School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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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.
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ItemThe posthumanism of William Carlos Williams( 2016)There is a torn fragment of a black and white photograph in the Beinecke rare book room at Yale University, showing American poet William Carlos Williams wearing a beret and tie (see figure 1). A tear cuts off the right two thirds of the original image, but Williams himself has been cut in half by the framing of the shot itself. What remains of the image of the poet has, in turn, been beset by time and mishandling; a white crease bisects Williams’s face a second time. Yet of all the images that exist of Williams, it is this unusual photograph that, more than any other, sums up Williams’s most significant, and most significantly unrecognised, achievements as a poet. Despite his reputation as a poet of clarity, of economic and discrete images of wheelbarrows, chickens and plums, it becomes clear upon closer reading that Williams’s poetics actively resisted notions of unity, clarity and stability of forms—even at the level of his own subjectivity. Rather, Williams’s poetics is predicated on the assumption that all objects, all words, and all human subjects are, like the man in the beret in the photograph, unstable and fragile components of the continuum of the material world. So much so that Williams’s poetics preempts many of the interrogations of the nature of language and human subjectivity that would later constitute the critical movements of posthumanism. Based on this premise, I argue that the critical lens of posthumanism provides an unprecedented and productive means of answering some of the enduring questions surrounding Williams’s poetry. The central challenge that Williams’s poetics has always posed is how to reconcile the tension between Williams’s humanistic ethos and the profound materialism of his work. In other words, how can we speak of a poet who pushes human consciousness to the periphery of his poems in favour of material reality, who destablises distinctions between the human mind and the natural, mechanical and bodily worlds, who reveals, by virtue of his experience as a physician, humankind to be fragile, temporal, mortal compositions of flesh, blood and bones—but whose poetry and prose also embody a deep-seated humanistic ethos, premised on ideals of democracy, charity and empathy? I argue that, from the perspective of posthumanism, the tension between materialism and humanistic values is not a tension at all; rather, the two are intertwined and even at times continuous. Williams’s poetry provides an early example of a particular contemporary notion of posthumanism, championed by Julie Clarke, N. Katherine Hayles and Cary Wolfe, in which the contingency and instability of language, human subjectivity and the borders between self and other serve as a valuable means of destabilising oppressive notions of authority and unity. Through an analysis of Williams’s approach to the relationship between the human subject and modern technology, the natural world, politics and medicine, I examine the ways in which Williams challenged, both thematically and at the level of language, humanist assumptions of the authority, autonomy and sovereignty of the human subject: assumptions that were used throughout the twentieth century to justify and perpetuate the subjugation of women and peoples of colour, the exploitation of the natural landscape, and the rise of fascist, nationalist and eugenic ideologies. I will suggest that the theories of writers such as Haraway, Wolfe, Clarke and Hayles offer the chance of reading Williams’s radical materialism and his posthumanist deconstruction of the humanist cogito not as a rejection of the humanity altogether, but as a poetic response to the various ethical, social and political challenges that defined the early twentieth century.
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ItemThe menstrual imaginary and 'The Butcher's Daughter'( 2016)A number of important writers and artists focus on the once taboo subject of menstruation in their work, drawing attention to the topic of women’s bleeding and the female cycle. A menstrual imaginary is a latent poetic source of inspiration in women writers and artists, an imaginary domain outside of language, which is drawn on through symbolism, particularly through references to blood, to eruptions of blood, and women’s cycles, as well as all procreative functions. Whilst, Julia Kristeva theorises menstruation on the side of the abject, my work alternatively seeks to rescue women’s menstruation from the patriarchal abject. Moreover, I draw on the writings of Hélène Cixous who argues for the importance of a voice of ‘milk and blood,’ although it is mostly at a subterranean level that we can find evidence for a menstrual narrative running through her work. I use Cixous as a springboard for exploring the concept of a feminine writing in red ink, in direct contrast to her ‘white ink,’ as well as consider the domain of woman’s ‘volcanic unconscious,’ in relation to the creation of a menstrual imaginary. Furthermore, I read important classical texts such as the stories of Persephone and Demeter, Medusa, Oedipus and the Sphinx, and the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood, against-the-grain for a menstrual imaginary. I also survey a number of poets and writers who explicitly adopt menstrual imagery and blood to depict a menstrual imaginary. Finally, I write my own menstrual imaginary in the form of a poetry manuscript.
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ItemR.S. Thomas: poetic horizons( 2014)This thesis engages with the poetry of R.S. Thomas. Surprisingly enough, although acclaim for Thomas as a major figure on the twentieth century’s literary scene has been growing perceptibly, academic scholarship has not as yet produced a full-scale study devoted specifically to the poetic character of Thomas’s writings. This thesis aims to fill that gap. Instead of mining the poetry for psychological, social, or political insights into Thomas himself, I take the verse itself as the main object of investigation. My concern is with the poetic text as an artefact. The main assumption here is that a literary work conveys its meaning not only via particular words and sentences, governed by the grammar of a given language, but also through additional artistic patterning. Creating a new set of multi-sided relations within the text, this “supercode” leads to semantic enrichment. Accordingly, my goal is to scrutinize a given poem’s artistic organization by analysing its component elements as they come together and function in a whole text. Interpretations of particular poems form the basis for conclusions about Thomas’s poetics more generally. Strategies governing his poetic expression are explored in relation to four types of experience which are prominent in his verse: the experience of faith, of the natural world, of another human being, and of art. In the process, the horizons of Thomas’s poetic style are sketched, encompassing a lyrical verse which is also a verse given over to reflection. In this study, his poetry emerges as personal and based on individual experience; however, that experience is at the same time accorded a more universal dimension. By way of conclusion, the present thesis sets Thomas’s writing within the context of literary tradition, highlighting his connections with Romanticism, seventeenth-century poetry, Modernist verse, and other literary movements. This study highlights the fact that Thomas’s literary models are still poorly understood. Examinations of his poetics are important for a fuller understanding of the poet’s achievement in literary history. In offering the first overview of Thomas’s poetic strategies, this thesis lays the groundwork for such future explorations.
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ItemSubjective renewals: tropes of the archaeological body in the verse novels of Anne Carson and Dorothy Porter & Sonqoqui: a verse novel( 2014)This study offers a feminist reading of the ways in which the verse novels of Anne Carson and Dorothy Porter have embraced new possibilities for linguistic experiment. My hypothesis is that literary experimentation within these writers’ contemporary verse novels produces new ways for thinking through, and beyond, sacrificial models of subjectivity. My principal research question contends that tropes of the archaeological body serve as a common heuristic device by which Porter and Carson construct both narrative and poetic vocalisation in their texts. I further argue that this vocalisation is polyphonic. My research suggests that these polyphonic tropes excavate and critique images of sacrifice in specific ways. Moreover, this study explores the interplay of poetic and fictional innovation evidenced in Porter’s and Carson’s respective verse novels. I propose that this interplay serves to produce dynamic representations of Kristevan 'revolt' or renewed subjectivity. These findings suggest that Porter’s and Carson’s verse novels simultaneously resist, or subvert, the sacrificial models of subjectivity on which Irigaray, for example, argues that liberal capitalist economies are built. I argue that the verse novels of Anne Carson and Dorothy Porter critique such economies as they also critique postmodernist representations of subjectivity. These writers’ literary excavations draw on an archaeological imaginary to question repressive notions of sexual difference, thus also critiquing representations of figurative heroism and sacrifice in recent and historical verse novel developments. Influenced by these writers’ polyphonic and poetic narrative techniques, my creative work, Sonqoqui, experiments with the formal possibilities of the verse novel and also deals directly with themes of sacrifice. Inspired by the archaeological discovery of three naturally preserved five-hundred-year-old Inca child mummies in 1999, this creative work draws on an archaeological imaginary to explore the touch of the past on textual subjectivities in flux and motion. Deploying a poetic, and in some cases, typographic, use of weft and warp, this tri-partite creative work produces embodied poetic polyphonies across a textured narrative space. Sonqoqui thus aims to enhance material configurations of ‘revolt’, exploring and representing historical tropes of gendered embodiment via non-sacrificial modes as a way of eschewing monological discourse.
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ItemPrick'd by charm: the pursuit of myth in Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes( 2014)This thesis asserts that poetry offers the most persuasive and complex medium for exercising what Stephen Jaeger has termed “enchantment.” While Jaeger covers a range of artistic practices within the Western canon, this thesis focuses on the power of the poem as charm (latin carmen: song) and of the poet (first emblematised in Orpheus) as a figure that productively confuses the relationship between life, art and death. Developing Agamben’s concept of the co-incidence of “life and its poeticisation,” I argue that there is a paradigmatic remastering and troubling of poetic vocation in the twentieth century, whereby the lyric becomes a specular techne through which to negotiate the constitution of self and state at a time when the grand narratives of subject, nation, and community are quickly eroding. Its transmission subsequently informs a sharing or correspondence of affect and, often, a creative response that is mythically informed. Successfully deploying mythos and charm in their writing and life, this thesis considers Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes as a significant trefoil in twentieth-century English language poetry. All three had untimely deaths, excited a collective homage, and developed cult followings that reverberate today. The earliest, Frank O’Hara, exercised an erotics of influence that both endears and pricks. His compositional method foregrounds a polyvocality of the lyric subject, courting others to feel they could possess or touch O’Hara the poet. I analyse this corporeal hauntologue through his Collected Poems before turning to how he complicated this in a daemonic doubling with Larry Rivers. I then investigate how it extended to a larger social configuration. Learning from O’Hara’s example but differentiating himself from it, Berrigan fashions an alternative figuration as poet: the uncouth, the erroneous, the cowboy, and prankster. Through reading The Sonnets, I demonstrate how the mythology of “Ted Berrigan” is that of the “cosmophage,” or one who ingests everything, while playfully and sacrificially dispersing distinctions between life and literature. I further analyse how Berrigan’s mythos shapes subsequent poetic practice and sharing of charmed relics. Analysing how Berrigan and O’Hara negotiate self-constitution in terms of a broader constitution of the United States of America, I then investigate how John Forbes takes up the self-mythologising techniques of both from a position of “coming after” but also from being “on the edge” culturally and geographically as an Australian poet. Enervating the figure of the troubadour, Forbes offers an ironic, parodic, but moving alternative in his modelling of poet and citizen.
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ItemAnthropologist of space: the poetry and poetics of Laurie Duggan( 2014)This thesis, which comprises a critical dissertation and creative manuscript, explores the representation of contemporary space in the work of Australian poet Laurie Duggan. Through comparative readings of Duggan’s poetry and that of other poets with whom he shares thematic preoccupations and aesthetic concerns, the thesis provides a range of critical approaches for illuminating the representational strategies in Duggan’s work. The thesis argues, with reference to theoretical perspectives including those of Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre and Fredric Jameson, that Duggan’s poetry constructs a deceptively complex spatial dynamic, a poetic strategy grounded in specific localities, while recognising that the local, as space, is open to social and cultural associations that extend beyond the static nature of place. Situating Duggan’s work within a modernist tradition of process-based aesthetics, the thesis argues that Duggan’s poetry involves a process of spatial mapping, a strategy that constructs experiential, yet necessarily provisional, maps of contemporary space that move fluidly from the local to the global. The creative component of the thesis takes the form of a poetry manuscript, the poems responding to—though not attempting to explicate—the aesthetic concerns explored in relation to Duggan’s poetry and poetics. Although the poetry presented here displays shared influences and representational strategies with Duggan and the other poets considered in this study, the manuscript is not imitative, or derivative but instead deliberately charts its own conception of contemporary space. In this respect, the two components of the thesis complement one another, offering on the one hand a critical investigation of Duggan’s approach to the representation of space, while at the same time creatively exploring the possibilities of what might constitute a spatial poetics.
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ItemPoets, belief and calamitous times( 2006-06)My research in this thesis covers the religious discourse of six contemporary poets who write belief from a position of calamity. Yehuda Amichai writes from the constant wars fought since the founding of the state of Israel; Anne Sexton from psychiatric illness; Seamus Heaney from the sectarian violence of Ireland; Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs from the twentieth century’s greatest calamity, the Holocaust; and Yves Bonnefoy, from the language theories of post-modernism, which are calamitous for a poet. (For complete abstract open document)