School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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Item(Re)defining recovery: exploring poetry as a therapeutic tool in recovery from severe mood episodes and associated suicide attempts in bipolar disorder( 2020)The critical component of this thesis explores the value of poetry as a therapeutic tool in recovery from severe mood episodes and associated suicide attempts in individuals diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Through literary analysis of Shira Erlichman’s Odes to Lithium and Jeanann Verlee’s Said the Manic to the Muse, I suggest that poetry allows a therapeutic space for dynamic reclamation of subjective narrative experiences of bipolar disorder from the medical discourse. Poetic devices such as personification and juxtaposition support the decentralisation of narrative in the subjective dialectic, thus creating scope for the productive tolerance of polarities, fragmentation and disorder. In doing so, poetry can facilitate emotional healing whilst eschewing redemptive narrative arcs. This provides valuable alternate readings and renderings of ‘recovery’ as part of an ongoing management of chronic mental illness which prioritises the experiential perspective, and thereby posits poetic process as a dynamic therapeutic tool in bipolar and attempted suicide contexts. The creative component of this thesis is a collection of poetry exploring my own recovery.
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ItemThe Forest, the Desert and the Road: Chronotopes of American Spaces in Twentieth-century Long-form Poetry; and a Creative Work, 'Hotel America'( 2020)Part One (60%): The Forest, the Desert and the Road: Chronotopes of American Spaces in Twentieth-century Long-form Poetry In this thesis I address the following questions: what is an ‘American space’? How is this space represented in, produced and/or contested by literary texts? Using the Bakhtinian theory of chronotopes, I undertake an analysis of the ways in which three twentieth-century long-form poems—Susan Howe’s ‘Articulation of Sound Forms in Time’, Michael Ondaatje’s 'The Collected Works of Billy the Kid' and Muriel Rukeyser’s 'The Book of the Dead'—represent, produce and contest specific American spaces (‘America’ defined as the contiguous United States). The key chronotopes identified for this study are: the forest, the desert and the road. I argue that these chronotopes, each corresponding to a critical place and time in American history, are employed by Howe, Ondaatje and Rukeyser, to unsettle national mythologies and narratives of settlement, in particular the ‘frontier thesis’ advanced by influential historian Frederick Jackson Turner. My thesis, which reads the three primary texts alongside broader cultural and historical contexts, is situated at the intersection between literary studies, American studies, history and cultural geography. Part Two (40%): ‘Hotel America’ In 'The American Scene', Henry James writes: ‘one is verily tempted to ask if the hotel-spirit may not just be the American spirit most seeking and most finding itself’. In the creative component of this thesis, I present a collection of poetic narrative sequences, titled ‘Hotel America’, which centres on the chronotope of the hotel in American history and culture. Each sequence is set within a real American hotel, from geographically and historically diverse locations and times. In this creative work, I extend upon my analyses of the chronotopes in the critical component of this thesis to explore the ways in which the chronotope of the hotel has contributed, and continues to contribute, to the composition of American spaces.
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ItemThree books: voice, literature, and mind( 2019)THREE BOOKS: Voice, Literature, and Mind (2013–2018) The Absent Therapist / The Inevitable Gift Shop / Murmur The Absent Therapist is a kaleidophone of voices – internal monologues, meditations, expostulations – that stir, argue, wander and pronounce. They may be thought of as sketches of the mind in flight – a vocal fugue that both suggests longer stories (how much more remains to be said) and bears glancing witness to the irretrievable or unknowable (how much has been lost). A companion “memoir by other means”, The Inevitable Gift Shop examines provisionality, detachment and obliquity in literary criticism and the composition of the self. It draws on philosophical and artistic models of brevity (on Auden’s notational essays and Shakespeare’s sonnets, for example) to renew an engagement with sensibility – the “faculty for feeling” – and with problems of voice, mind, belief and consistency as they arise in writing. A third, closely-related section, Murmur, is a discursive novel. It draws on aspects of the later life and work of the logician and computer science pioneer Alan Turing, sentenced to a regime of organotherapy (chemical castration) in 1952 for Gross Indecency with another man. Turing told his Jungian analyst that he’d been dreaming vividly throughout the organotherapy, and the novel presents these dreams as versified hallucinations, framed by letters to the woman (Joan Clarke) he nearly married during the Second World War. Turing and his avatars appears as Alec Pryor. His fiancée becomes June Wilson. In correspondence, Pryor and June use their experience as cryptanalysts to investigate the possibilities of AI: the stumbling blocks are point-of-view, consciousness, and the reality of pain. Murmur constitutes an extension of philosophical material explored in The Inevitable Gift Shop.
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ItemLyric Eye: the poetics of twentieth-century surveillance( 2018)Lyric Eye: The Poetics of Twentieth-Century Surveillance presents the first detailed study of the relationship between lyric poetry and twentieth-century American surveillance culture. It examines the work of modern American poets who responded to the knowledge that they and other writers were being closely monitored by United States surveillance agencies from the 1920s to the 1960s. Combining close textual analysis and archival study with a range of critical theory, Lyric Eye argues that so pervasive was the spectre of surveillance in twentieth-century America that even poets who were not directly surveilled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation made it one of their poetic themes. By analysing twentieth-century American lyric poetry and its various ideas about the self across a forty-year period, Lyric Eye also establishes a new mode of interdisciplinary research, whose aim is to demonstrate the extent to which poetry and the discourses of surveillance employ similar styles of information gathering, such as observation, overhearing, imitation, abstraction, repurposing of language, keywords, subversion, fragmentation and symbolism. One of the central arguments of Lyric Eye is that the impositions placed upon individual autonomy by an American surveillance state were most incisively explored in lyric poetry of the period because of its ability to negotiate between the public and private spheres and to be both aesthetic and political at the same time. Thus, contrary to many prior literary histories of the lyric, the new theorisation of lyric poetry argued for in this study positions it as a complex public discourse that uses the very structures of politics, culture and technology to bring about its commentary. The first half of the thesis explores the technical, political and conceptual overlaps that lyric poetry and surveillance share, as well as the reasons behind and consequences of the FBI’s surveillance of modern American poets. The second half of the thesis develops close readings of lyric poems and moments of twentieth-century American culture and politics, organised around the concepts of nationalism, expatriation, modernism, domesticity, overhearing and confession. Key poets examined include Ezra Pound, W.H. Auden, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Claude McKay, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell.