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Dalton, Bridget. "Kindness in modernist American poetry." Thesis, University of East Anglia, 2016. https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/59451/.
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This thesis poses the question, ‘can we find Kindness in modernist American poetry?’ It is a work comprised primarily of detailed and extended close readings that will track Kindness through selections from the works of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen and Charles Reznikoff. Working within an understanding that no interpretation can be naïve, this thesis argues a case for Kindness as a “grammar of reading” that accounts for the readerly experience of the neophyte by considering the notion of “reading in exile”. This is undertaken not only as an ethical step towards accessibility in texts that are conventionally identified as presenting a stark and difficult aesthetics but also with the historical considerations of the relationship between high art and mass culture, with which recent thought on modernism is concerned (Huyssen, Perelman, Jennison). This “grammar of reading” is developed through interpretations of twenty-‐first century theorists such as Derek Attridge (“singularity”), Jane Bennett (“vibrant matter”) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (“reparative reading” and the “paranoid position”). The theoretical work of this “grammar of reading” is based around the notion of “behaviour” as it evinces a potential critical position that can account for naïveté, vulnerability, and not knowing within reading and within poems themselves. The attendant aim of this project then is to explore the potential and implications of identifying a recognizable Kindness in early-‐twentieth century modernist poetry.
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Allen, Edward Joseph Frank. "Lyric technologies : the sound media of American modernist poetry." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.708318.
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Rosenow, Cecilia L. "Pictures of the floating world : American modernist poetry and cultural translations of Japan /." view abstract or download file of text, 2002. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3055709.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002.Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 176-199). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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Gilbert, Matthew. "Fir-Flower Petals on a Wet Black Bough: Constructing New Poetry through Asian Aesthetics in Early Modernist Poets." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2019. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3588.
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Critics often credit Ezra Pound and his Imagist movement for the development of American poetics. Pound’s interest in international arts and minimalist aesthetics of cross-cultural poetry gained the attention of prominent writers throughout Modernist and Post-Modern periods. From writers like Wallace Stevens and Gertrude Stein to later poets like Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder, image and precise language has shaped American literature. Few critics have praised Eastern cultures or the Imagist poets who adopted an East-Western form of poetics: Amy Lowell and William Carlos Williams. Studying traditional Eastern painting and short-form poetry and interactions with personal connections to the East, Lowell and Williams adapt then progress aesthetic fusions Pound began and abandoned through his interpretation of Eastern art. Like Pound, Lowell and Williams illustrate a mix of form, free-verse language, and modernized poetics to not only imitate Eastern art but to create poetics of international discourse which shape American Modernism.
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Stone, Alison Jane. "Contemporary British poetry and the Objectivists." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/30174.
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This thesis examines a neglected transatlantic link between three post-war British poets – Charles Tomlinson, Gael Turnbull and Andrew Crozier – and a group of Depression-era modernists: the Objectivists. This study seeks to answer why it was the Objectivists specifically, rather than other modernists, that were selected by these three British poets as important exemplars. This is achieved through a combination of close readings – both of the Americans’ and Britons’ poetry and prose – and references to previously unpublished correspondence and manuscripts. The analysis proceeds via a consideration of how the Objectivists’ principles presented a challenge to dominant constructs of ‘authority’ and ‘value’ in post-war Britain, and the poetic is figured in this sense as a way-of-being as much as a discernible formal mode. The research concentrates on key Objectivist ideas (“Perception,” “Conviction,” “Objectification”), revealing the deep ethical concerns underpinning this collaboration, as well as hitherto unacknowledged political resonances in the context of its application to British poetries. Discussions of language-use build on recent critical perspectives that have made a case for the ‘re-forming’ potential of certain modernist poetries, particularly arguments about ‘paratactic’ versus ‘fragmentary’ modernisms, and as such the three British poets’ interest in the Objectivists is interpreted as a response to a need for restitution following the trauma of World War II. Ultimately, it is argued that this interaction (which this thesis figures in explicitly transatlantic terms) was a challenge to the emphasis placed on collective and normative viewpoints in much post-war British poetry, many of which were located in an organic conception of ‘nation.’ This study claims that the Objectivists’ example posited a contrasting poetic, foregrounding individual agency and capacity for thought as the only viable means for the poet to re-connect with and make meaningful statements about society and the world.
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Kim, Heejung. "THE OTHER AMERICAN POETRY AND MODERNIST POETICS: RICHARD WRIGHT, JACK KEROUAC, SONIA SANCHEZ, JAMES EMANUEL, AND LENARD MOORE." Kent State University / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1523964596644369.
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Stubbs, Tara M. C. "'Irish by descent' : Marianne Moore, Irish writers and the American-Irish Inheritance." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2008. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:bf87b5ea-4baa-4a46-9509-2c59e738e2a1.
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Despite having a rather weak family connection to Ireland, the American modernist poet Marianne Moore (1887-1972) described herself in a letter to Ezra Pound in 1919 as ‘Irish by descent’. This thesis relates Moore’s claim of Irish descent to her career as a publisher, poet and playwright, and argues that her decision to shape an Irish inheritance for herself was linked with her self-identification as an American poet. Chapter 1 discusses Moore’s self-confessed susceptibility to ‘Irish magic’ in relation to the increase in contributions from Irish writers during her editorship of The Dial magazine from 1925 to 1929. Moore’s 1915 poems to the Irish writers George Moore, W. B. Yeats and George Bernard Shaw, which reveal a paradoxical desire for affiliation to, and disassociation from, Irish literary traditions, are scrutinized in Chapter 2. Chapters 3a and b discuss Moore’s ‘Irish’ poems ‘Sojourn in the Whale’ (1917) and ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ (1941). In both poems political events in Ireland – the ‘Easter Rising’ of 1916 and Ireland’s policy of neutrality during World War II – become a backdrop for Moore’s personal anxieties as an American poet of ‘Irish’ descent coming to terms with her political and cultural inheritance. Expanding upon previous chapters’ discussion of the interrelation of poetics and politics, Chapter 4 shows how Moore’s use of Irish sources in ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ and other poems including ‘Silence’ and the ‘Student’ reflects her quixotic attitude to Irish culture as alternately an inspiration and a tool for manipulation. The final chapter discusses Moore’s adaptation of the Anglo-Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth’s 1812 novel The Absentee as a play in 1954. Through this last piece of ‘Irish’ writing, Moore adopts a sentimentality that befits the later stages of her career and illustrates how Irish literature, rather than Irish politics, has emerged as her ultimate source of inspiration.
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Clavier, Aurore. "Origines et originalité américaines dans l'oeuvre de Mariane Moore." Thesis, Paris 3, 2014. http://www.theses.fr/2014PA030142.
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Figure moderniste à la fois centrale et marginale, radicale et anachronique, locale, cosmopolite et idiosyncratique, Marianne Moore (1887-1972) semble depuis ses débuts résister à la catégorisation. Son œuvre en vers et en prose permet ainsi de remettre en question les notions d’origines et d’originalité constamment invoquées dans les débats culturels sur l’Amérique, des années 1900 aux décennies suivant la seconde guerre mondiale. Tandis que, face à la hantise de la répétition, du retard, et de la dérivation, certains auteurs et critiques cherchent à recouvrer un fondement plus ou moins mythifiée, en passant ou non par l’Europe, elle tend à substituer à l’origine fixe les figures plurielles de l’amorce et du (re)commencement. Pour autant, son travail n’est aucunement voué aux idéaux de nouveauté et d’originalité artistiques. L’Amérique qu’elle décrit laisse affleurer les survivances de temps plus anciens, observées au filtre de multiples intermédiaires, visuels, scripturaires, et culturels. Le statut de l’auteur s’en trouve par là-même subverti, le créateur cédant le pas au lecteur, au critique, à l’artisan ou encore au bricoleur. Dès lors, la tradition n’est plus un modèle à refonder ou à exclure, mais le lieu d’aménagements continuels, où le mimétisme se révèle créatif et les importations étrangères une source d’expériences et d’adaptations, laissant toute place aux singularités irréductibles. L’enjeu de ce travail est d’étudier ces différents déplacements, ainsi que les redéfinitions qu’ils permettent autour de l’Amérique et de sa littératureAs a modernist, Marianne Moore (1887-1972) appears both central and marginal, radical and anachronistic, local, cosmopolitan and idiosyncratic, and she seems to have resisted categorization ever since her first texts. Her verse and prose works therefore enable us to question the notions of origins and originality which constituted the heart of the cultural debates about America, from the 1900s to the decades following the Second World War. While, faced with the anxiety of repetition, belatedness and derivation, some authors and critics sought to recover a more or less mythical foundation, through Europe or not, she tended to replace the idea of a fixed origin with multiple beginnings and new starts. Yet, her work was not dedicated to the ideals of artistic novelty and originality. The America she described let the surviving forms of older times surface, and it was observed through a multiplicity of visual, scriptural or cultural intermediaries. The author’s status was thus questioned, giving way to more humble characters— the reader, the critic, the craftsman or the bricoleur. Tradition was no longer a model to be recovered or excluded, but the stage for continuous accommodation, through which mimicry could become creative and foreign imports could inspire experiments and adaptations, without erasing radical singularities. The purpose of this work is to study these various displacements, as well as the redefinitions of America and its literature they allowed
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Jolliffe, Michael Douglas. "'Life lawlessly poetic' : Italy, anarchism and American modernism." Thesis, University of Leicester, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/2381/42844.
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In a letter of 1908, William Carlos Williams accused Ezra Pound of preaching 'poetic anarchy'. Seeking clarification, Pound questioned whether by using this term Williams referred to a ‘life lawlessly poetic and poetically lawless mirrored in the verse' or to 'a lawlessness in the materia poetica and metrica'. This project addresses both elements of the dualism to which Pound refers. It is intended as both a biographically-rooted intellectual history and a semiological analysis of 'poetic anarchy' as it pertains to American literary modernism. Unlike previous works on the subject of anarchist modernism, however, it is set in a transatlantic context, using Italy as an intellectual staging post for investigating the long evolution of classical European anarchism, across the fields of politics, philosophy and economics, into enclaves of American modernist production. Significantly expanding on current scholarship, this project investigates a little-known trio of immigrant Italian anarchists in America: Arturo Giovannitti, Francesca Vinciguerra and Emanuel Carnevali. Through an analysis of poetry, experimental theatre, essays, speeches, economic writings, manifestos, magazines and archival documents, their contributions to modernism are theorised as a twinned labour of social action and revolutionary literary craft. Yet, this concept also shares a reciprocal arrangement with the economic activism that Pound took up in support of Italian fascism. In the case of all four writers, the historical influence of anarchism manifests as a struggle of labour and literature coupled together, pressing advocacy into the centre of their modernist aesthetics, while protest itself becomes staged as an aesthetic practice. This modernism is assessed here as a field of artisan activism indebted to a spectrum of nineteenth century anarchist theories.
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Rinner, Jenifer. "Midcentury American Poetry and the Identity of Place." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/18524.
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This dissertation argues that the midcentury period from 1945-1967 offers a distinct historical framework in American poetry that bears further study. This position counters most other literary history of this period wherein midcentury poets are divided into schools or coteries based on literary friendships and movements: the San Francisco Beats, the New York School, the Black Mountain poets, the Confessionals, the Black Arts poets, the Deep Image poets, and the New Critics, to invoke only the most prominent designations. Critics also typically share a reluctance to cross gender or racial lines in their conceptualizations of the period. Of the few books that survey this period as a whole, most propose the defining features of midcentury poetry as formal innovation (or lack thereof) and a renunciation of the past.
By contrast, I argue that such divisions and limiting categories do not attend to some of the most important features of midcentury poetry. I suggest that midcentury poetry most often demonstrates a renewed interest in locating a particular identity in a specific place. To illustrate this point, I explore depictions of identity and place in the works of three poets who are rarely studied together, Gwendolyn Brooks, Theodore Roethke, and Elizabeth Bishop. Each chapter examines the changes in poets' careers by focusing on how the relationship between place and identity differs in their early and late work. I contend that the few generalizations we have about the trajectory of this period (that poets moved from using more traditional forms to more open forms, for example) are not entirely accurate and, even more, that the accounts that we have of the poets' individual careers could be enhanced by a comparison between their early and late depictions of identity and place. I argue that the concerted exploration of the intersection of place and identity calls for a reconsideration of midcentury poetry: not just the categories we have but the poets and poems we read.
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Pan, Lina. "Poetic Labor: Meaning and Matter in Robert Frost's Poetry." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2016. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/1401.
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This thesis examines Frost’s conception of poetry as the labor of human value. It investigates how Frost consciously shaped his notions of “sound of sense” and metaphor, which he deemed fundamental elements of poetic labor, in contradistinction to the Modernist poetics of Eliot and Pound. The author closely examines a representative sample of Frost’s poetry and prose as critiques of Modernist poetic theory and its implications for what Frost deemed the essential human function of poetry. The thesis will interest scholars studying strains of English poetic thought that developed concurrently with and against Modernist poetic thought. More broadly, it will interest those who seek a serious and thoughtful challenge to Modernist literary trends that prevail even today.
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Bucher, Vincent. "Une pratique sans théorie. Le très long poème américain de seconde génération." Thesis, Paris 3, 2012. http://www.theses.fr/2012PA030135/document.
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Les États-Unis n’ont eu de cesse d’attendre depuis Emerson le grand chef d’œuvre national qui célèbrerait le destin d’exception de la jeune démocratie et affranchirait la littérature et la langue américaines de la tutelle du vieux continent. Cette tâche ne pouvait incomber à l’épopée dont on a pu juger qu’elle était inapte à décrire le monde contemporain et qu’elle contredisait une modernité poétique de l’intensité lyrique. La renaissance spectaculaire du « long poème » américain au cours des XIXe et XXe siècle ne peut donc s’inscrire dans la filiation de « formes » jugées obsolètes. Elle paraît d’ailleurs d’autant plus problématique qu’après avoir été rapportée au lyrisme démocratique de Walt Whitman, le « long poème » fut approprié par T.S. Eliot et Ezra Pound et assimilée aux excès d’un « high modernism » autoritaire, élitiste et systématique. C’est ainsi que la critique n’est parvenue à rendre compte paradoxalement de cette « forme » qu’en la niant, confirmant ainsi son illisibilité : le long poème ne pouvait être qu’un recueil de poèmes courts, un chef d’œuvre ruiné ou une parodie de la pensée systématique et de l’exceptionnalisme américain. En étudiant « A » de Louis Zukofsky, Paterson de William Carlos William et les Maximus Poems de Charles Olson, je vise à démontrer qu’il est au contraire possible de lire cette forme en tant que telle sans avoir recours à des typologies génériques ou à la dichotomie modernisme/postmodernisme. Je tenterai aussi de suggérer que, dans ces trois œuvres, la poésie se conçoit comme une activité en devenir qui tente modestement d’articuler le poème au monde, au temps et à la lectureEver since Emerson the United-States have been expecting the great national masterpiece that would not only celebrate the unique destiny of this young democracy but would also free American language and literature from the European model. However, it did not seem that it was for the epic poem to accomplish this task given that it appeared not only ill-suited to describe the modern world but also incompatible with the demands of a poetic modernity predicated on lyrical intensity. Hence, the planned obsolescence of this “form” has made it all the more difficult to explain the spectacular rebirth of the “American long poem” in the 19th and 20th centuries. It has appeared all the more problematic since, after having been associated to Walt Whitman’s democratic lyricism, the “long poem” was appropriated by T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound making it the symbol of the authoritarian, elitist and systematic tendencies of “high modernism”. It will thus come as no surprise that the critical community has tended to view the “long poem” negatively confirming in a way its illegibility: the “long poem” could only be viewed as a short lyric sequence, an impossible masterpiece or a parody of systematic thought and American exceptionalism. In undertaking this study of Louis Zukofsky’s “A”, William Carlos William’s Paterson and Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems I wish to demonstrate that it is possible to read the “long poem” as such without having to resort to generic categories and to the modern/postmodern dichotomy. I also hope to show that, in these three works, poetry is understood as a kind of ongoing activity which modestly attempts to articulate the poem to the world, time and reading
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Arnold, David. "'Out of an eye comes research' : renegotiating the image in twentieth century American poetry." Thesis, University of Sussex, 1996. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.321381.
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Wakefield, Eleanor. "Extending the Line: Early Twentieth Century American Women's Sonnets." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/22651.
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This dissertation rereads sonnets by three crucial but misunderstood early twentieth-century women poets at the intersection of the study of American literary history and scholarship of the sonnet as a genre, exposing and correcting a problematic loss of nuance in both narratives. Genre scholarship of the sonnet rarely extends into the twentieth century, while early twentieth-century studies tend to focus on nontraditional poem types. But in fact, as I show, formal poetry, the sonnet in particular, engaged deeply with the contemporary social issues of the period, and proved especially useful for women writers to consider the ways their identities as women and poets functioned in a world that was changing rapidly. Using the sonnet’s dialectical form, which creates tension with an internal turn, and which engages inherently with its own history, these women writers demonstrated the enduring power of the sonnet as well as their own positions as women and poets. Tying together genre and period scholarship, my dissertation corrects misreadings of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sarah Teasdale, and Helene Johnson; of the period we often refer to as “modernism”; and of the sonnet form.
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Harter, Odile. "In Others' Words: Poetry, Quotation, and the Great Depression." Thesis, Harvard University, 2012. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:10629.
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Quotation, the placing of found material into a new context, always involves transforming that material. The modernist poets who first incorporated extensive quotation into poetry prioritized hierarchy, aesthetic excellence, and formal license, values that encourage us to measure a poet’s genius by the audacity with which he transforms found material. This conception of poetry as masterful arrangement proved inadequate, however, in the wake of the Great Depression, as Marxist politics, a trend toward collectivism, and a vogue for documentary forms inflected the words of others with ethical status and social significance. In Others’ Words traces the effect of the Great Depression on the quoting practice of six poets, each of whom seeks to quote in a way that sufficiently honors other voices and other experiences, selecting material for its authenticity of experience as much as for its linguistic aptness. Ezra Pound imagines a “common sepulcher” of evidence and alternates between lyric and documentary expressions of the same ideas to represent the growing conflict between his early theorizations of his quotation method and his changing sense of his quotations’ purpose. In Marianne Moore’s poems, collective, error-prone speech and a plural speaking voice denote a transition, in her career, from a poetics based on exceptional discernment to a poetics based on participation and social connection. William Carlos Williams’s most important work with quotation, not published until the 1940s, developed out of his struggle throughout the 1930s to reconcile his commitment to rendering the “American idiom” with his growing doubts about his own ability to fully comprehend others’ experience. Finally, Charles Reznikoff, Muriel Rukeyser, and Louis Zukofsky each embarks, during the 1930s, on a documentary project that emphasizes the limitations of a poet’s power to shape the meaning of his or her poem.
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Tracy, Jordan Elizabeth. "Framing the Sacred in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century American Ekphrasis." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/556022.
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Framing the Sacred revisits the significance of ekphrasis, the verbal rendering of a visual representation, in modern and contemporary American poetics. Although a seemingly marginal strain of lyric poetry, ekphrasis is a literary crucible in which the problems of representation converge, catalyzing a unique process of enchantment and disenchantment. Through an examination of a number of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poems, I argue that this enchantment has bearing on how we envision the import of religion in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America and its literature. On account of its liminal status--a text that is "betwixt and between" the verbal and visual--ekphrasis does not need to meditate explicitly on spiritual, sacred, or religious objects to undermine and destabilize our definitions of such terms. Each chapter in Framing the Sacred examines the manifestation of a single trope of containment--the figure of the frame, the genre of still life, the genre of the self-portrait, and the acts of collection and curation--and discovers the various ways the ekphrastic work of William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Charles Wright, A.E. Stallings, and Jorie Graham constructs and deconstructs such tropes. The pattern that emerges from a number of dramatically different ekphrases reveals the generative value of loosening the frames through which we consider the sacred in the study of literature and the visual arts.
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Tarlo, Harriet Ann Bowen. "H.D.'s Helen in Egypt : origins, processes and genres." Thesis, Durham University, 1994. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/1039/.
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Dunkle, Iris Jamahl. "Shaking the Burning Birch Tree: Amy Lowell’s Sapphic Modernism." Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies / OhioLINK, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1259612760.
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Welcman, Max. "Traduzindo imagens = o imagismo em perspectiva." [s.n.], 2010. http://repositorio.unicamp.br/jspui/handle/REPOSIP/270247.
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Orientador: Fábio Akcelrud DurãoDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-16T02:43:36Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Welcman_Max_M.pdf: 689545 bytes, checksum: 220de918e976fa7f963c4ec14a71c61b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010
Resumo: O objetivo do trabalho é introduzir no âmbito acadêmico brasileiro a discussão sobre a primeira vanguarda literária inglesa do século XX, o Imagismo, além de trazer a público, por meio da elaboração de uma antologia bilíngue, uma série de poemas de autores britânicos e norte-americanos pertencentes àquele movimento e ainda inéditos ou pouco divulgados no país. O Imagismo teve reconhecido seu papel pioneiro na reflexão e difusão de novas formas literárias na poesia anglo-norteamericana, envolveu alguns dos principais nomes da literatura anglófona do período, como Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, Hilda Doolittle, Amy Lowell, D. H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Ford Madox Ford, entre outros, e influenciou diversos poetas modernistas a ele posteriores, sendo assim fundamental para compreender a formação e desenvolvimento do modernismo nos Estados Unidos e Reino Unido. O estudo foi realizado a partir da leitura e análise das antologias imagistas de 1914-1917, além de obras dos seus alegados precursores; do exame dos principais textos teóricos que embasam a escola imagista; da pesquisa bibliográfica sobre o tema; e da seleção e tradução dos textos antologizados
Abstract: The objective of the work is to introduce into Brazilian academic scope a discussion on the first English literary avant-garde movement in XX century, Imagism, and also to bring a number of poems by British and North American authors related to that movement still unreleased or little promoted in Brazil before the public, by means of a bilingual anthology. Imagism is acknowledged as a pioneer in creating and promoting new literary forms in English and North American poetry, included some of the main English literature authors of the period, such as Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, Hilda Doolittle, Amy Lowell, D. H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Ford Madox Ford, among others, and influenced several modernist poets, being thus essential to understand the formation and development of modernism in the USA and United Kingdom. The study was performed by reading and analyzing Imagist anthologies dated of 1914-1917, besides some works by their alleged precursors; by analyzing the main theoretical founding texts of imagist school; by means of bibliographical research on the theme and selection and translation of anthologized texts
Mestrado
Teoria e Critica Literaria
Mestre em Teoria e História Literária
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Wheeler, Belinda. "At the center of American modernism Lola Ridge's politics, poetics, and publishing /." Connect to resource online, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/1805/1683.
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Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2008.Title from screen (viewed on June 2, 2009). Department of English, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Karen Kovacik, Jane E. Schultz, Thomas F. Marvin. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 57-61).
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Manecke, Keith Gordon. "On location the poetics of place in modern American poetry /." Connect to this title online, 2004. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1070218804.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2004.Document formatted into pages; contains 236 p. Includes bibliographical references. Abstract available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center; full text release delayed at author's request until 2008 Dec. 1.
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Oudart, Clément. "Les métamorphoses du modernisme de H.D. à Robert Duncan : vers une poétique de la relation." Phd thesis, Université de la Sorbonne nouvelle - Paris III, 2009. http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00947767.
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Cette thèse explore le fonctionnement de la poésie moderniste américaine sous l'angle de la relation. Critiquant la rhétorique de la rupture généralement associée à l'esthétique des avant-gardes modernistes, notre parcours suit la ligne sinueuse de la poétique de la relation de H.D. [1886-1961] à Robert Duncan [1919-1988]. Loin de tracer une trajectoire chronologique entre ces deux points, qui ne sont pas envisagés comme les œuvres-limites d'un nouveau canon, cette étude a pour point central The H.D. Book. La poésie dite de l'après-guerre émerge comme celle d'un perpétuel entre-deux-guerres, et sa postmodernité, comme une illusion. L'analyse montre que le passage du modernisme historique à son avatar métamoderniste s'effectue par la reconfiguration du mode disjonctif en mise en relation. Ligne fuyante du modernisme, la relation Duncan-H.D. est une utopie. C'est pourquoi elle permet sa critique. Celle-ci implique le passage d'une politique individuelle de l'invention [Pound, Eliot...] à une éthique de l'écriture. Cette aventure, fondée sur des échanges poétiques et épistolaires publiés et inédits, passe par Eliot, Pound, Levertov, Olson et Creeley, mais aussi par Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Valéry ou encore Deleuze, Meschonnic et Glissant. Du H.D. Book à Ground Work, comme de Hymen à Trilogy, la philosophie du devenir, qui s'étend de l'héraclitéisme à la relation d'Édouard Glissant, en passant par le flux bergsonien et par l'empirisme radical de Williams James, offre un cadre conceptuel propre à rendre compte de l'écriture comme processus, de l'espace poétique comme champ de composition, du texte comme système complexe et du poème comme projet.
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Cannella, Wendy. "Fireplaces: The Unmaking of the American Male Domestic Poet (Frost, Stevens, Williams, and Stephen Dunn)." Thesis, Boston College, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/2161.
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Thesis advisor: Paul MarianiThe fireplace has long stood at the center of the American home, that hearth which requires work and duty and which offers warmth and transformation in return. Fireplaces: The Unmaking of the American Male Domestic Poet takes a look at three major twentieth-century men whose poetry manifests anxieties about staying home to "keep the fire-place burning and the music-box churning and the wheels of the baby's chariot turning," as Wallace Stevens described it (L 246), during a time of great literary change when their peers were widely expatriating to Europe. Fireplaces considers contemporary poet Stephen Dunn as an inheritor of this mottled Modernist lineage of male lyric domesticity in the Northeastern United States, a tradition rattled by the terrorist events of September 11, 2001 after which Dunn leaves his wife and family home to remarry, thus razing the longstanding domestic frame of his poems. Ultimately Fireplaces leaves us with a question for twenty-first century verse--can a male poet still write about home? Or has the local domestic voice been supplanted at last by a placeless strain of lyric
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: English
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Platt, Mary Hartley. "Epic reduction : receptions of Homer and Virgil in modern American poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:9d1045f5-3134-432b-8654-868c3ef9b7de.
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The aim of this project is to account for the widespread reception of the epics of Homer and Virgil by American poets of the twentieth century. Since 1914, an unprecedented number of new poems interpreting the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid have appeared in the United States. The vast majority of these modern versions are short, combining epic and lyric impulses in a dialectical form of genre that is shaped, I propose, by two cultural movements of the twentieth century: Modernism, and American humanism. Modernist poetics created a focus on the fragmentary and imagistic aspects of Homer and Virgil; and humanist philosophy sparked a unique trend of undergraduate literature survey courses in American colleges and universities, in which for the first time, in the mid-twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of students were exposed to the epics in translation, and with minimal historical contextualisation, prompting a clear opportunity for personal appropriation on a broad scale. These main matrices for the reception of epic in the United States in the twentieth century are set out in the introduction and first chapter of this thesis. In the five remaining chapters, I have identified secondary threads of historical influence, scrutinised alongside poems that developed in that context, including the rise of Freudian and related psychologies; the experience of modern warfare; American national politics; first- and second-wave feminism; and anxiety surrounding poetic belatedness. Although modern American versions of epic have been recognised in recent scholarship on the reception of Classics in twentieth-century poetry in English, no comprehensive account of the extent of the phenomenon has yet been attempted. The foundation of my arguments is a catalogue of almost 400 poems referring to Homer and Virgil, written by over 175 different American poets from 1914 to the present. Using a comparative methodology (after T. Ziolkowski, Virgil and the Moderns, 1993), and models of reception from German and English reception theory (including C. Martindale, Redeeming the Text, 1993), the thesis contributes to the areas of classical reception studies and American literary history, and provides a starting point for considering future steps in the evolution of the epic genre.
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Essert, Emily Margaret. "A modernist menagerie: representations of animals in the work of five North American Poets." Thesis, McGill University, 2013. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=114133.
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This dissertation considers the representation of animals in Canadian and American modernist poetry. In investigating the relationship between the proliferation of animal tropes and imagery and experimental poetics, it argues that modernism is fundamentally concerned with reconsidering human nature and humanity's place in the modern world. By employing a blend of socio-historical and formalist approaches, while also incorporating theoretical approaches from animal studies, this project shows that the modernist moment is importantly post-Darwinian, and that the species boundary was an important site of ideological struggle. This project also makes an intervention into the New Modernist Studies by proposing "North American Modernism" as a coherent area of inquiry; too few studies consider American and Canadian writers together, but doing so enables a richer understanding of modernism as a complex, global movement. Chapter one argues that animal tropes and imagery form part of a strategy through which Marianne Moore and H.D. challenge prevailing conceptions of femininity. Building upon theoretical work that considers sexism and speciesism as interlocking oppressions, it offers a sharper picture of their conceptions of gender and their feminist intentions. Chapter two considers impersonality and animality in the work of T.S. Eliot and P.K. Page. Like the concept of impersonality, Eliot's influence on Page is often taken for granted in the critical literature; it argues that impersonality (in Eliot's formulation) relies upon embodied personal experience, and on that basis offers an account of Eliot's anxieties about embodiment and Page's lapsus. Finally, chapter three investigates Marianne Moore's and Irving Layton's representation of animals to communicate indirectly their responses to global crises. Both poets felt a strong compulsion to comment on social and moral issues, but found it difficult to do so directly; images and tropes of animals enabled Moore to produce modernist allegories, and assisted Layton in depicting human ferity.Cette thèse examine la représentation des animaux dans la poésie moderniste du Canada et des États-Unis. En étudiant la relation entre la prolifération des tropes et d'imagerie animale et la poésie expérimentale, je soutiens que le modernisme est fondamentalement préoccupé par la reconsidération de la nature de l'être humain et sa place dans le monde moderne. En utilisant un mariage d'approches socio-historiques et formaliste, tout en incorporant des avances théoriques provenant d'études animales, je démontre que le moment moderniste est post-darwinien de façon significative, et que la frontière des espèces était un champ de bataille important de la lutte idéologique. Mon projet fait également une intervention parmi les nouvelles études du modernisme en proposant le «modernisme nord-américain» comme un espace cohérent; trop peu d'études considèrent les écrivains américains et canadiens dans un ensemble, mais cela permet une compréhension plus riche du modernisme comme étant un mouvement complexe et mondial. Je soutiens que les tropes et l'imagerie animale font partie d'une stratégie à travers laquelle Marianne Moore et H.D. contestent les conceptions dominantes de la féminité. En m'appuyant sur les travaux théoriques qui considèrent le sexisme et l'espècisme comme oppressions entremêlées, j'offre une image plus nette de leurs conceptions du genre et de leurs intentions féministes. Ensuite, je considère l'impersonnalité et l'animalité dans les travaux de T.S. Eliot et P.K. Page. Comme le concept de l'impersonnalité, l'influence d'Eliot sur Page est souvent prise pour acquis dans la critique littéraire; je soutiens donc que l'impersonnalité (dans la formulation d'Eliot) s'appuie sur l'expérience personnelle incarnée, et sur cette base, je mets en évidence les inquiétudes d'Eliot et les lapsus de Page. Enfin, j'examine la représentation des animaux chez Marianne Moore et Irving Layton qui communiquent indirectement leurs répliques aux crises mondiales. Les deux poètes ont ressenti une forte compulsion pour commenter les questions sociales et morales, mais ont trouvé difficile de le faire directement; les tropes et les imageries de l'espèce animale ont permis à Moore de produire des allégories modernistes, et ont soutenues Layton pour dépeindre l'animalerie humaine.
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Fiorussi, André. "Inundação musical: a música da poesia modernista hispano-americana." Universidade de São Paulo, 2013. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8145/tde-26062013-094151/.
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A tese investiga possíveis funções históricas da formulação e do uso de categorias poéticas relacionadas à música na poesia modernista hispano-americana, a partir da leitura e análise de poemas selecionados principalmente de Rubén Darío (1867-1916) e Julio Herrera y Reissig (1875-1910) e de textos críticos, teóricos, programáticos e narrativos que participam da primeira recepção histórica do modernismo. Divide-se em cinco capítulos que organizam os resultados de cinco frentes de investigação: aspectos da relação entre os poetas modernistas e a arte musical; papel da musicalidade na modernização do idioma poético castelhano; técnicas rítmicas e harmônicas e funções do efeito musical em diversos poemas modernistas; relação entre a música do modernismo e a ascensão oitocentista da música à condição de meta e metáfora da poesia; particularidades do aporte à música na poesia de Herrera y Reissig.This PhD dissertation investigates the possible historical functions of the formulation and use of poetical categories related to music in the Hispanic-American Modernist poetry, beginning with the reading and analyses of selected poems mainly those of Rubén Darío (1867-1916) and Julio Herrera y Reissig (1875-1910) and of critical, theoretical, programmatic and narrative texts that participate in the first historical reception of Modernism. The dissertation is divided into five chapters that organize the results of five domains of investigation: specific aspects of the relation between the Modernist poets and musical art; the role of musicality in the modernization of the Spanish poetic idiom; rhythmical and harmonic techniques and functions of the musical effects in diverse Modernist poems; the relation between the music of Modernism and the rise of music, in the 19th century, to the condition both of goal and metaphor for poetry; the particularities of the recourse to music in the poetry of Herrera y Reissig.
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Tomaszewska, Lara Halina. "Borderlines of poetry and art : Vancouver, American modernism, and the formation of the west coast avant-garde, 1961-69." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/31696.
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In 1967, San Francisco poet Robin Blaser titled his Vancouver-based journal The Pacific Nation because the imaginary nation that he envisaged was the "west coast." Blaser was articulating the mythic space that he and his colleagues imagined they inhabited at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia: a nation without borders, without nationality, and bound by the culture of poetry. The poetic practices of the San Francisco Renaissance, including beat, projective, and Black Mountain poetics, had taken hold in Vancouver in 1961 with poet Robert Duncan's visit to the city which had catalyzed the Tish poetry movement. In 1963, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Creeley participated in the Vancouver Poetry Conference, an event that marked the seriousness and vitality of the poetic avant-garde in Vancouver. The dominant narrative of avant-garde visual art in Vancouver dates its origins to the late 1960s, with the arrival of conceptualism, especially the ideas and work of Dan Graham and Robert Smithson. By contrast, this thesis argues for an earlier formation of the avant-garde, starting with the Tish poetry movement and continuing with a series of significant local events such as the annual Festival of the Contemporary Arts (1961-71), organized by B.C. Binning and Alvin Balkind, who was the curator of the Fine Arts Gallery at the University of British Columbia. The diverse artistic and intellectual practices of Robert Duncan, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Stan Brakhage, and Marshall McLuhan presented at the Festivals were absorbed and adapted not only by poets and writers but also by artists, including Ian Wallace, Roy Kiyooka, Ian Baxter, Gary Lee-Nova, and Michael Morris. The cross-fertilization of avant-garde poetry and art was an international phenomenon. In New York, "anti-formal" art also embraced Cage and Cunningham as aesthetic models. Its effect in Vancouver was to de-stabilize European traditions of art that had been dominant. In the 1960s, Vancouver avant-garde artists constructed the west coast as an alternative space--alternative to American militarism and anti-communism, to Euro-Canadian cultural traditions and to the artistic dominance of New York. They helped to create a vital, transnational Pacific region.Arts, Faculty of
Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of
Graduate
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Clement, Tanya E. "The makings of digital modernism rereading Gertrude Stein's (the making of Americans) and poetry by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven /." College Park, Md.: University of Maryland, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1903/9160.
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Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2009.Thesis research directed by: Dept. of English Language and Literature. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.
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Byers, Mark. "After the new failure of nerve : Charles Olson and American modernism, 1946-1951." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:02478ea1-832a-4ecc-9c47-a264ba746c49.
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One medium has dominated accounts of American art in the years following the Second World War. The period witnessed, in the words of one critic, a 'Triumph of American Painting', with advances in the easel picture far surpassing those in other media. Whilst more recent accounts have nuanced this view, drawing attention to developments in music and sculpture, literary contributions to the new American modernism have gone almost without assessment. Were there advances in literature comparable to those of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, David Smith and John Cage? Drawing extensively on his unpublished writings, After the New Failure of Nerve reveals the poet Charles Olson to have been the keenest literary advocate of the new American avant-garde and one of the most astute observers of its conditions and possibilities. Paying special attention to unpublished notes, lectures, and correspondence, the thesis utilises Olson's early writings in order to examine the momentum given early postwar modernism by a potent contemporary reaction against abstract rationality, a reaction identified at the time as a 'New Failure of Nerve'. Born of recent disillusionment with 'scientific' Marxism and New Deal progressivism, the thesis demonstrates the several ways in which this 'New Failure of Nerve' fuelled vanguard American art from the middle of the Second World War to the end of the decade. It argues that the new critique of abstract rationality - which was also reflected in the contemporary American work of the Frankfurt School - defined the way American artists understood the function of postwar modernism, the posture of the postwar modernist artist, and the status of the postwar modernist artwork. This pivotal moment in the history of modernism was shaped, I contend, by a philosophical critique explored most ambitiously by an American poet.
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Moffett, Joe. "The search for origins in the twentieth-century long poem : Sumerian, Homeric, Anglo-Saxon /." Morgantown, W. Va. : West Virginia University Press, 2007. http://bvbr.bib-bvb.de:8991/F?func=service&doc_library=BVB01&doc_number=015671691&line_number=0001&func_code=DB_RECORDS&service_type=MEDIA.
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Mata, Buil Ana. "La antología como carta de presentación de un poeta. Estudio del modernismo norteamericano y propuesta de antología bilingüe de Edna St. Vincent Millay." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/387231.
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Esta tesis doctoral pretende estudiar la antología poética de un solo autor como vía de entrada de un poeta en el sistema literario de la cultura de llegada. Para ello, parte del análisis de la recepción en inglés y en castellano de un corpus de poetas del modernismo norteamericano, entendido en sentido amplio y «polifónico», y se detiene en el estudio de las antologías de poetas modernistas publicadas en castellano, relacionando el capital simbólico del autor con el del traductor-antólogo, en la línea de los estudios de sociología de la traducción. Por último, se propone introducir a la poeta Edna St. Vincent Millay en nuestro sistema literario a través del estudio de su poesía y
de la presentación de una antología poética bilingüe que aplique los principios de la hermenéutica. La investigación aportará un análisis transnacional y diacrónico (ejes de la literatura comparada) de la recepción del movimiento modernista norteamericano y reivindicará tanto la importancia de la antología poética de un solo autor como la del traductor-antólogo que la crea.This PhD research focuses on the study of a single author’s poetic anthology as a poet’s means of entry into the target culture’s literary system. Its starting point will be the analysis of the reception (in both English and Spanish) of a corpus of North American Modernist poets in the wide, «polyphonic» sense of the term. It will then look at anthologies of Modernist poets published in Spanish, relating the symbolic capital of the author with that of the translator-anthologist according to sociological translation studies. Finally, the project aims to introduce Edna St. Vincent Millay into our literary system through the study of her poetry and through the presentation of a bilingual anthology that applies hermeneutic principles. This research will provide a transnational and diachronic analysis—the axes of Comparative Literature— of the reception of the North American Modernist movement, vindicating the importance of an author’s poetic anthology as well as of the translatoranthologist who has created it.
Aquesta tesi doctoral té per objectiu estudiar l’antologia poètica d’un autor com a via d’entrada d’un poeta al sistema literari de la cultura d’arribada. A partir de l’anàlisi de la recepció en anglès i castellà d’un corpus de poetes del modernisme nord-americà, entès en sentit ampli i «polifònic», s’estudien en profunditat les antologies de poetes modernistes publicades en castellà i es relaciona el capital simbòlic de l’autor amb el del traductor-antòleg, d’acord amb la sociologia de la traducció. En darrer lloc, el projecte pretén introduir la poeta Edna St. Vincent Millay al nostre sistema literari mitjançant l’estudi de la seva poesia i la presentació d’una antologia poètica bilingüe que apliqui els principis de l’hermenèutica. La recerca oferirà una anàlisi transnacional i diacrònica (eixos de la literatura comparada) de la recepció del moviment modernista nord-americà i reivindicarà tant la importància de l’antologia poètica d’un autor com la del traductor-antòleg que la crea.
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Shakespeare, Alex Andriesse. "Robert Lowell, Lyric and Life." Thesis, Boston College, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:104264.
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Thesis advisor: Paul MarianiRobert Lowell, Lyric and Life investigates the meaning of autobiography as it is represented and produced by the work of art. I begin by tracing Lowell's poetics to the highly personal Romanticism of William Wordsworth and the highly impersonal Modernism of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Allen Tate. Reading Lowell's writing in light of this dual inheritance, I am able to point out the limitations of calling Lowell's poetry "confessional" and to propose a model of the lyric self that accounts for the significant semiotic and psychological complexity that goes into the making of a lyric "I." I argue that, from a reader's point of view, Lowell's autobiographical poems are more creations of experience than they are records of experience; that, although the reader is supposed to believe he is "getting the real Robert Lowell," what he really gets is a fictive representation. Taking hold of what Robert Lowell called the "thread of autobiography" that strings together his life's work, I then trace the changing role of Lowell's autobiographical lyric self in a series of three chapters. The first of these chapters concerns the manuscript drafts and published poems of Life Studies (composed from 1953-1959) and, through attention to Lowell's revisions, demonstrates the great extent to which Lowell fictionalized his experience: for instance, by omitting some of the most personal details of the poems in favor of elegant prosodic or thematic composition. The next chapter takes up what I designate "the Notebook poems" (the sonnets published between 1967 and 1972 in the volumes Notebook 1967-68, Notebook, History, and For Lizzie & Harriet), examining the ways in which Lowell's move to New York City and his readings of Hannah Arendt, Eric Auerbach, Simone Weil, and Herbert Marcuse (among others) affected his views of the lyric self in relation to history. This chapter ends by arguing for the Dantesque contours of the Notebook poems, and again takes a close look at Lowell's drafts, including an unpublished essay on Dante. A final chapter examines two ekphrastic autobiographical poems ("Marriage" and "Epilogue"), from Lowell's final volume, Day by Day (1977), in relation to poems by Elizabeth Bishop and William Wordsworth. It concludes by showing, through a close reading of "Epilogue" and its drafts, Lowell's own retrospective concern to question and doubt the autobiographical pursuits of his poetry. A brief epilogue draws the variegated threads of these chapters together and offers a final reflection on the inextricable knot of Lowell's lyrics and his life by way of reading his final poems and the biographical record of his death
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: English
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Xiong, Ying. "Herbs and Beauty: Gendered Poethood and Translated Affect in Late Imperial and Modern China." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/23739.
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My dissertation is a comparative analysis of the juncture at which Chinese poetry became “modern.” The catalyst for this development was the early twentieth-century translation into Chinese of the European Romantics, which was contemporaneous with changes and permutations within the “herbs and beauty” myth crucial to the conception of the Chinese poet. I argue that the convergence of the two serve as an anchor for examining China’s literary responses, in both form and content, to drastic social change brought about by rapid modernization and dramatic revolutions.
Through a diverse selection of written and visual texts, I scrutinize and accentuate two ambivalences that, I argue, China’s struggle for modernity required and to which the “herbs and beauty” myth gives form. On the one hand, I locate a moment when the essential femininity of the traditional Chinese poet (man or woman) came to be displaced onto the Western new woman, as the Southern Society, a large community of Chinese poets in the early 20th century, revamped the “herbs and beauty” allegory through their project of translating the European Romantics into Chinese. On the other hand, I investigate how modern Chinese poets and intellectuals, torn between their residual attachment to a hallowed national literary tradition and their new quest for non-indigenous (European) sources, partook in the difficult moments of China’s modern transformation by constantly redefining the interconnections between the beautiful and the virtuous through translation and transcultural relation.
In each instance in question, the influence of translation causes a shift in modes of representation that require new definitions of what it means to be a poet in an increasingly unspiritual and commodified world: together, these examples enable me to conceptualize the poetics and politics of what I call “translated affect” and “affective modernity.”10000-01-01
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Tilbury, Simon John. "The dancer walking the ruins : Laura Riding and dialectical thought." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2019. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/290212.
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This thesis explores the origin and expression of dialectical thought in the life and writings of the American modernist Laura Riding. Within a biographical framework, I trace the steps by which it became the defining characteristic of her poetic, literary and critical works. A few have noted Riding's dialectical manner; none have appreciated its centrality. This is the first detailed study. An introductory outline of the origin and definition of dialectic provides a working theoretical context for the study that follows. Riding was born Laura Reichenthal in New York City, 1901. Her father, a Jewish émigré, was a committed activist for the left and included Riding in his campaigning at a very young age, immersing and educating her in the political and philosophical radicalism thriving in New York's Jewish communities of the era. There she internalised the revolutionary dialectics that would inform her aesthetic practice. Breaking with her father in her teens, she abandoned politics for literature. As Laura Riding - the name she adopted in 1927 and with which her literary writings continue to be associated - she moved to London and began collaborating with Robert Graves, relocating with him to Majorca in 1929. Producing poetry, fiction, criticism and experimental philosophico-literary works, she became a formidable presence within European literary modernism. Many aspects of her work are dialectical. Paradox, inversion and negation are perennial textual features. Key events in her life were also experienced as dialectical. Her insistence upon 'death' as an inverted sigil of unmediated vitality points toward a negatively dialectical mode of thought. In this regard, the theories of Theodor W. Adorno prove invaluable. Adorno provides a unique lexicon of terms - 'constitutive subjectivity', 'administered world', 'true object' - with which to draw out Riding's dialectical subtleties. Reading them alongside Adorno's negatively dialectical theory of modernist art and aesthetic praxis, certain aspects of Riding's writings are illuminated and, in some respects, they correspond. After a suicide attempt in 1929, Riding's perspective changed. Before it, her point of view was positioned within institutionally determined 'reality', and 'truth' beyond it was adumbrated by dialectical means. Afterwards, she believed herself transfigured: the embodiment of immediate, consciously apprehended noumenal objectivity. But the written word remained recalcitrant toward her attempts to inscribe this newfound positive 'truth'. This frustration contributed to her abandonment of poetry at the end of the 1930s. Re-emerging in the 1960s as Laura (Riding) Jackson, her disavowal of poetry and exploration of 'truth-potential' in language utilised dialectical approaches derived from her earlier experiences and writings.
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Rebillon, Carole. "Le Poète, les Philosophes et les Physiciens - Représentation et critique des sciences dans l'oeuvre littéraire de E. E. Cummings." Thesis, Sorbonne Paris Cité, 2019. http://www.theses.fr/2019USPCA060/document.
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Ce travail s'inscrit dans un questionnement sur les liens entre la littérature et la science au XXème siècle, appliqué à l’œuvre littéraire du poète américain E.E.Cummings (1884-1962). La première partie du travail consiste à voir comment Cummings répond dans son œuvre aux conceptions de la science et de la connaissance qui font partie de son arrière-plan culturel et littéraire, en particulier celles exprimées par les philosophes transcendantalistes et pragmatistes du XIXème et du début du XXème siècles. Il sera également question du caractère matérialiste et concret de l'écriture poétique de Cummings au début de sa carrière poétique, en réaction à ces courants de pensée. Les conceptions personnelles et les critiques de Cummings au sujet de la science et du langage scientifique seront ensuite dégagées : le poète s'attache à mettre en valeur les limites du langage savant et l'aspect déshumanisant des sciences et des techniques. Il montre la fracture qui s'instaure entre l'humanité et la nature, dont il souligne la spontanéité. La seconde partie étudie comment Cummings, en dépit de ses critiques, met en œuvre un véritable imaginaire scientifique dans ses poèmes et dans ses pièces de théâtre. Cet imaginaire lui permet de reconstruire sur le plan poétique la plénitude du cosmos et de l'humain mise à mal par les sciences. Le poète peut alors élaborer sa propre définition de l'intuition, proche de celle de Bergson, et esquisser le portrait du poète "homo faber", l'homme aux prises avec la matérialité du monde, dont l’œuvre et l'action répondent aux conséquences de celles de l'"homo sapiens", l'homme savant qui s'est détaché de la natureThis dissertation questions the links between literature and science during the 20th century, as they can be observed in the literary works of American poet E.E.Cummings (1884-1962). The first part of this study is about how Cummings meets in his works to the conceptions of science and knowledge that are part of his cultural and literary background, especially those expressed by transcendantalist and pragmatist philosophers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It will also deal with the concrete and materialistic aspect of Cummings' poetical writings at the beginning of his literary career as a reaction to these schools of thought. Cummings' personal conceptions and criticism about science and scientific langage will then be revealed : the poet endeavours to highlight the limits of scholarly langage and the deshumanizing aspect of sciences and techniques. He shows the newly installed breach between mankind and nature, whose spontaneity he emphasizes in his works. The second part studies how Cummings, in spite of his criticisms of science, makes use of a truly scientific imagination in his poems and theatrical works. This enables him to reconstruct, on a poetical level, the wholeness of cosmos and mankind that was jeopardized by science. He can then develop his own definiton of intuition which is close to that of Bergson, and draw a portait of the "homo faber" poet, or the man struggling with the materiality of cosmos as opposed to the "homo sapiens", a learned man who set himself apart from nature
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Cole, Merrill. "The other Orpheus : a poetics of modern homosexuality /." New York [u.a.] : Routledge, 2003. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip042/2003007030.html.
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Soud, William David. "Toward a divinised poetics : God, self, and poeisis in W.B. Yeats, David Jones, and T.S. Eliot." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:331a692d-a40c-4d30-a05b-f0d224eb0055.
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This thesis examines the traces of theological and broader religious discourses in selected works of three major twentieth-century poets. Each of the texts examined in this thesis encodes within its poetics a distinct, theologically derived conception of the ontological status of the self in relation to the Absolute. Yeats primarily envisions the relation as one of essential identity, Jones regards it as defined by alterity, and Eliot depicts it as dialectical and paradoxical. Critics have underestimated the impact on Yeats’s late work of his final and most sustained engagement with Indic traditions, which issued from his friendship and collaboration with Shri Purohit Swami. Though Yeats projected Theosophical notions on the Indic texts and traditions he studied with Purohit, he successfully incorporated principles of Classical Yoga and Tantra into his later poetry. Much of Yeats’s late poetics reflects his struggle to situate the individuated self ontologically in light of traditions that devalue that self in favor of an impersonal, cosmic subjectivity. David Jones’s The Anathemata encodes a religious position opposed to that of Yeats. For Jones, a devout Roman Catholic committed to the bodily, God is Wholly Other. The self is fallen and circumscribed, and must connect with the divine chiefly through the mediation of the sacraments. In The Anathemata, the poet functions as a kind of lay priest attempting sacramentally to recuperate sacred signs. Because, according to Jones’s exoteric theology, the self must love God through fellow creatures, The Anathemata is not only circular, forming a verbal templum around the Cross; it is also built of massive, rich elaborations of creaturely detail, including highly embroidered and historicized voices and discourses. Critics have long noted the influence of Christian mystical texts on Eliot’s Four Quartets, but some have also detected a countercurrent within the later three Quartets, one that resists the timeless even as the poem valorizes transcending time. This tension, central to Four Quartets, reflects Eliot’s engagement with the dialectical theology of Karl Barth. Eliot’s deployment of paradox and negation does not merely echo the apophatic theology of the mystical texts that figure in the poem; it also reflects the discursive strategies of Barth’s theology. The self in Four Quartets is dialectical and paradoxical: suspended between time and eternity, it can transcend its own finitude only by embracing it.
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Bast, Laura Stefanie Dawn. "A Case Study of E. E. Cummings: The Past and Presence of Modernist Literary Criticism." 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10222/14180.
Full textAbstract:
The early- to mid-twentieth century criticism surrounding E. E. Cummings often dismisses his poetry in Eliotic terms. In analyzing Cummings’s critics’ arguments and methodologies, I attempt to reveal the ways in which Cummings has been unfairly labelled, and also the strains in modernist criticism that have continued up through to today. I compare the modernist approaches to the text to the way recent critics talk about Cummings in order to shed light on our critical inheritance from modernism. Finally, I analyse Cummings’s poetry in terms of one of the more recent discussions of modernist texts, that of relationship between commodity and advertising culture and modernist poetry. My project seeks, by using Cummings as a case study, to articulate not only how certain literary values came to be established, but also how certain methods of persuasion in literary criticism can undermine and even silence certain aspects of a text.
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Sulak, Marcela Malek Newton Adam Zachary Cullingford Elizabeth. "Ligatures of time and space 1920s New York as a construction site for modernist "American" narrative poetry /." 2005. http://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/2113/sulakd44492.pdf.
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Sulak, Marcela Malek. "Ligatures of time and space: 1920s New York as a construction site for modernist "American" narrative poetry." Thesis, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/2113.
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Tost, Tony. "Machine Poetics: Pound, Stein and the Modernist Imagination." Diss., 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10161/3900.
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This dissertation intervenes in the fields of modernist criticism and new media studies to examine an under-appreciated reciprocity between them. I argue that this reciprocity has not yet been adequately incorporated into a critical reckoning of the modernist period, a literary age too often neglected by new media studies as an epoch of "old media" productions. Even if modernist poets did create works largely intended for traditional book-bound channels, the imaginations that produced those works were forged in the combustible mix of new media and technologies that emerged in the early 20th century.
The argument focuses on the poetics of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, innovative poets who composed some of the most prescient, insightful writings on record about the connections linking technological and poetical developments. Through an examination of these poets' speculative writings, I argue that their experimental poetic methods emerged from their understanding of the challenges posed by new media and technologies. Among these challenges were new velocities of signification that emerged with the proliferation of the telegraph, new capacities for the storage of information that arrived with the introduction of the phonograph, an altered relationship to language itself with the externalized alphabet of the typewriter, and a new feel for how meaning could be generated through the montage logic of the cinema.
Drawing on a critical perspective derived from Martin Heidegger, pragmatist philosophers, Frankfurt School theorists and new media scholars such as Friedrich Kittler and Marshall McLuhan, I examine how modernist poetry, when framed as a media event, can help us understand how technological and media shifts influence our conceptions of our own inner and outer domains.
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"Environmental Justice Witnessing in the Modernist Poetry of Lola Ridge, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Elizabeth Bishop." Doctoral diss., 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.I.29662.
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abstract: Environmental Justice Witnessing in the Modernist Poetry of Lola Ridge, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Elizabeth Bishop analyzes the poetic forms used by four modernist American women poets to trace depictions of social oppression that are tied to specific landscapes. My focus is on what I term "environmental justice witnessing," which I define as accounts that testify to experiences of injustices that affect humans and the environments they inhabit. Integrating theories of witnessing, which to date have focused exclusively on humans, with environmental justice criticism, I fashion a lens that highlights the interconnectedness of social and environmental problems. In this way, I theorize the study of texts of witness and how they document the decay, disease, and exploitation of urban and rural landscapes in the twentieth century. In this dissertation, I focus on Lola Ridge's "The Ghetto" (1918), Muriel Rukeyser's "The Book of the Dead" (1938), Gwendolyn Brooks' "In the Mecca" (1968), and poems about Brazil from Elizabeth Bishop's Questions of Travel (1965) and New Poems (1979). I argue that these women poets depict environmental injustices as an inherent facet of social injustice and do so by poetically connecting human bodies to environmental bodies through sound, diction, figurative language, and imagery.
In Environmental Justice Witnessing, I expand arguments made by environmental scholars about the exchange of environmental elements among humans, animals, and landscapes to include the way poets reflect this transfer poetically. The poetry of Ridge, Rukeyser, Brooks, and Bishop allows me to investigate the ways the categories of race, gender, and class, typically thought of as human qualities, are integrally tied to the geographic, national, and cultural bounds in which those categories are formulated. This argument has clear implications on the study of poetry and its environmental contexts as it invites discussions of the transnational conceptions of global citizenship, examinations of the relationships among communities, the environment, and overarching power structures, and arguments surrounding the ways that poetry as art can bring about long-term social and environmental awareness.Dissertation/Thesis
Doctoral Dissertation English 2015
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Martin, Thomas Henry. "Daphne in the twentieth century: the grotesque in modern poetry." Thesis, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2736.
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This dissertation seeks to expose the importance of the grotesque in the poetry and writings of Trans-Atlantic poets of the early twentieth century, particularly Ezra Pound, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore and T.S. Eliot. Prior scholarship on the poets minimizes the effect of the grotesque in favor of the more objective elements found in such movements as Imagism. This text argues that these poets re-established the grotesque in their writing after World War I mainly through Hellenic myths, especially myths concerning the motif of the tree. The myths of Daphne and Apollo, Baucis and Philemon, and others use the tree motif as an example of complete metamorphosis into a new identity. This is an example of what Mikhail Bakhtin entitles grotesque realism, a type of grotesque not acknowledged in art since the French Revolution. Since the revolution, the grotesque involved an image trapped between two established forms of identity, or what Bakhtin refers to as the Romantic grotesque. This grotesque traps the image in stasis and does not provide a dynamic change of identity in the same way as grotesque realism. Therefore, these poets introduce the subversive act of change of identity in Western literature that had been absent for the most part for nearly a century. The modern poets pick up the use of the complete metamorphosis found in Hellenic myth in order to identify with a constantly changing urban environment that alienated its inhabitants. The modern city is a form of the grotesque in that it has transformed its environment from a natural state to a manmade state that is constantly in a state of transformation, itself. The modern poets use Hellenic myths and the tree motif to create an identity for themselves that would be as dynamic in transformation as the environment they inhabited.
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Robinson, Vanessa Jane. "Reflecting the Other: The Thing Poetry of Marianne Moore and Francis Ponge." Thesis, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1807/36296.
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Across continents and independently of one another, Marianne Moore (1887-1972) and Francis Ponge (1899-1988) both made names for themselves in the twentieth century as poets who gave voice to things. Their entire oeuvres are dominated by poems that attempt to reconstruct an external thing (inanimate object, plant or animal being) through language, while emphasizing the necessary distance that exists between the writing self and the written other. Furthermore, their thing poetry establishes an “essential otherness” to the subject of representation that (ideally) rejects an objectification of that subject, thereby rendering the “thing” a subject-thing with its own being-for-itself.
This dissertation argues that the thing poetry of Marianne Moore and Francis Ponge successfully challenged the hierarchy between subject and object in representation by bringing the poet’s self into a dialogue with the encountered thing. The relationship between the writing self and the written other is akin to what Maurice Merleau-Ponty refers to in Le visible et l’invisible when he describes the act of perceiving what is visible as necessitating one’s own visibility to another. The other becomes a mirror of oneself and vice versa, Merleau-Ponty explains, to the extent that together they compose a single image. The type of reflection involving self and others that Moore and Ponge employ in their thing poetry invokes the characteristically modern symbol of the crystal with its kaleidoscopic reflective properties. Self and other are distinct yet indissolubly bound, and rather than a hierarchy between subject and object there are only subjects who exist for-themselves and for-each other, reflecting the kind of reciprocal Pour soi that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology envisioned.
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Wheeler, Belinda. "AT THE CENTER OF AMERICAN MODERNISM: LOLA RIDGE’S POLITICS, POETICS, AND PUBLISHING." Thesis, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/1805/1683.
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Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)Although many of Lola Ridge's poems champion the causes of minorities and the disenfranchised, it is too easy to state that politics were the sole reason for her neglect. A simple look at well-known female poets who often wrote about social or political issues during Ridge's lifetime, such as Edna St. Vincent Millay and Muriel Rukeyser, weakens such a claim. Furthermore, Ridge's five books of poetry illustrate that many of her poems focused on themes beyond the political or social. The decisions by critics to focus on selections of Ridge's poems that do not display her ability to employ multiple aesthetics in her poetry have caused them to present her work one-dimensionally. Likewise, politically motivated critics often overlook aesthetic experiments that poets like Ridge employ in their poetry. Few poets during Ridge's time made use of such drastically varied styles, and because her work resists easy categorization (as either traditional or avant-garde), her poetry has largely gone unnoticed by modern scholars. Chapter two of my thesis focuses on a selection Ridge's social and political poems and highlights how Ridge's social poetry coupled with the multiple aesthetics she employed has played a part in her critical neglect. My findings will open up the discussion of Ridge's poetry and situate her work both politically and aesthetically, something no critic has yet attempted. Chapter three examines Ridge’s role as editor of Modern School, Others and Broom. Ridge's work for these magazines, particularly Others and Broom, places her at the center of American modernism. My examination of Ridge's social poetry and her role as editor for two leading literary magazines, in conjunction with her use of multiple aesthetics, will build a strong case for why her work deserves to be recovered.
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Barclay, Adèle Véronique. "Cinematic projections in the poetry of H.D., Marianne Moore, and Adrienne Rich." Thesis, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1828/7575.
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This dissertation examines the influence of film on the poetry of H.D., Marianne Moore, and Adrienne Rich. It builds on scholarship by Susan McCabe (2005), Lawrence Goldstein (1994) and others, who have traced the way twentieth-century American poets reacted formally to film culture in their writing. My project responds to the call of the editors of the volume of Close Up 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism for critics to interrogate how authors harnessed the aesthetic and political possibilities opened up by cinema. This study draws from theories of feminist film phenomenology by Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks to analyze the aims and arguments of the texts.
The literary works studied include: H.D.’s Sea Garden, “Projector” series, Trilogy, Helen in Egypt, and film essays; Marianne Moore’s animal poems from the 1930s and early 1940s and film essays; and Adrienne Rich’s The Will to Change. This dissertation argues that the poets drew from film to renovate their poetic vision and forms and ply at questions of power, visuality, and bodies. The poems articulate an awareness of the filmic gaze and how it constructs feminine or animal others. Through careful analysis of the poems, this dissertation locates each poet’s particular rapport with film and how it influenced her literary style and prompted her to challenge dominant patriarchal scripts.
This dissertation makes several original contributions to twentieth-century Anglo-American poetry scholarship. It sets these three authors alongside one another to reveal how their engagements with film inspired their poetics and politics at various points throughout the twentieth century. The conclusions herein determine how the poets turned to film to construct their poetic projects. The dissertation offers new readings of the work of H.D., Moore and Rich as queer women poets invested in film culture.Graduate
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Kotze, Haidee. "Beat poetry and the twentieth century, Allen Ginsberg / Haidee Kotze." Thesis, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/10394/16307.
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This dissertation investigates Allen Ginsberg's Beat poetry within the framework of twentieth-century literary developments, from modernism to postmodernism. It is argued that Beat writing is founded on a rejection of the detached, intellectual and formal nature of the high modernism which came to be institutionalised in the American literary practice of the 1950s. Beat poetry rejects this tradition in favour of an eclectic assemblage of ideas which may, either through direct influence or through parallel development, be linked to certain avant-garde modernist movements. All of these movements share assumptions which support and echo the personal and spiritual vision of Beat aesthetics, as well as its formal experimentation. This eclectic assemblage also involves the assimilation of the ideas of modernist movements often held to be in conflict, embodying opposing strains of modernism. This dynamic is illustrated by analysing the influence of two such opposing modernist influences on Ginsberg's Beat poetry, namely imagism and surrealism. Finally, it is argued that this double gesture of a rejection of the institutionalised form of high modernism and a simultaneous re-assessment of the avant-garde constitutes a crucial step in the development towards postmodernism. Together with the surfacing of postmodernist characteristics in Ginsberg's Beat poetry, this forms the basis for
the conclusion that Ginsberg's Beat poetry may be regarded as playing a transitional and initiating role in the literary evolution from modernism to postmodernism.Thesis (MA)--PU for CHE, 1999.
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Guendel, Karen E. "The organic metaphor of the digesting mind from English romanticism to American modernism: a cognitivist approach." Thesis, 2015. https://hdl.handle.net/2144/14020.
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Recent scholarship demonstrates that the metaphor of taste, which represents aesthetic discernment as gustatory sensation, foregrounds ideologically laden questions of individual and cultural identity across a wide swath of literary history. But critics have yet to discover that taste is but one component of a much broader network of metaphors that figure the mind as a human body that eats and digests the world of objects and ideas. Using two approaches to metaphor from cognitive science, Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Fauconnier and Turner’s theory of "conceptual blending," I relate metaphors like reading-is-eating, ideas-are-food, and contemplation-is-digestion within a metaphor system that I call "the digesting mind." Applying this insight to organic aesthetics, I argue that poets expand organicism's metaphorical basis beyond the familiar poem-as-plant by introducing a mind that consumes plantlike poems. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Emerson, Whitman, and William Carlos Williams link writers and readers in an ideational economy figured as nutritional exchange. As each poet negotiates questions of creativity and literary influence, his biological, philosophical, political, and aesthetic beliefs converge in metaphors of the digesting mind.
After introducing my approach in chapter one, I examine the digesting mind's importance in the evolution of organic aesthetics from English romanticism to American modernism. In chapter two, the digesting mind destabilizes Coleridge's influential distinction between mechanism and organicism by revealing, in Biographia Literaria, his anxiety that a diet of mechanistic literature will reduce the organic mind to a machine. Chapter three reads Wordsworth's Prelude in similar terms, as an allegory representing mental development as nutritional growth, in which the imagination requires an organic diet of poetry and nature. In chapter four, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass Americanizes the digesting mind with an Emersonian aesthetic that locates power in the poet’s present transformation of the literary past into future mental nourishment. In chapter five, Williams adapts Emerson's digesting mind with a pragmatic aesthetics of experience. By representing his Objectivist poems as fruit, as in "This is Just to Say," Williams relocates the organic ideals of vitality and unity from the poem, as aesthetic object, to the audience's felt experience of reading-as-eating.2017-11-04T00:00:00Z
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"Traduttori Traditori: The Tasks of the Creative “Traitor” and the Problematic of Translation (Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, José Martí, and Octavio Paz)." Doctoral diss., 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.I.38553.
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abstract: Every act of communication, and therefore, reading, are in themselves acts of translation and interpretation, as the reader creates a mental representation or reconstruction of the text, extrapolating meaning from it. Interlinguistic translation adds another dimension to these hermeneutic processes, and in the movement through space and time, constant re-interpretation, new translations, and, often, modern theories and perspectives, can interfere with or bring clarity to the meaning of the original text, as well as add to the myth-creation of the writers themselves.
This study centers on some of the great literary figures in poetic and essayistic production in the world of Spanish-speaking letters: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, José Martí, and Octavio Paz. These figures represent not only important literary movements going from the baroque to modernismo, to the vanguardia and to the creation of the self-conscious “modern” poet, but also are among the most well known Spanish-language writers in the English-speaking world. They are all self-aware creators, who, in distinct ways, join poetry, critical essays and theory that are at once an extension of and revolve around their personal poetics, projected toward the currents of their respective epochs.
Finding problematic moments in translation theory and practice, and studying them in the context of the analysis of these great literary figures, at the same time contributes to a new understanding of translation theory itself. These ‘case studies’ expose certain key moments of existing translations, moments that later contribute to critical and interpretive dialogue in a type of hermeneutic spiral of influence. They also show the importance of translation as a contribution to cultural changes and literary movements. This ultimately aids in the understanding of the important points of contact between the many worlds occupied by these great writers and the ways in which they, and in turn, their translators, recreate the contexts in which they were produced.Dissertation/Thesis
Doctoral Dissertation Spanish 2016
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Strachotová, Alžběta. ""Má duše moři podobá se". Přírodní motivy v díle Alfonsiny Storni." Master's thesis, 2017. http://www.nusl.cz/ntk/nusl-267911.
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(in English): The diploma's thesis deals with the natural theme in the work of Argentine poet Alfonsina Storni. The first part briefly outlines her biography. Following theoretical chapter presents several literary movements of which the writer is considered to be part of: modernism, postmodernism and avant-garde. Among others the work refers to the distinctive position of the author in the Hispano-american poetry. The main part consists of the analyses of several poems of Alfonsina Storni, chosen from her work according to the selected topics. Primarily, the element of the sea, the earth and the sky are being analyzed, after that the elements of fauna and flora are interpreted. The analyses are oriented not only on the content and meaning of the poems but also on the formal part in which the shift of author's style is noticeable. The final part of the thesis briefly introduces other topics which are related with the author's writing. The whole work is based primarily on the author's works, followed by theoretical studies related to the era and also on two biographies and several interpretations of the particular works. Since there has not been yet published any translation of Alfonsina's Storni work, an attachment of this thesis consists of translations of several selected poems.