ten from home. The themes to be focused on significantly represent the life realities of Kurdish women and the attitudes of Kurdish society towards their rights and existence. Through the exposition of the themes, this study aims to present a realistic picture of Kurdish women and urge for actions required to guarantee gender justice in southern Kurdistan. The themes symbolise a long-term war waged jointly by Kurdish women poets at home and in exile against the classic Kurdish patriarchy and its misogynistic laws. They reflect the injustice committed against women in a century when the respect of women’s rights have taken big steps forward elsewhere and should theoretically be ensured. The conclusion the study reaches is an emphasis on the overall condition of Kurdish women’s poetry and the challenges lying ahead of it. It indicates the level of progress Kurdish women’s poetry has made in southern Kurdistan and the role feminist criticism in unison with certain gender theories that criticise the link between women and nation can play in further developing this type of poetry. Moreover, a rather detailed comparison between the thematic structure and form of the poetry of diasporic and home Kurdish women poets is what enriches the conclusion. The influence of exile on diasporic Kurdish women poets and its relation to freedom of expression is also underlined and measured against opposite conditions back at home. Finally, the point where the poets of the two different localities converge is not omitted.

“Women of the Apocalypse: Feminist Afrospeculative Writers,” seeks to address the problematic ‘Exodus narrative,’ a convention that has helped shape Black American liberation politics dating back to the writings of Phyllis Wheatley. Novels by Zora Neale Hurston, Octavia Butler, and Alice Walker undermine and complicate this narrative by challenging the trope of a single charismatic male leader who leads an entire race to a utopic promised land. For these writers, the Exodus narrative is unsustainable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because there is no room for women to operate outside of the role of supportive wives. The mode of speculative fiction is well suited to crafting counter-narratives to Exodus mythology because of its ability to place marginalized voices in the center from the stance of ‘What next?’ My project is a hybrid in that I combine critical theory with original poems. The prose section of each chapter contextualizes a novel and its author with regard to Exodus mythology. However, because novels can only reveal so much about character development, I identify spaces to engage and elaborate upon the conversation incited by these authors’ feminist protagonists. In the tradition of Black American poets such as, Ai, Patricia Smith, Rita Dove, and Tyehimba Jess, in my own personal creative work, I regularly engage historical figures through recovering the narratives of underrepresented voices. To write in persona or limited omniscient, spotlighting an event where the reader possesses incomplete information surrounding a character’s experience, the result becomes a kind of call-and-response interaction with these novels.

The following is a collection of original poetry written over a span of two years while attending the University of South Florida. The poetry is divided into three numbered sections, marking the major thematic divisions. Preceding the poetry is a critical introduction to the work which outlines the author's developing thematic ideology.

This thesis examines feminist rewritings of the Penelope myth and the intersections between poetry, myth, and feminist theory. The theoretical framework develops from Rosi Braidotti’s theory of memory and subjectivity which has its roots in the work of Michel Foucault. In Braidotti’s understanding, subjectivity is constructed through narratives of the past including myth. In order to support new, minority, and dissident subjectivities, a re-remembering of mythical narratives needs to happen. This process is linked to Judith Butler’s recent work on narrating the self and to Adrienne Rich’s idea of “Re-vision”. What Butler’s theory adds to Braidotti’s is the notion of dispossession: that as subjects we do not own our identities. We are, instead, dependent on others for recognition. This co-dependence based notion of subjectivity has ethical implications for how we interact with one another and what kind of narratives we iterate and reiterate. The writers discussed in this thesis, namely, Francisca Aguirre, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, Gail Holst-Warhaft, and Margaret Atwood, not only rewrite Penelope, but perform Re-visions of the myth. They look back at it with a critical eye and remake it. This thesis further contends that Re-vision provides contemporary feminist writers with a reading and writing strategy that allows them to engage with myth in a way that parallels feminist theory’s efforts to construct new forms of subjectivity. Chapter 1 frames feminist appropriations of myth in a contemporary context and discusses Adrienne Rich’s theory of Re- vision. The next four chapters focus on specific writers who carry out a sustained dialogue with Penelope; they each take an element of the myth and tease it out towards a modern relevance. In looking at how Penelope is revised, this thesis demonstrates that women writers are engaged in a process of remaking canonical, mythic texts in such a way that speaks to contemporary issues of ethical subjectivity and self-making.

This project reconceives the methods critics use to define and analyze the critical field of documentary poetry. Although scholarship on documentary in the visual arts abounds, literary criticism that explores poetry through a documentary lens is sparse. Documentary poetics criticism focuses almost exclusively on socioeconomic class within the poems and on defining the genre. Critics have not attended to the ways that the category “document” inflects this poetic arena. I argue that documentary poetics includes engagement with specific documents and with the power they hold within a given historical moment. This requires attending to what I call document culture: a document’s visual and stylistic norms, in addition to the customs of its subject matter and material/medium. In addition to contributing to critical theory, this project traces documents’ shift from the twentieth century into the twenty-first from wood pulp to strings of code. I focus on representative collections of poetry that foreground the effects particular documents, like congressional hearings, dictionaries, and social media posts, have on people based on their position within the society in which they live. These documentary poems function differently than other poems that engage documents. A second category, poem-documents, interrogate the historical genre of English-language poetry in the nominally postcolonial US, with special focus on the African and Jewish diasporas, and experiences of indigenous people in the colonizing nation. These poems confront the genre’s social position and critically-imposed limitations to demonstrate poetry’s potential to act as a document that names and remembers injustices. My project emphasizes poetry by women, particularly women of color, in order to revise documentary poetics criticism’s interest in class and style to include textual resonances of race, gender, sexuality and nation. Just as the collections documentary poets offer are interdisciplinary in ethos, so is this project, with roots in documentary studies, media studies, feminist criticism, queer studies, and critical race studies in addition to literary criticism. Each chapter of this project follows the slippage between poem-documents and documentary poems. Chapter one grounds documentary culture in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead (1938), widely considered to be the first American documentary poem. I juxtapose Rukeyser’s interest in document cultures and theory of poetry’s ethical possibilities in The Life of Poetry (1949) with, in Chapter two, Irena Klepfisz’s A Few Words in the Mother Tongue: Poems Selected and New 1971-1990, a collection that reframes lyric poetry as mode of documentation. Chapter three places Harryette Mullen’s critique of English-language reference texts and the accumulations of connotative meaning, Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), in conversation with M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008), which re-documents African women’s experiences of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The final chapter addresses Citizen (2014), in which Claudia Rankine re-envisions the archive of anti-black racism to include speech and Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2015), Joy Harjo’s polyvocal and iconoclastic collection that uses poetry to redefine the archive’s temporality in a way that might counter the erasure of indigenous peoples in the Americas. The nuanced ruminations these poets offer illustrate that, as an area of study with its own investments, interests, and modes of inquiry, critical documentary poetics has just begun.

Submitted by NATALIA HELENA Wiechmann (nataliahw@hotmail.com) on 2016-11-29T12:53:35Z No. of bitstreams: 1 merged_document tese final.pdf: 1278323 bytes, checksum: bd3a385e94c7d4d3def8e7a2f3dbf147 (MD5)
Rejected by Felipe Augusto Arakaki (arakaki@reitoria.unesp.br), reason: Solicitamos que realize uma nova submissão seguindo a orientação abaixo: O arquivo submetido está sem a ficha catalográfica. A versão submetida por você é considerada a versão final da dissertação/tese, portanto não poderá ocorrer qualquer alteração em seu conteúdo após a aprovação. Corrija esta informação e realize uma nova submissão com o arquivo correto. Agradecemos a compreensão. on 2016-12-02T13:40:12Z (GMT)
Submitted by NATALIA HELENA Wiechmann (nataliahw@hotmail.com) on 2016-12-03T18:39:34Z No. of bitstreams: 1 tese natalia h wiechman.pdf: 1389999 bytes, checksum: e49f465ba62565f942cdeef5d313bc04 (MD5)
Approved for entry into archive by Felipe Augusto Arakaki (arakaki@reitoria.unesp.br) on 2016-12-05T16:16:27Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 wiechmann_nh_dr_arafcl.pdf: 1389999 bytes, checksum: e49f465ba62565f942cdeef5d313bc04 (MD5)
Made available in DSpace on 2016-12-05T16:16:27Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 wiechmann_nh_dr_arafcl.pdf: 1389999 bytes, checksum: e49f465ba62565f942cdeef5d313bc04 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-10-31
O objetivo desta tese de doutorado consiste em analisar a poesia de Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) sob a perspectiva da crítica literária feminista estadunidense utilizando o conceito de subtexto literário enquanto recurso poético que revele na obra dickinsoniana diversas formas de subversão de normas sociais e literárias do patriarcado. Para isso, nosso corpus de análise se compõe de dezoito poemas e nosso trabalho está estruturado em quatro seções. A primeira discute algumas questões caras à crítica literária feminista estadunidense, como o conceito de autoria feminina e a tradição literária para, então, teorizar sobre o conceito de subtexto literário relacionando-o à ideia de subversão. Também nessa primeira seção analisamos do poema “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant – ”. Já na segunda parte de nossa tese apresentamos o contexto da produção literária estadunidense no século XIX e discutimos o fato de Emily Dickinson ter se recusado veementemente a publicar seus poemas. Os poemas analisados nessa seção são “Publication – is the Auction”, “Fame of Myself, to justify”, “Fame is the tint that Scholars leave”, “Fame is the one that does not stay” e “Fame is a fickle food”. Na sequência, examinamos o ideal de feminilidade do século XIX e as formas como Dickinson subverte esse ideal nos poemas “To own a Susan of my own”, “Her breast is fit for pearls”, “I gave myself to Him – ”, “She rose to His Requirement – dropt”, “Title divine – is mine!” e “I started Early – Took my Dog – ”. Por fim, analisamos poemas em que Dickinson empreende a subversão da imagem de Deus ao apontar as vulnerabilidades da fé e da condição humana e questionar preceitos religiosos: “I never lost as much but twice”, “It’s easy to invent a Life – ”, “A Shade upon the mind there passes”, “God is indeed a jealous God – ” e “God gave a Loaf to every Bird – ”. Como suporte teórico, recorremos a diversos autores que compõem a fortuna crítica de Emily Dickinson bem como a importantes nomes da crítica literária feminista estadunidense, além de outros autores cujos estudos também dialogam com nossa pesquisa. Alguns dos autores utilizados neste trabalho são Virginia Woolf, Sandra Gilbert e Susan Gubar, Elaine Showalter, Betsy Erkkila, Helen Vendler, Maria Rita Kehl, Susan Howe e Carlos Daghlian.
The aim of this dissertation is to analyze the poetry of Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) from the perspective of American feminist literary criticism drawing on the concept of literary subtext as a poetic resource that reveals in Dickinson’s work several ways of subverting the social and literary norms of patriarchy. To these ends, I analyze a corpus of eighteen poems, and the text is organized into four sections. The first section discusses some issues that are important to American feminist literary criticism, such as the concept of female authorship and literary tradition; it is then theorized about the concept of literary subtext and I relate it to the idea of subversion. Also, in this first section, I analyze the poem “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant – .” In the second part of this work, the context of American literary production in the nineteenth-century is presented and the fact that Emily Dickinson emphatically refused to have her poems published is considered. The poems analyzed in this section are “Publication – is the Auction”. “Fame of Myself, to justify”, “Fame is the tint that Scholars leave”, “Fame is the one that does not stay” and “Fame is a fickle food”. After the discussion of the poems, in the third section I examine the ideal of womanhood in the nineteenth century and the ways Dickinson subverts this ideal in the poems “To own a Susan of my own”, “Her breast is fit for pearls”, “I gave myself to Him – ”, “She rose to His Requirement – dropt”, “Title divine – is mine!” and “I started Early – Took my Dog – ”. Finally, in the closing section I study some poems in which Dickinson undertakes the subversion of God’s image, points out the vulnerabilities of faith and human condition, and questions religious precepts: “I never lost as much but twice”, “It’s easy to invent a Life – ”, “A Shade upon the mind there passes”, “God is indeed a jealous God – ” and “God gave a Loaf to every Bird – ”. To provide theoretical underpinning, several critics who have written on Dickinson’s work were consulted and significant names in American literary feminist criticism are also discussed, as well as other authors whose studies intersect with our research as well. Included among the writers, critics and researchers mentioned in our work are Virginia Woolf, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Elaine Showalter, Betsy Erkkila, Helen Vendler, Maria Rita Kehl, Susan Howe, and Carlos Daghlian.

Este trabalho propõe uma primeira tradução do conjunto de poemas Twenty-One Love Poems (1974-1976) de Adrienne Rich para o português brasileiro e divide-se em dois eixos: o primeiro centra-se nos estudos feministas da tradução, revisando o projeto de Adrienne Rich e o balanço entre a cooperação da tradutora e a tradução como crítica. Discutem-se, caso a caso, as marcações de gênero na tradução, pensando a falácia da neutralidade e as possibilidades relacionadas ao gênero gramatical, com base nos trabalhos de Olga Castro e Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz. O segundo eixo centra-se nas estratégias de recriação de aspectos retórico-formais tais como o contraste entre características antiestéticas e a ambivalência rítmica gerada pela evocação do blank verse, aspectos implicados no ato de re-visão da tradição dos sonetos de amor ingleses performada pela sequência. Com base nos trabalhos de Alice Templeton, Sheila Black, Alicia Ostriker, dentre outras, busca-se mostrar como a postura ambivalente em relação à tradição poética é constituinte do desafio de Rich em sua busca por uma linguagem feminista que alinharia o estético e o político. Para a abordagem da recriação de traços formais, mobilizam-se trabalhos de Paulo Henriques Britto, Mário Laranjeira e Derek Attridge. O conceito de ambivalência que amarra o trabalho recai, por fim, sobre o uso de dêiticos para demarcar espaços, nomear o corpo e fundar a subjetividade autocrítica da voz poemática. Veicula-se a opacidade dos dêiticos, conforme abordada por Giorgio Agamben, a uma postura ambígua frente ao ato adâmico de nomear.
This work presents and discusses a translation of Adrienne Rich\'s set of poems Twenty-One Love Poems (1974-1976) into Brazilian Portuguese. Based on Alice Templeton\'s criticism, it aims to explore the notion of dialogue as well as the re-vision (Rich\'s concept) of the love sonnets\' tradition performed by this sequence of lesbian poems, perhaps the first one written by a major North American poet. The work consists of two parts: the first one focuses on feminist translation studies and the balance between translator\'s cooperation and criticism. It also discusses gender marks on a case-by-case basis, considering the fallacy of neutrality and some possibilities related to grammatical gender, based on the works of Olga Castro and Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz. The second part outlines strategies of re-creation of rhetorical-formal traits such as the anti-aesthetic features and the rhythmic ambivalence given by the poems\' evocation of the blank verse. Formal traits such as these reiterate the challenge faced by Rich in her search for a feminist language in confrontation with the masculine canon, as she reworks traditional poetic forms from another perspective, looking for the dream of a common language, that would align the poetic and the political aspects. This act of translation deals not only with the recreation of traditional Portuguese verse forms, but with the transposition of the notion of tradition to another context as well. This approach is based on the works of Haroldo de Campos, Paulo Henriques Britto, Mário Laranjeira and Derek Attridge.

We all have stories to share, to build, to pass around, to inherit, and to create. This story - the one I piece together now - is about a Thai-/Bengali-/Muslim-/American-/Feminist looking for home, looking to manage the tension and conflict of wanting to belong to her family and to her feminist community. This thesis focuses on the seemingly conflicting obligations to kinship on the one hand and to feminist practice on the other, a conflict where being a good scholar or activist is directly in opposition to being a good Asian daughter. In order to understand how and why these communities appear at odds with one another, I examine how the material spaces and psychological realities inhabited by specific hyphenated, fragmented subjects are represented (and misrepresented) in both popular culture and practical politics, arguing against images of the hybrid body that bracket its lived tensions. I argue that fantasies of home as an unconditional site of belonging and comfort distract us from the multiple communities to which hyphenated subjects must move between. Hyphenated Asian-/American bodies often find ourselves torn between nativism and assimilationism - having to neutralize, forsake, or discard parts of our identities. Thus, I reduce complicated, difficult ideas of being to the size of a thimble, to a question of loyalty between my Asian-/American history and my American-/feminist future, between my familial background and the issues that have become foregrounded for me during college, between the home from which I originate and the new home to which I wish to belong. To move with fluidity, I must - in collaboration with others - invent new stories of identity and belonging.
B.A. and B.S.
Bachelors
Office of Undergraduate Studies
Interdisciplinary Studies; Philosophy

Orientador: Alcides Cardoso dos Santos
Banca: Ana Maria Domingues de Oliveira
Banca: Maria Dolores Aybar Ramires
Resumo: Esta dissertação tem por objetivo apresentar os resultados da pesquisa de mestrado intitulada primeiramente Aspectos da autoria feminina na poesia de Emily Dickinson, modificada posteriormente pelo título A questão da autoria feminina na poesia de Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) foi uma poeta norte-americana cuja obra é bastante conhecida por suas características particulares, tanto na forma quanto no conteúdo: o uso excessivo do travessão, das incorreções gramaticais, das metáforas constantes, dos paradoxos e da ironia, além das imagens que ela desenha da morte, de Deus, do ambiente doméstico feminino e das relações amorosas, entre outros tantos traços que fazem sua poesia destacar-se no panorama da literatura ocidental. Partindo do contexto em que a poeta se insere, este trabalho buscou investigar as relações entre a poesia de Emily Dickinson e a autoria feminina na tentativa de identificar possíveis manifestações poéticas de uma consciência das relações de gênero. Para isso, adotamos a crítica literária feminista de vertente norte-americana como base teórica e metodológica. Num primeiro momento, traçamos o percurso desenvolvido pela critica literária em geral desde as primeiras publicações dos poemas dickinsonianos até o surgimento e fortalecimento da crítica literária feminista. Em seguida, discutimos as principais questões trabalhadas por essa postura crítica e como ela tem visto a poesia de Emily Dickinson. Dedicamo-nos, então, à sua obra refletindo sobre como seus traços mais marcantes podem se relacionar à autoria feminina e propomos a análise de três poemas - "The Soul selects her own Society - ", "I'm "wife" - I've finished that - " e "My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun - " - em que pudemos verificar... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo)
Abstract: This thesis aims to present the results of the Master's research firstly entitled Aspects of the female authorship in Emily Dickinson's poetry, but whose title later became The issue of the female authorship in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was an American poet whose work is widely known for its particular characteristics, both in its form and content: the excessive use of dashes, the grammar incorrections, the constant metaphors, paradoxes and irony, besides the images she makes of death, of God, of the womanly domestic environment and of the love relationships, among many other features that give her poetry a prominent place in the Western literature. Starting from the context in which her poetry is inserted, this researched aimed to investigate the relations between Emily Dickinson's poetry and the female authorship in an attempt to identify possible poetic manifestations of a gender relations awareness. In order to do that, we have taken the American literary feminist criticism as our theoretical and methodological basis. In a first moment, we have traced the trajectory developed by literary criticism in general since the first Dickinson's poems were published until the emergence and strengthening of the literary feminist criticism. After that, we have discussed the main questions of this critical view and also how they have worked with Emily Dickinson's poetry. Then we focus on her work to discuss how its most remarkable features may be related to the female authorship and we propose the analysis of three poems - "The Soul selects her own Society - ", "I'm "wife" - I've finished that - " and "My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun - " - in which we could see how the female authorship does... (Complete abstract click electronic access below)
Mestre

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:26:54Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2012-05-18Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T20:35:08Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 wiechmann_nh_me_arafcl.pdf: 656875 bytes, checksum: d6ea00bec81ccc40296221293f13a10f (MD5)
Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)
Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)
Esta dissertação tem por objetivo apresentar os resultados da pesquisa de mestrado intitulada primeiramente Aspectos da autoria feminina na poesia de Emily Dickinson, modificada posteriormente pelo título A questão da autoria feminina na poesia de Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) foi uma poeta norte-americana cuja obra é bastante conhecida por suas características particulares, tanto na forma quanto no conteúdo: o uso excessivo do travessão, das incorreções gramaticais, das metáforas constantes, dos paradoxos e da ironia, além das imagens que ela desenha da morte, de Deus, do ambiente doméstico feminino e das relações amorosas, entre outros tantos traços que fazem sua poesia destacar-se no panorama da literatura ocidental. Partindo do contexto em que a poeta se insere, este trabalho buscou investigar as relações entre a poesia de Emily Dickinson e a autoria feminina na tentativa de identificar possíveis manifestações poéticas de uma consciência das relações de gênero. Para isso, adotamos a crítica literária feminista de vertente norte-americana como base teórica e metodológica. Num primeiro momento, traçamos o percurso desenvolvido pela critica literária em geral desde as primeiras publicações dos poemas dickinsonianos até o surgimento e fortalecimento da crítica literária feminista. Em seguida, discutimos as principais questões trabalhadas por essa postura crítica e como ela tem visto a poesia de Emily Dickinson. Dedicamo-nos, então, à sua obra refletindo sobre como seus traços mais marcantes podem se relacionar à autoria feminina e propomos a análise de três poemas - “The Soul selects her own Society – ”, “I’m “wife” – I’ve finished that – ” e “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun – ” – em que pudemos verificar...
This thesis aims to present the results of the Master’s research firstly entitled Aspects of the female authorship in Emily Dickinson’s poetry, but whose title later became The issue of the female authorship in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was an American poet whose work is widely known for its particular characteristics, both in its form and content: the excessive use of dashes, the grammar incorrections, the constant metaphors, paradoxes and irony, besides the images she makes of death, of God, of the womanly domestic environment and of the love relationships, among many other features that give her poetry a prominent place in the Western literature. Starting from the context in which her poetry is inserted, this researched aimed to investigate the relations between Emily Dickinson’s poetry and the female authorship in an attempt to identify possible poetic manifestations of a gender relations awareness. In order to do that, we have taken the American literary feminist criticism as our theoretical and methodological basis. In a first moment, we have traced the trajectory developed by literary criticism in general since the first Dickinson’s poems were published until the emergence and strengthening of the literary feminist criticism. After that, we have discussed the main questions of this critical view and also how they have worked with Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Then we focus on her work to discuss how its most remarkable features may be related to the female authorship and we propose the analysis of three poems – “The Soul selects her own Society – ”, “I’m “wife” – I’ve finished that – ” and “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun – ” – in which we could see how the female authorship does... (Complete abstract click electronic access below)

Unindo crítica cultural à pesquisa acadêmica, pretendemos mapear a poesia de Patti Smith e Ana Cristina Cesar, partindo de seus respectivos contextos da década de 1970 o movimento punk nova-iorquino, nos Estados Unidos, e a poesia marginal, no Brasil , para então explorar seus pontos de convergência, no que tange a uma micropolítica do feminino e a uma estética de confrontamento. Pensamos ambas as poetas como cartógrafas de uma época e das transformações intrínsecas a essa época, mapeadas por elas no fazer poético, no corpo da linguagem, por meio de uma política-estética; por elas somos levados à política como estética; à política menor, do eu mínimo, de Deleuze, em caráter contingente, de subjetividade e feminilidade. Discutimos também como, a voz do feminino localizado em Patti e Ana C. dá vazão à abertura de um novo tipo de experimentalismo que se integra a uma genealogia de arte/cultura e ao legado da poesia moderna travando diálogo com elementos catalisadores do pós-moderno que desembocariam no contemporâneo.
By merging cultural criticism and academic research, we aim to rummage the poetic works of Patti Smith and Ana Cristina Cesar, starting from their respective contexts in the 1970s the New York punk scene in the United States, and marginal poetry in Brazil , and on to explore their points of convergence within the micropolitics of the feminine and an aesthetics of confrontation. The two poets are taken as cartographers of a time and of the changes that are intrinsic to that time, which they chart on the making of poetry, on the body of language, by means of a politics-aesthetics. We are led to politics as aesthetics a politics of what is contingent, of subjectivity and of femaleness; Deleuzes minor politics, or politics of the minimal self. We will also discuss how, in the voices of the feminine (further than that of feminism) that underpin their poetics/aesthetics, a new kind of experimentalism opens up within a genealogy of art and culture and the legacy of modern poets thus engaging in a dialogue with a small/minor History, with the microsphere, the outsider, and disruption; unfoldings of nascent notions of the post-modern and the contemporary.

This dissertation aims to contribute to the burgeoning field of Arab-American feminist critique through an exploration of the work of four contemporary Arab-American women poets: Etel Adnan (1925-), a poet and a visual artist and a writer, Naomi Shihab Nye (1952-), poet, a song writer, and a novelist, Mohja Kahf (1967-), a poet, an Islamic feminist critic and author, and Suheir Hammad (1973-), a hip-hop poet and political activist. The study traverses the intersections of stereotypical racial and Orientalist discourses with which these women contend, and which have been further complicated by being shaped against the backdrop of the “War on Terror” and hostility against Arabs, Muslims and Arab-Americans in the post-September 11 era. Hence, the study attempts to examine their poetry as a tool for resistance, and as a space for conciliating the complexities of their hyphenated identities. The last two decades of the twentieth-century saw the rise of a rich body of Arab-American women writing which has elicited increasing academic and critical interest. However, extensive scholarly and critical attention was mainly drawn to novels and non-fiction prose produced by Arab-American women writers as reflected in the huge array of anthologies, journal articles, book reviews and academic studies. Although such efforts aim to research and examine the racial politics that have impacted the community and how it relates to feminist discourses in the United States, they have rarely addressed or researched how the ramifications of these racialised politics and discourses are articulated in Arab-American women’s poetry per se. Informed by a wide range of postcolonial and United States ethnic theory and criticism, feminist discourses of women of colour such Gloria Anzaldúa's borderland theory, and Lisa Lowe's discussions of ethnic cultural formations in addition to transnational feminism, this study seeks to lay the groundwork for a complex analysis of Arab-American feminist poetics, based on both national and transnational literary approaches. The dissertation addresses the following questions: how does the genre of poetry negotiate identity politics and affiliations of belonging in the current polarized and historical moment? How do these women poets challenge the troubling oppressed/exoticised representations of Arab/Muslim women prevalent in the United States mainstream culture? How does each of these poets express their vision of social and political transformation? Emphasising the varying ethnic, religious, national, political, and cultural backgrounds and affiliations of these four poets, this dissertation attempts to defy any notion of the monolithic experience of Arab-American women, and argues for a nuanced understanding of specificity and diversity of Arab-American feminist experiences and articulations. To achieve its aim, the study depicts the historical evolution of Arab women’s poetry in the United States throughout four generations in order to examine the deriving issues and formative elements that contributed to the development of this genre, and also to pinpoint the defining characteristics marking Arab-American women poetry as a cultural production of American women of Arab descent. Through close readings and critical analyses of texts, the dissertation offers an investigation of some of the major themes and issues handled by these Arab-American women to highlight the most persistent tropes that mark this developing literary genre. Eventually, this study shows how literature, and specifically poetry becomes a conduit to investigate Arab-American cultural and sociopolitical conditions. It also offers productive explorations of identities and representations that transcend the rigid essential totalising categorisation of identity, while attempting to forge a new space for cultural translation and social transformation.

Magic City Gospel is a collection of poems that explores themes of race and identity with a special focus on racism in the American South. Many of the poems deal directly with the author’s upbringing in Birmingham, Alabama, the Magic City, and the ways in which the history of that geographical place informs the present. Magic City Gospel confronts race and identity through pop culture, history, and the author’s personal experiences as a black, Alabama-born woman. Magic City Gospel is, in part, influenced by the biting, but softly rendered truth and historical commentary of Lucille Clifton, the laid-back and inventive poetry of Terrance Hayes, the biting and unapologetically feminist poetry of Audre Lorde, and the syncopated, exact, musical poetry of Kevin Young. These and other authors like Tim Siebles, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Major Jackson influence poems as they approach the complicated racial and national identity of the author.

A recent trend in the study of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath often dissociates Confessional poetry from the subject of the writer and her biography, claiming that the artist is in full control of her work and that her art does not have naïve mimetic qualities. However, this study proposes that subjective attributes, namely negativity and abjection, enable a powerful transformative dialectic. Specifically, it demonstrates that an emphasis on the subjective can help manifest the process of transgressing the law of One. The law of One asserts a patriarchal, monotheistic law as a social closed system and can be opposed to the bodily drives and its open dynamism. This project asserts that unique, creative voices are derived from that which is individual and personal and thus, readings of Confessional poetry are in fact best served by acknowledgment of the subjective. In order to stress the subject of the artist in Confessionalism, this study employed a psychoanalytical Kristevan approach. This enables consideration of the subject not only in terms of the straightforward narration of her life, but also in relation to her poetic language and the process of creativity where instinctual drives are at work. This study further applies a feminist reading to the subject’s poetic language and its ability to transgress the law, not necessarily in the political, macrocosmic sense of the word, but rather on the microcosmic, subjective level. Although Sexton and Plath possess similar biographies, their work does not have the same artistic value in terms of transformative capabilities. Transformation here signifies transgressing of the unity of the subject and of the authoritative father, the other within, who has prohibitive social and linguistic powers. Plath, Kristeva’s the “deadmost,” successfully confronts the unity of the law, releasing the death drive through anger. Moreover, Plath’s psychic borders are more fluid because of her ability to identify with the pre-Oedipal mother. This unsettling subject is identified by shifts in texts marked by renewal, transgression, and jouissance. Unlike Sexton, Plath is able to achieve transformation as she oscillates masochistically between the “inside” and the “outside” of her psychic borders, and between the symbolic and the semiotic. Furthermore, this enables Plath to develop the unique “Siren Voice of the Other.” In comparison, Sexton, the “dead/less,” evades any confrontation with the maternal and the performance of death in her poetry. Her case is further complicated by the discovery of a second mother. As a result, passivity becomes a main characteristic of her work. This passivity remains until the maternal abject bursts in her text and she reacts to this by performing cleansing rituals, and gravitating toward a symbolic father. Without the dynamism of transgression, Sexton’s work is heterogeneous but does not achieve ultimate transformation and jouissance. Confessional poetry, in this sense, takes on a new dimension. The life stories of the poets become important not for their pejorative, pathological aspects that focus on narrative mimesis, but rather for their manifestation as an aesthetic process. The subject of the writer becomes important as an aesthetic identity in the poems, which are rooted in real life. The main concern then becomes the aesthetic transformative dialectic between the semiotic and the symbolic in her work of art.

You Don't Have to be Good, is a nonfiction collection of prose, poetry and graphic memoir set in New Orleans, central Florida, and points in between. In this coming-of-age memoir, I recall the abrupt end of my dad's life, the 24 years of my life in which he was alive, and the years after his death—remembering him while living without him in his hometown of New Orleans. Along the way there are meditations on language, race, gender, dreams, addiction, and ecology. My family and I encounter Hurricane Katrina and Mardi Gras, and at least one shuttle launch. These are the stories I find myself telling at parties, and also those I've never voiced until now.

The thesis undertakes a Buddhist reading of Mary Oliver’s oeuvre. It seeks to fill a palpable lacuna in extant criticism of her work, which tends to adopt Romantic, Feminist, Ecocritical, and Christian viewpoints. Thus far, no criticism has offered a sustained reading of her work from a specifically Buddhist stance. The thesis is structured in five chapters. The introductory chapter is followed by a literature review. The next three chapters are devoted to the Buddhist themes of Mindfulness, Interconnection, and Impermanence respectively. Each chapter opens with detailed consideration of its respective theme before moving on to the analysis and amplification of poems pertinent to it. In addition, the main Buddhist theme of each chapter is subdivided into its component sub-themes or corollaries. The main methodological approach to Oliver’s poetry comprises explication de texte as this makes provision for detailed readings of the texts themselves. Furthermore, this approach has been adopted because it allows for in-depth exploration of Oliver’s literary devices, three notable examples of which are anaphora, adéquation, and correspondence. In the course of the discussion, reference is also made to the influence of Imagism and, more specifically, the Japanese haiku tradition insofar as they impact on her poetry. This discussion is intended to give some indication of Oliver’s place within the American poetic tradition. The predominant subject-matter of her corpus is an all-encompassing view of the natural world with its birth-life-decay-death cycle. She does not flinch from addressing the harsh and violent aspects of nature as well as its exuberance and beauty. Her unifying topos is being the bride of amazement as witness to the natural world. For her readers, this witnessing translates into an inner, potentially transformative process, ultimately integrating mind and heart. The thesis concludes with a list of references and a glossary of the Buddhist terms.
Thesis (PhD (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2013.

This paper will draw on the work of leading feminist critics and the works of Dickinson, her biographers, and her critics. No effort is being made to trace the history of feminist criticism; that has been done numerous times by critic after critic. Nor does this paper attempt to provide a concordance to critical thought on Dickinson. That, too, is unnecessary. Rather, this paper looks at the relationship between self-identity in Dickinson's poetry and the fundamental need for such a pronounced sense of identity to serve as the cornerstone of feminist criticism. Dickinson's courage to be female and the implications of that courage on her world view are at the core of neofeminist or post-feminist criticism. Dickinson exhibited an independence of mind that broke out of the boxes of cultural constraints developing a strong sense of identity as a woman and as a poet. She expressed a strong moral view of the world solidly grounded in, but often critical of, the Christian tradition. With her strong sense of self, her overarching moral vision, and her disregard for the "oughts" and "shoulds" of her culture, Dickinson held her work to a high standard of significance. Feminist criticism is only now reaching such a standard of significance. As Dickinson achieved personal wholeness and creative integrity through the integration of (not the obliteration or repression of) opposing qualities, feminist criticism, too, must have that same courage to stand firm in the face of powerful opposition and defy social and political pressures to conform. Conforming to a mediocre, and consequently powerless but socially acceptable, integrated position within mainstream criticism places feminist criticism once again on the sidelines waiting for the next popular trend to relegate it even further from the intellectual center.

Initially developed and perfected by male poets, the history of the sonnet has been characterised by androcentrism. Yet from its inception the sonnet has also been adopted by women. In recent years feminist critics have begun to redress the form’s gender imbalance, but most studies of the female-authored sonnet have excluded the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and thus one of the most important periods in women’s history – the rise of feminism – leading to a flawed narrative of the genre. Repositioning Edna St. Vincent Millay as the starting point in a twentieth-century tradition, this study begins where most others end and examines how the emergence and development of feminism, specifically in an American context, underscores a significant female narrative of the sonnet that emerges outside of the male tradition. By reading the works of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Adrienne Rich, Marilyn Hacker, Marilyn Nelson and Moira Egan within their specific feminist contexts and within the broader trajectory of feminism, it is possible to see how women in the era took ownership of the form. Ultimately, the thesis suggests that feminism has shaped an important narrative in the history of the genre that means today the sonnet is no longer exclusively male.

Historically, women have not been "speaking subjects" but "spoken objects" in Western culture--the ground on which male-dominated constructions have been erected. In literature, women have been conventionally held as the silent and silenced other. Lyric poetry especially has idealized not only the entrenched figures of masculine subject/feminine object, but poetry itself as the site of prophecy, vision, Truth. Most dramatically in lyric poetry then, the issue of women as subjects has been collapsed into Woman as object, that figure who has been the sacrifice necessary for the production of lyric "song" and the consolidation of the unified masculine voice. It has thus been difficult for women poets to take up the position of speaking subject, most particularly because of women's problematic relationship to Woman. Recent feminist theorists have explored female subjectivity, how women put into hegemonic discourse "a possible operation of the feminine." This dissertation analyzes that possibility in poetry as exemplified in the works of Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and H.D. I contend that these paradigmatic American poets constitute speaking subjects in their poetry that both figure Woman conventionally and reconfigure it, i.e. subvert the stability of those representations, thereby disturbing our view. I argue that this double identification produces, in effect, a divided or split subjectivity that is enabling for the female speaker. As an alternative to the traditionally specularized figure of Woman then, such a position opens up distinctly counter-hegemonic spaces in which to constitute the female subject, rendering problematic readerly consumption of the image of Woman as a totality. I explore the attempts to represent women's difference differently--the tenuous accession to, rejection of, or play with the lyric "I" in these poets' works. Dickinson, Moore, and H.D. reconfigure Woman and inscribe female speakers as grammatically and rhetorically, but not necessarily visually, present, thereby frustrating patriarchal economies of mastery and possession.

En esta tesis analizaré en la poesía de Georgina Herrera, Nancy Morejón y Excilia Saldaña 1 los conceptos de género y raza y cómo han sido apropiados del esquema patriarcal y redefinidos en la elaboración de identidad y nación a través de lo que Flora González Mandri y Catherine Davies han llamado la memoria cultural. Mi propósito es demostrar como dichas poetas han subvertido, a través de la palabra, un discurso historicamente maniqueísta que ha servido para reafirmar la doble subyugación de raza y género, como también exploro los resortes de auto-inscripción y el imaginario mítico-cultural que cada poeta emplea en su poesía para desmantelar el paradigma patriarcal. Lejos de ofrecer un análisis exhaustivo de la obra de cada escritora, mi objetivo es más bien deslindar las complejidades culturales que enmarca la producción literaria de cada una. He tomando en cuenta el contexto sociohistórico de donde surgen para comprender el lugar que han reclamado en la producción y reproducción cultural. Aunque no abordo los discursos de raza y género mediante un filtro estrictamente teórico, más bien utilizo ciertas teorías como ópticas en el vislumbrar poético de la aportación de cada poeta, me he apoyado cuando necesario en algunos postulados feministas, postestructuralistas, y postcoloniales. No obstante mi intención es ante todo ofrecer una lectura que se fundamenta en el análisis literario. En ciertos poemas aplico algunos aspectos de la teoría feminista de bell hooks, la contrapropuesta que ofrece Oyèrónké Oy ĕwùmi ante el discurso feminista occidental, el planteamiento sobre el poder del lenguaje y la dominación del discurso de Michel Foucault, y la teoría postcolonial de Homi Bhaba sobre el tercer espacio y la mímica. Herrera, Morejón, y Saldaña se adueñan de sus historias y reivindican las de sus ancestros femeninos mediante el protagonismo que ejercen como creadora/sujetos. Utilizando los temas de la memoria, la reconstrucción de la identidad, el homenaje a los antepasados femeninos, la recreación del vínculo con África como matriz, el rescate de la imagen de la mujer en el proyecto de identidad nacional, y la exaltación de la maternidad, dichas poetas deconstruyen los estereotipos afro-femeninos para después reconstruir y proyectar la imagen de la mujer dentro de un marco de resistencia. En su afán de desmontar los códigos establecidos, desarticulando y reconstruyendo el pasado para redefinir la identidad de la mujer afrocubana de manera protagónica en el presente, la obra de Morejón, Herrrera, y Saldaña rompe y transciende los parametros vanguardistas del negrismo 2 misógino de la primera mitad del siglo XX. Tras su auto-inscripción dentro de la poesía, la mujer afrocubana se plantea como creadora y portadora de la palabra constructora. En su lucha por crear un sujeto lírico que la represente y quede impreso en el subconsciente imaginario cultural, emerge como la voz más influyente de la poesía cubana post-revolucionaria.

Submitted by Geandra Rodrigues (geandrar@gmail.com) on 2018-05-17T18:56:55Z No. of bitstreams: 1 marcelabatistamartinhao.pdf: 1205483 bytes, checksum: 4338b1816f91f644aebfc250ed9d4f75 (MD5)
Approved for entry into archive by Adriana Oliveira (adriana.oliveira@ufjf.edu.br) on 2018-05-22T11:36:23Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 marcelabatistamartinhao.pdf: 1205483 bytes, checksum: 4338b1816f91f644aebfc250ed9d4f75 (MD5)
Made available in DSpace on 2018-05-22T11:36:23Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 marcelabatistamartinhao.pdf: 1205483 bytes, checksum: 4338b1816f91f644aebfc250ed9d4f75 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-03-21
Esta dissertação versa sobre a obra poética da poeta colombiana Marta Quiñónez, que atualmente vive em Medelin, publicada até o momento, que consiste nos seguintes volumes: Noctívago (1998), Acantilado (1999), Abecedário de Eximición (2000), Eva (2001), Kartalá (2002), La Trinidad (2005), Arcanos (2007), No. Libro de haripalas (2010), Dame tu canto ciudad (2012), Conversaciones en Comala (2012), Paréntesis (2013), El rostro del pan (2014) e Continente Mohíno (2016), publicado originalmente em 1996. O trabalho se concentra em quatro eixos principais, a saber: diáspora, migração, território e o lar, em diálogo com os temas do amor, da afetividade, da territorialização/desterritorialização nos centros urbanos, e da casa, perpassando as discussões de gênero e raciais na divisão dos espaços geográficos e sociais. Discutimos como este corpo e subjetividade feminina negra homossexual se reconfigura para a construção subjetiva de seu lar, considerando-se a experiência da desterritorialização e da migração, e o poema como a força reterritorializadora que alça as noções de pertencimento e conexão à sua própria criação poética como principal catalizadora de suas vivências. Percorremos toda sua obra em certa cronologia temática, iniciada com Continente Mohíno (1996) até El rostro del pan (2014), cujo principal objetivo é compreender a relação estabelecida entre sua escrita poética e o imaginário da diáspora contemporânea e fluxos migratórios, no que diz respeito aos territórios e a construção subjetiva do lar. A versatilidade e criatividade de sua poesia é flagrante por seu próprio curso de vida de movimento e desarraigo, que confluem para uma literatura capaz de abrigar suas vivências para além dos reducionismos históricos e sociais do lugar da mulher negra homossexual na literatura e na sociedade.
This dissertation approaches the poetic work of Colombian poet Marta Quiñónez, who currently lives in Medelin, which has been published to date, consisting of the following volumes: Noctívago (1998), Acantilado (1999), Abecedário de Eximición (2000), Eva (2001), Kartalá (2002), La Trinidad (2005), Arcanos (2007), No. Libro de haripalas (2010), Dame tu canto ciudad (2012), Conversaciones en Comala (2012), Paréntesis (2013), El rostro del pan (2014) and Continente Mohíno (2016), originally published in 1996. The work focuses on four main axes: diaspora, migration, territory and home, in dialogue with the themes of love, affectivity, territorialization/deterritorialization in urban centers, and the house, bypassing gender and racial discussions in the division of geographic and social spaces. We discuss how this homosexual black female body and subjectivity reconfigures itself for the subjective construction of its home, considering the experience of deterritorialization and migration, taking the poem as the reterritorializing force that elevates the notions of belonging and connection to its own poetic creation as main catalyst of her experiences. We go through all her work in a certain thematic chronology, beginning with Continente Mohíno (1996) until El rostro del pan (2014), whose main objective is to understand the relation established between her poetic writing and the contemporary diaspora imaginary and migratory flows, concerning territories and the subjective construction of home. The versatility and creativity of her poetry is blatant for her own life course of movement and uprooting, which converge to a literature capable of sheltering her experiences beyond the historical and social reductions of the homosexual black woman's place in literature and society.

More than 2.6 million troops have deployed in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, surveys reveal that more than half feel “disconnected” from their civilian counterparts, and this feeling persists despite ongoing efforts, in the academy and elsewhere, to help returning veterans overcome physical and mental wounds, seek an education, and find meaningful ways to contribute to society after taking off the uniform. This dissertation argues that Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans struggle with reassimilation because they lack healthy, complete models of veteran identity to draw upon in their postwar lives, a problem they’re working through collectively in literature and artwork. The war veteran—returning home transformed by the harsh realities of military training and service, having seen humanity at its extremes, and interacting with a society apathetic toward his or her experiences—should engage in the act of storytelling. This act of sharing experiences and crafting-self subverts stereotypes. Storytelling, whether in a book read by millions, or in a single conversation with a close family member, should instruct civilians on the topic of human resiliency; it should instruct veterans on the topic of homecoming. But typically, veterans do not tell stories. Civilians create barriers to storytelling in the form of hollow platitudes—“thank you for your service” or “I can never understand what you’ve been through”—disconnected from the meaning of wartime service itself. The dissonance between veteran and civilian only becomes more complicated when one considers the implicit demands and expectations attached to patriotism. These often well-intentioned gestures and government programs fail to convey a message of appreciation because they refuse to convey a message of acceptance; the exceptional treatment of veterans by larger society implies also that they are insufficient, broken, or incomplete. So, many veterans chose conformity and silence, adopting one of two identities available to them: the forever pitied “Wounded Warrior” or the superficially praised “Hero.” These identities are not complete. They’re not even identities as much as they are collections of rumors, misrepresentations, and expectations of conformity. Once an individual veteran begins unconsciously performing the “Wounded Warrior” or “Hero” character, the number of potential outcomes available in that individual’s life is severely diminished. Society reinforces a feeling among veterans that they are “different.” This shared experience has resulted in commiseration, camaraderie, and also the proliferation of veterans’ creative communities. As storytellers, the members of these communities are restoring meaning to veteran-civilian discourse by privileging the nuanced experiences of the individual over stereotypes and emotionless rhetoric. They are instructing on the topics of war and homecoming, producing fictional and nonfictional representations of the veteran capable of competing with stereotypes, capable of reassimilation. The Introduction establishes the existence of veteran culture, deconstructs notions of there being a single or binary set of veteran identities, and critiques the social and cultural rhetoric used to maintain symbolic boundaries between veterans and civilians. It begins by establishing an approach rooted in interdisciplinary literary theory, taking veteran identity as its topic of consideration and the American unconscious as the text it seeks to examine, asking readers to suspend belief in patriotic rhetoric long enough to critically examine veteran identity as an apparatus used to sell war to each generation of new recruits. Patriotism, beyond the well-meaning gestures and entitlements afforded to veterans, also results in feelings of “difference,” in the veteran feeling apart from larger society. The inescapability of veteran “difference” is a trait which sets it apart from other cultures, and it is one bolstered by inaccurate and, at times, offensive portrayals of veterans in mass media and Hollywood films such as The Manchurian Candidate (1962), First Blood (1982), or Taxi Driver (1976). To understand this inescapability the chapter engages with theories of race, discussing the Korean War veteran in Home (2012) and other works by Toni Morrison to directly and indirectly explore descriptions of “difference” by African Americans and “others” not in positions of power. From there, the chapter traces veteran identity back to the Italian renaissance, arguing that modern notions of veteran identity are founded upon fears of returning veterans causing chaos and disorder. At the same time, writers such as Sebastian Junger, who are intimately familiar with veteran culture, repeatedly emphasize the camaraderie and “tribal” bonds found among members of the military, and instead of creating symbolic categories in which veterans might exist exceptionally as “Heroes,” or pitied as “Wounded Warriors,” the chapter argues that the altruistic nature which leads recruits to war, their capabilities as leaders and educators, and the need of larger society for examples of human resiliency are more appropriate starting points for establishing veteran identity. The Introduction is followed by an independent “Example” section, a brief examination of a student veteran named “Bingo,” one who demonstrates an ability to challenge, even employ veteran stereotypes to maintain his right to self-definition. Bingo’s story, as told in a “spotlight” article meant to attract student veterans to a college campus, portrays the veteran as a “Wounded Warrior” who overcomes mental illness and the scars of war through education, emerging as an exceptional example—a “Hero”—that other student veterans can model by enrolling at the school. Bingo’s story sets the stage for close examinations of the “Hero” and the “Wounded Warrior” in the first and second chapters. Chapter One deconstructs notions of heroism, primarily the belief that all veterans are “Heroes.” The chapter examines military training and indoctrination, Medal of Honor award citations, and film examples such as All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Heroes for Sale (1933), Sergeant York (1941), and Top Gun (1986) to distinguish between actual feats of heroism and “Heroes” as they are presented in patriotic rhetoric. The chapter provides the Medal of Honor citations attached to awards presented to Donald Cook, Dakota Meyer, and Kyle Carpenter, examining the postwar lives of Meyer and Carpenter, identifying attempts by media and government officials to appropriate heroism—to steal the right to self-definition possessed by these men. Among these Medal of Honor recipients one finds two types of heroism: Sacrificing Heroes give something of themselves to protect others; Attacking Heroes make a difference during battle offensively. Enduring Heroes, the third type of heroism discussed in the chapter, are a new construct. Colloquially, and for all intents and purposes, an Enduring Hero is simply a veteran who enjoys praise and few questions. Importantly, veterans enjoy the “Hero Treatment” in exchange for silence and conforming to larger narratives which obfuscate past wars and pave the way for new ones. This chapter engages with theorists of gender—such as Jack Judith Halberstam, whose Female Masculinities (1998) anticipates the agency increasingly available to women through military service; like Leo Braudy, whose From Chivalry to Terrorism (2003) traces the historical relationship between war and gender before commenting on the evolution of military masculinity—to discuss the relationship between heroism and agency, begging a question: What do veterans have to lose from the perpetuation of stereotypes? This question frames a detailed examination of William A. Wellman’s film, Heroes for Sale (1933), in the chapter’s final section. This story of stolen valor and the Great Depression depicts the homecoming of a WWI veteran separated from his heroism. The example, when combined with a deeper understanding of the intersection between veteran identity and gender, illustrates not only the impact of stolen valor in the life of a legitimate hero, but it also comments on the destructive nature of appropriation, revealing the ways in which a veteran stereotypes rob service men and women of the right to draw upon memories of military service which complete with those stereotypes. The military “Hero” occupies a moral high ground, but most conceptions of military “Heroes” are socially constructed advertisements for war. Real heroes are much rarer. And, as the Medal of Honor recipients discussed in the chapter reveal, they, too, struggle with lifelong disabilities as well as constant attempts by society to appropriate their narratives. Chapter Two traces the evolution of the modern “Wounded Warrior” from depictions of cowardice in Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895), to the denigration of World War I veterans afflicted with Shell Shock, to Kevin Powers’s Iraq War novel, The Yellow Birds (2012). As with “Heroes,” “Wounded Warriors” perform a stereotype in place of an authentic, individualized identity, and the chapter uses Walt Kowalski, the protagonist of Clint Eastwood’s film, Gran Torino (2008), as its major example. The chapter discusses “therapeutic culture,” Judith Butler’s work on identity-formation, and Eva Illouz’s examination of a culture obsessed with trauma to comment on veteran performances of victimhood. Butler’s attempts to conceive of new identities absent the influence of systems of definition rooted in the state, in particular, reveal power in the opposite of silence, begging another question: What do civilians have to gain from the perpetuation of veteran stereotypes? Largely, the chapter finds, the “Wounded Warrior” persists in the minds of civilians who fear the veteran’s capacity for violence. A broken, damaged veteran is less of a threat. The story of the “Wounded Warrior” is not one of sacrifice. The “Wounded Warrior” exists after sacrifice, beyond any measure of “honor” achieved in uniform. “Wounded Warriors” are not expected to find a cure because the wound itself is an apparatus of the state that is commodified and injected into the currency of emotional capitalism. This chapter argues that military service and a damaged psyche need not always occur together. Following the second chapter, a close examination of “The Bear That Stands,” a short story by Suzanne S. Rancourt which confronts the author’s sexual assault while serving in the Marines, offers an alternative to both the “Hero” and the “Wounded Warrior” stereotypes. Rancourt, a veteran “Storyteller,” gives testimony of that crime, intervening in social conceptions of veteran identity to include a female perspective. As with the example of Bingo, the author demonstrates an innate ability to recognize and challenge the stereotypes discussed in the first and second chapters. This “Example” sets the stage for a more detailed examination of “Veteran Storytellers” and their communities in the final chapter. Chapter Three looks for examples of veteran “difference,” patriotism, the “Wounded Warrior,” and the “Hero” in nonfiction, fiction, and artwork emerging from the creative arts community, Military Experience and the Arts, an organization which provides workshops, writing consultation, and publishing venues to veterans and their families. The chapter examines veteran “difference” in a short story by Bradley Johnson, “My Life as a Soldier in the ‘War on Terror.’” In “Cold Day in Bridgewater,” a work of short fiction by Jerad W. Alexander, a veteran must confront the inescapability of that difference as well as expectations of conformity from his bigoted, civilian bartender. The final section analyzes artwork by Tif Holmes and Giuseppe Pellicano, which deal with the problems of military sexual assault and the effects of war on the family, respectively. Together, Johnson, Alexander, Holmes, and Pellicano demonstrate skills in recognizing stereotypes, crafting postwar identities, and producing alternative representations of veteran identity which other veterans can then draw upon in their own homecomings. Presently, no unified theory of veteran identity exists. This dissertation begins that discussion, treating individual performances of veteran identity, existing historical, sociological, and psychological scholarship about veterans, and cultural representations of the wars they fight as equal parts of a single text. Further, it invites future considerations of veteran identity which build upon, challenge, or refute its claims. Conversations about veteran identity are the opposite of silence; they force awareness of war’s uncomfortable truths and homecoming’s eventual triumphs. Complicating veteran identity subverts conformity; it provides a steady stream of traits, qualities, and motivations that veterans use to craft postwar selves. The serious considerations of war and homecoming presented in this text will be useful for Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans attempting to piece together postwar identities; they will be useful to scholars hoping to facilitate homecoming for future generations of war veterans. Finally, the Afterword to the dissertation proposes a program for reassimilation capable of harnessing the veteran’s symbolic and moral authority in such a way that self-definition and homecoming might become two parts of a single act.

This thesis focuses on the presence of Black women characters in domestic contexts in the early poetry of African American poets Nikki Giovanni and Rita Dove and examines the strategies these women employ, individually and in close relationships, in order to empower themselves and sustain those around them. It provides a joint exploration of the work of two major contemporary poets from a literary and interdisciplinary perspective, mapping instances of the poetic expression of Black feminist politics. The theoretical approach builds on a range of understandings of empowerment, strategy, and the central importance of home in an African American context, as conceptualized primarily in the work of Black feminists, in particular Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks. Structurally, the study follows the cycle of a woman’s life from girlhood to old age. Thus, poems involving the empowerment strategies of girls at home are explored first. They are followed by poems where the domestic lives of adult women and then elderly women are addressed, with a focus on their respective empowering strategies. Discussed last are strategies of empowerment evident in the interactions of (largely) Black women of different generations in poems depicting intergenerational contacts and relationships. Homeplaces created by Black women have historically been experienced as sheltering African Americans from the perils of the dominant white society and thereby Black women’s domestic experiences have generally been linked to privilege rather than to confinement and victimization. In the poems, when at home, Black women utilize different strategies to assert themselves and each other, implicitly or explicitly, emerging strong and resilient, even though sometimes they may merely derive satisfaction from their poor circumstances. Strong connections to the past and a sense of belonging, partaking in legacies and storytelling, as well as memory, imagination, dreaming and hiding, are recurring elements of their empowerment processes. However, their enjoyment of loving bonds and their sharing of African-derived knowledges and ways of being emerge as the most significant aspects contributing to their empowerment.

Le but de cette thèse est de comprendre pourquoi la poésie d’Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), autrice étatsunienne majeure, est absente du champ littéraire français. Poétesse prolifique, Adrienne Rich reçut de nombreux prix littéraires tout au long de sa carrière. Essayiste, elle fut une théoricienne du mouvement féministe étatsunien. Des recueils de ses poèmes ont été publiés dans une vingtaine de langues dans le monde. En français, une quinzaine de poèmes d’Adrienne Rich a été traduite et publiée sur divers supports (anthologies, revues littéraires, blogs). Un recueil a été conçu en collaboration avec la poétesse, mais il n’a jamais été publié à ce jour. Malgré différentes tentatives pour accueillir la poésie d’Adrienne Rich en France (traduction de ses essais, inscription au programme de l’agrégation, lecture en librairie) elle est toujours en 2019 dans une situation ambiguë de présence mais d’invisibilité pour le lectorat français. Nous chercherons donc à expliquer cette réception en suspens en examinant d’abord les traductions de poèmes d’Adrienne Rich publiés en français. Qui en sont les auteurs et autrices ? Quelles sont leurs pratiques et les caractéristiques de leurs traductions ? Leurs travaux s’inscrivent dans le sous-champ éditorial de la poésie traduite en France qui sera analysé pour en identifier les dynamiques, les acteurs et actrices, les supports de diffusion. À la lumière de ces analyses qui relèvent de la sociologie de la traduction et de la réception, nous comparerons le cas de la poésie d’Adrienne Rich avec d’autres poètes mais surtout d’autres poétesses étatsuniennes contemporaines. Dans ce contexte de réception, il faut aussi prendre en compte l’histoire des idées. En effet, l’œuvre d’Adrienne Rich est marquée par l’engagement féministe de l’autrice, ce qui représente une caractéristique significative pour le transfert culturel que constitue la traduction. Nous nous intéresserons donc à l’histoire des mouvements mais aussi des courants de pensée féministes aux États-Unis et en France depuis les années 1960. Enfin, dans une démarche prospective, ce travail se propose d’envisager les modalités de conception d’un recueil de poèmes d’Adrienne Rich traduits en français à l’aune de l’analyse du champ éditorial de la poésie en France et d’une lecture microtextuelle des poèmes déjà traduits. Nous illustrerons cette réflexion par des traductions ou retraductions de quelques textes : comment traduire une poésie féministe ?
The aim of this thesis is to understand why the poetry of Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), the major United States poet, is absent from the French literary field. Adrienne Rich was awarded numerous literary prizes throughout her prolific career. As an essayist, she was one of the first theorists of the feminist movement in the United States. Collections of her poems have been published in almost twenty languages worldwide. In French, fifteen of her poems have been translated and published in different forms (anthologies, literary magazines, blogs). A collection was being drawn up in collaboration with the poet, but to this day has never been released. Despite several attempts to introduce her work in France—some of her essays have been translated, a collection of her poems was in the agrégation curriculum, and she was invited to read her work in a bookshop—in 2019 it remains largely invisible to French readers. This thesis will thus try to explain this “arrested” reception first by examining the translations of Rich’s poems which have been published in French. Who translated her poetry? How can we characterise their translations? Their work is part of the French subfield of translated poetry which will be analysed so as to identify what is at stake, who is involved and how the poetry is distributed. In the light of these analyses which come under the sociology of translation and of reception, the case of Adrienne Rich’s poetry will be compared with other US male and especially female poets from the same period. In this reception context, addressing the history of ideas is crucial. Indeed, Adrienne Rich’s work is marked by her engagement with feminism, which is a significant element in the cultural transfer which translation represents. As such, the history of feminist movements and theories in France and the United States since the 1960s will be subjected to close analysis. Lastly, in a prospective approach, this thesis will focus on the conditions for the possible publication of a collection of Adrienne Rich’s poetry translated into French, in light of the analysis of the publishing field of poetry in France and of a microtextual reading of her previously published poems. These considerations will be illustrated by new translations or retranslations of selected poems. At the heart of this research lies the question: how is feminist poetry to be translated?

Nights in The City Beautiful is a collection of confessional, free verse poems that explores sexual trauma, mental health, the exigencies of marriage, and the complexities of human desire. These interconnected poems are grounded with a braided narrative and tackle taboo themes. In Part 1: Monogamy, the reader journeys into the world of Vincent and Victoria, their profound love, and their anxiety disorders. In Part 2: Polyamory, Victoria gets caught in a love triangle when she meets her publishing coworker, Peter Langley. The book evokes the movement of Romanticism and first-and-second-generation Romantic poets such as William Blake and Lord Byron. Contemporary influences on this collection include Aaron Smith’s Primer, Stacey Waite’s Butch Geography, and Tracy K. Smith’s The Body's Question. Nights in The City Beautiful merges lyricism with narrative, the ethereal with the physical. It is a novella in verse that delves into the boundaries of sexuality, love, and intimacy.

This dissertation analyzes the performance praxis of the Mexican poet Nahui Olin (1893-1978) and the Salvadoran guerrilla leader and author Nidia Díaz (1952-). Through their self-representation in images and texts, these two women subverted the discourse of power characteristic of their respective cultural and historical contexts. Whereas Olin carried out her “corporeal activism” through defiant eroticism; Díaz did so through her stoic stance in the face of incarceration and torture. The dissertation carries out visual analyses enriched by attention to literature, and literary analyses informed by visual culture. In their respective approaches to performance these two figures engage with their sociopolitical contexts as they relate to women’s condition and the quest for spiritual liberation. The first chapter presents the dissertation’s theoretical framework. Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Elaine Scarry’s theories are crucial to understanding the concepts of body, discourse of power, performance, and pain; Gillian Rose’s approach is essential to analyzing images; Lucia Guerra-Cunningham and Rita Felski are fundamental for addressing women’s writing. The second chapter focuses on Olin’s activism, evident in her role as a “flapper,” her transgressive nude photographs and her poems written during the Mexican post-revolutionary period and which were influenced by avant-garde movements. My analysis links the key photograph I call “Nahui Olin Andrógina” with her poetry, centering on the trope of androgyny as a mystic state. The third chapter examines the naïf self-portraits and testimonio found in Díaz’s Nunca estuve sola (in 1988), which she narrates her imprisonment during El Salvador’s civil war of the 1980’s. My analysis centers on the trope of stoicism manifested in her drawing I call “Una ‘mesías’ que deviene en la madre del pueblo” as well as in the prose of her testimonio. Olin’s erotic activism and Díaz’s armed rebellion both represent attempts to achieve human liberation, including their own as oppressed women, and suggested emancipatory paths that may serve as models for others.

Emily Dickinson, Frances Sargent Osgood, and Sarah Piatt render the nineteenth-century “women’s sphere” ironically Unheimliche while simultaneously conveying it as the “home sweet home” the sentimental tradition prescribes it should be. These American women poets turn the domestic milieu into, as Paula Bennett phrases it, “the gothic mise en scene par excellence…the displacements, doublings, and anxieties characterizing gothic experience are the direct consequence of domestic ideology’s impact on the lives and psyches of ordinary bourgeois women (121-122).” Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath continue to represent the Unheimliche home in their poetry through the middle of the twentieth century, specifically by portraying the woman writer’s homebound experience as a fearful one; the materials of writing surrounding Plath’s and Sexton’s speakers encourage both creation and self-destruction. The speakers of Invisible Mink confront writing similarly in that the process of making a poem is couched in extreme anxiety. Poetic creation in my collection is explored via gothic conventions including the use of doubles, or poetic doppelgangers, as multiple speakers in poems. Recent poetry and criticism by Lyn Hejinian, Brenda Hillman, Mary Ruefle, and Olena Kalytiak Davis navigate the space between “home” and “away” in terms of tensions between the “feminine” and the “masculine” and the “confessional” and the “experimental.” Innovations in form and content throughout Invisible Mink are encouraged by Hillman’s work with blank space on the page and Hejinian’s writings on the materiality of words and forms. The use of classic film as a guiding motif in Invisible Mink is particularly inspired by Ruefle’s erasures and Davis’ “samplings,” as termed by critic Ira Sadoff, of classical literary texts. Invisible Mink serves as an example of one woman artist’s “survival story” and is also, I hope, a testament to other women artists’ similar ordeals.

abstract: Since the Enlightenment, humanist philosophy has understood materiality as an inert and determinate world categorically separate from the sphere of consciousness and language. However, after evolving significantly during the 20th century, the natural sciences now recognize the complexity, indeterminacy and agency of matter. A parallel transformation can be observed in contemporary Spanish and Latin American literature and is exemplified in the works of Cristina Peri Rossi and Cecilia Vicuña. Drawing on knowledge which emerges from the natural sciences, the humanities and personal experience, these poets explore multiple dimensions of materiality from the microscopic world of subatomic particles and DNA molecules to the macroscopic world of the body and the structure of the universe. The theoretical orientation of this study emerges from posthumanism, which critiques the epistemological foundations of humanist thought and reconfigures reductionist concepts of matter, discourse, the subject, and agency which are grounded in dualistic ontology. Material feminist theorists explore materiality through interdisciplinary approaches which establish a dialogue between posthumanism, feminist theory and the natural sciences. The material feminist Karen Barad proposes an agential realist ontology which constitutes the principal theoretical framework of this thesis. According to Barad, phenomena are not exclusively social or material but rather material-discursive practices, and the concept of agency is reconfigured as the product of the dynamics of intra-action rather than an as an attribute restricted to the human sphere. Furthermore, this thesis utilizes diverse materials from the areas of literary criticism and scientific research in order to achieve an authentically interdisciplinary interpretation of materiality in the poetry. Peri Rossi and Vicuña express a profound questioning of the fundamental assumptions of humanism and offer perspectives which take into account matter's agency and dynamism. Their poetry presents materiality as a constant process of creation and as an active participant in the unfolding of reality, thereby opening up new horizons of investigation. By interpreting the works of Peri Rossi and Vicuña through the lens of posthumanist theory, this study contributes to a growing body of interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary Spanish and Latin American literature.
Dissertation/Thesis
M.A. Spanish 2013