Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'William Stevens'

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.

Thesis advisor: Paul Mariani
The 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

Si c’est la nouvelle américaine minimaliste qui a le plus souvent retenu l’attention, cette thèse s’intéresse à travers les nouvelles de William Gass, Steven Millhauser et David Foster Wallace à une écriture de l’expansion et de l’excès, qui fait pourtant de la réticence – à révéler et à conclure – sa pierre angulaire. Alors que la critique a souvent placé la nouvelle sous le signe de la restriction, comme un objet à l’économie poétique fondamentalement brève, notre corpus se départit nettement de cette vision. Les méandres de la voix, qui disent les introspections tortueuses du sujet au gré de boucles réflexives, les jeux de déclinaisons métaphoriques ainsi que la grammaire du détail, véritable tentative de maîtrise du monde par son atomisation, inscrivent ainsi l’esthétique de ces auteurs aux antipodes de l’écriture blanche. Se tisse alors une trame du ressassement, qui aspire à l’infini textuel et déjoue véritablement le telos. Cette renégociation singulière de la brièveté nourrit par ailleurs un régime philosophique de l’aporie, qui fait de la lecture une véritable expérience heuristique de l’indéterminé. C’est ainsi que les auteurs étudiés jouent constamment de la tendance du texte court à se dérober, tout en se refusant à une esthétique de la concision : l’examen de ce paradoxe apparent permettra dès lors de recontextualiser la notion de brièveté dans le champ de la nouvelle, tout en éclairant l’esthétique de ces trois auteurs. Ce faisant, cette thèse ambitionne de montrer comment l’assouplissement de la brièveté à l’œuvre informe une certaine épistémologie littéraire contemporaine dans les lettres américaines
While the minimalist short story has often been explored by contemporary criticism, this study wishes to focus on the resolutely more expansive and excessive style to be found in the shorter works of William Gass, Steven Millhauser and David Foster Wallace. Nonetheless, their stories guide the reader through an experience of reticence as they withhold the promise of revelation or resolution. Given that theoretical approaches to the short story are wont to emphasize its supposedly inherent concision, the stories of these three writers seem to deliberately transgress this preconception by consistently pushing their structural and metaphorical boundaries. Indeed, the texture of their narrative voices, depicting the tortuous introspections of characters prone to highly reflexive discourses, the constant weaving of poetic leitmotive as well as an omnipresent thirst for detail shape a prose which asserts itself as a firm counterpoint to minimalism. This constant renegotiation of what brevity means also fuels the philosophical tenets of their prose, often characterized by various aporetic patterns and considerations which confront the reader with a heuristic approach to indeterminacy. Gass, Millhauser and Wallace therefore constantly play with the implications of brevity in their stories, which are neither short nor concise, thereby contributing to the definition of a new literary epistemology in the context of contemporary American literature

Thesis (D.M.A.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999.
Vita. Discography: leaf 129. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 127-128). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

NBC?s situation comedy The Office reflects on the nature of workplace management in the 21st century. The show critiques a corporation that values conformity over individuality, while implying that promoting ?creative? employees to upper management is not credible alternative. The Office does this by focusing on Michael Scott (played by Steve Carell), a character whose unique creative working style makes him a great salesman but a poor manager. Michael?s character stands in contrast to Ryan Howard (played by B.J. Novak), who differs from Michael both in his approach to business and his success at it. The Office implies that creativity is a valuable asset for non-managerial workers, but creative management can be problematic. As workplaces continue to evolve, it is imperative to explore how creativity and bureaucracy co-exist. It may be unrealistic to expect creativity to saturate all aspects of professional life, but striking a balance between creativity and organization might be paramount in assuring job satisfaction and productivity for future generations of employees.

It is a central claim of modern linguistic theory that linguists do not prescribe, but describe language as it is, without pronouncing on correctness or judging one variety better than another. This attempt to exclude evaluation is motivated by a desire to be ' politically correct', which hinders objective analysis of language, and by an ill-advised imitation of the natural sciences, which obstructs the discipline's progress towards becoming a science in its own right. It involves linguists, as users of a valued variety, in self-deception and disingenuousness, distances them from the concerns of the ordinary language user, and betrays a failure to understand the involvement of social values in language, the nature of language itself, and the limits of linguistic science. On a wider scale, linguistics reflects society's devaluing and mechanisation of language. Despite growing concern expressed in the literature, and the incoherence that becomes apparent when linguists attempt to address social problems using a theory that regards language as an autonomous object, newcomers to the discipline continue to be taught that anti-prescriptivism is the natural corollary of a scientific approach to language. This thesis suggests that the way out of these difficulties is to rethink the meaning of ' theory' in linguistics. If we take the reflexivity of language seriously, building on M.A.K. Halliday's notion of 'linguistics as metaphor', we are reminded that a linguistic theory is made of language. Metalanguage must use the experiential and interpersonal meaning-making resources of everyday language. It follows that a linguistic theory cannot escape being evaluative, because evaluation is an inherent part of interpersonal meaning. If we fail to notice our own metalinguistic evaluation, this is because language disguises its evaluative meanings, or perhaps we are just not used to thinking of them as part of the grammar. To achieve clarity about the involvement of value in language, we need to turn our metalanguage back on itself - 'using the grammar to think with about the grammar' . Some ways of doing this are demonstrated here, turning the resources of systemic functional linguistics on linguists' own language. The circularity of this process should be seen not as a drawback but as a salutary reminder that linguistics is an interpretive rather than a discovery process. This knowledge should help us revalue language and make a place for evaluation in linguistic theory, paving the way for a socially responsible and productive linguistics.

Le contexte artistique californien de la fin des années 60 et du début des années 70 constitue un terrain favorable aux investigations d'une nouvelle génération d'artistes, même s'il ne bénéficie pas de réels soutiens logistiques marchands ou institutionnels. L'art conceptuel promu à la même époque par Seth Siegelaub à New York prépare une alternative à l'art minimal. Ce phénomène a déjà son équivalent en Europe. La dématérialisation de l'oeuvre d'art aura des conséquences décisives en Californie, où elle donnera naissance à un art conceptuel dénué de tout dogmatisme marqué par l'influence de fortes personnalités comme Edward Ruscha et John Baldessari. Des artistes originaires de la côté est comme Douglas Huebler, William Wegman, Robert Cumming, du Midwest comme Ruppersberg trouveront de l'autre côté des États-Unis des conditions de travail plus stimulantes. Des Européens comme Bas Jan Ader ou son complice Ger van Elk suivront le même chemin. Leurs oeuvres ne trouveront pas immédiatement sur place une grande visibilité. Mais après une éclipse d'une quinzaine d'années, voici qu'une nouvelle génération d'artistes européens (citons des artistes comme Claude Closky, en France, ou Jonathan Monk, en Angleterre) se penche sur ces grand frères et les place au premier rang de leurs références. À partir d'exemples sélectionnés d'artistes et d'un corpus de textes constitué depuis le début des années 90, que j'ai écrits pour différents catalogues d'expositions, revues, éditeurs, l'objet de cette thèse est de présenter ce dialogue entre les générations et de mettre en évidence certaines convergences malgré la dissemblance des contextes institutionnels et sociétaux.

When the meritless scrabble for the bauble of deity, they ironically set their human lives at the “pin’s fee” to which Shakespeare’s Hamlet refers. This thesis focuses on these undeserving individuals in premillennial and postmillennial fiction, who seek immortality at the expense of both their humanities, and their natural mortalities. I will analyse an array of popular modern characters, paying particular attention to the precursors of immortal personages. I will inaugurate these analyses with an examination of fan favourite series

The discursive and critical positions of the ‘classic’ nineteenth-century novel, particularly the woman’s novel, in the field of adaptation studies have been dominated by long-standing concerns about textual fidelity and the generic processes of the text-screen transfer. The sociocultural patterns of adaptation criticism have also been largely ensconced in representations of literary women on screen. Taking a decisive twist from tradition, this thesis traces the evolution of representations of masculinity in the malleable characters of Rochester and Heathcliff in film and television adaptations of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights between 1939 and 2009. Concepts of masculinity have been a neglected area of enquiry in studies of the ‘classic’ novel on screen. Adaptations of the Brontës’ novels, as well as the adapted novels of other ‘classic’ women authors such as Jane Austen, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, increasingly foreground male character in traditionally female-oriented narratives or narratives whose primary protagonist is female. This thesis brings together industrial histories, textual frames and sociocultural influences that form the wider contexts of the adaptations to demonstrate how male characterisation and different representations of masculinity are reformulated and foregrounded through three different adaptive histories of the narratives of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Through the contours of the film and television industries, the application of text and context analysis, and wider sociocultural considerations of each period an understanding of how Rochester and Heathcliff have been transmuted and centralised within the adaptive history of the Brontë novel.

This thesis addresses critical conceptions of Scottish literary development in the twentieth-century which inscribe realism as both the authenticating tradition and necessary telos of modern Scottish writing. To this end I identify and explore a Scottish ‘counter-tradition’ of modern uncanny fiction. Drawing critical attention to techniques of modal disruption in the works of a number of post-1970s Scottish writers gives cause to reconsider that realist teleology while positing a range of other continuities and tensions across modern Scottish literary history. The thesis initially defines the critical context for the project, considering how realism has come to be regarded as a medium of national literary representation. I go on to explore techniques of modal disruption and uncanny in texts by five Scottish writers, contesting ways in which habitual recourse to the realist tradition has obscured important aspects of their work. Chapter One investigates Ali Smith’s reimagining of ‘the uncanny guest’. While this trope has been employed by earlier Scottish writers, Smith redesigns it as part of a wider interrogation of the hyperreal twenty-first-century. Chapter Two considers two texts by James Robertson, each of which, I argue, invokes uncanny techniques familiar to readers of James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson in a way intended specifically to suggest concepts of national continuity and literary inheritance. Chapter Three argues that James Kelman’s political stance necessitates modal disruption as a means of relating intimate individual experience. Re-envisaging Kelman as a writer of the uncanny makes his central assimilation into the teleology of Scottish realism untenable, complicating the way his work has been positioned in the Scottish canon. Chapter Four analyses A.L. Kennedy’s So I Am Glad, delineating a similarity in the processes of repetition which result in both uncanny effects and the phenomenon of tradition, leading to Kennedy’s identification of an uncanny dimension in the concept of national tradition itself. Chapter Five considers the work of Alan Warner, in which the uncanny appears as an unsettling sense of significance embedded within the banal everyday, reflecting an existentialism which reaches beyond the national. In this way, I argue that habitual recourse to an inscribed realist tradition tends to obscure the range, complexity and instability of the realist techniques employed by the writers at issue, demonstrating how national continuities can be productively accommodated within wider, pluralistic analytical approaches.

碩士
國立臺灣大學
外國語文學研究所
101
This thesis attempts to explore the ontological potential and epistemological status of metaphor by probing into several theories of metaphor and reading some poems of John Donne, William Wordsworth, and Wallace Stevens. The thesis is mainly based on I. A. Richards’ and Max Black’s interaction theory of metaphor, which asserts that metaphor is the unifying interaction between tenor and vehicle, and on Paul Ricoeur’s semantic theory that integrates Kant’s schematic theory in order to illustrate metaphor’s world-constructing ability. The thesis discusses three generic exceptions to the interaction theory—the distanciation between tenor and vehicle in Donne, the non-impertinent metaphors and the reversibility between tenor and vehicle in Wordsworth—as a way to engage with the theory. On the other hand, the discussions on Stevens mainly serve the interaction theory, trying to provide an effective account and examples for the concept of interaction. The thesis examines in the chapter on Donne the distanciation between tenor and vehicle, the relation between metaphor and absence, and the phenomenon of “cumulative metaphor” through which a series of metaphors becomes a “real” presence. On the other hand, the chapter on Wordsworth discusses the union between tenor and vehicle into one single word, the relation between metaphor and symbol, the metaphor’s resistance to Aufhebung, and the metaphor’s status as a border being. The chapter on Stevens surveys his binary motive for metaphor—to undo outworn metaphors for a world uncreated and to weave a new supreme fiction with fresh metaphors. The chapter also examines the connection between Stevens’ notion of decreation, metonymy, and an anti-metaphor tendency in Stevens, as well as the transition from the metonymic world of decreation to the metaphorical world of revelation in his poetry.

博士
國立臺灣大學
外國語文學研究所
103
This dissertation aims to provide a theoretical reading of food in modern poetry, particularly in poetic works by Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Li-Young Lee. The distancing-channeling theory applied to the reading of poetry is based mostly on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of intensity and is employed specifically to realize how food objects as poetic devices interpret human experience in modern poetry. Through the aforementioned theory and its application, this dissertation seeks to establish a food poetics. This dissertation is composed of six major sections, with each section forming a chapter, expect for the first section of Review of Key Literatures, which consists of two subsections. The first section begins with the Introduction which leads to the two-part Review of Key Literatures: Food and Poetics. The emphasis of the literature reviews and their length reflects the challenges and complications of founding a new poetics. The first two chapters: “Chapter One: The Given Food against the Constituted Subject” and “Chapter Two: Distancing and Channeling” are the theoretical backbone of this research. While the former asserts an object-oriented critical point of view instead of an anthropocentric one, the latter establishes a system of poetic reading from this point of view supported by this dissertation and the Deleuzean thoughts that influences it. Chapter Three, Four, and Five are the demonstration of how the system of poetic reading facilitates interpretation of disparate and surreal food objects in poetry (with a focus on Stevens), scarce but succinct food objects in poetry (with a focus on Williams), and ethic or exotic food object in poetry (with a focus on Lee). The interpretive system of this research should, as its set purpose, facilitate the understanding of the relations between food and human beings in a world where objects are more powerful than their human recipients.