School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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    (Re)defining recovery: exploring poetry as a therapeutic tool in recovery from severe mood episodes and associated suicide attempts in bipolar disorder
    Lacey, Felicity ( 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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    The Forest, the Desert and the Road: Chronotopes of American Spaces in Twentieth-century Long-form Poetry; and a Creative Work, 'Hotel America'
    Li, Bella ( 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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    Three books: voice, literature, and mind
    Eaves, William Alden ( 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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    Lyric Eye: the poetics of twentieth-century surveillance
    Sumner, Tyne Daile ( 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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    Spectres of Modernism: authorship, reception and intention in Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke’s spectra hoax
    Jakubowicz, Stephen ( 2017)
    This thesis draws from a range of primary materials relating to the Spectric School, a hoax poetry movement concocted in 1916 by poets Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke, to reconcile the movement’s relationship to the backdrop of modernist print culture. Specifically, it argues that Bynner and Ficke exploited a breakdown of discourses surrounding modernist conceptions of authorship, identity, and intention in their construction of the hoax movement. Additionally, this thesis considers the hoax alongside contemporary appraisals of the movement, and argues that the hoaxers’ subversion of what it meant to be an author exposes a growing disjunction during the modernist period between a culture of reviewing and modernist conceptions of authorship. Finally, this thesis considers Bynner and Ficke’s use of a hoax movement as a medium to further their poetic aims and avers that the hoaxers’ retrospective recasting of their motives alongside the development of the hoax complicate current critical valuations of the movement. Through considering Bynner and Ficke’s recasting of poetic intention, I challenge readings of the hoax that interpret it as having had a clear didactic purpose in parodying modernist poetry, and instead argue that the Spectra Hoax serves as an interface of meanings that complicates attempts to inscribe clear notions of authenticity, authorship and intentionality onto it.
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    The posthumanism of William Carlos Williams
    Edwards, Christopher ( 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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    The menstrual imaginary and 'The Butcher's Daughter'
    Dyer, Natalie Rose ( 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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    Water imagery in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh
    McCullough, Meredith ( 2016)
    This thesis analyses water imagery, in particular scenes of drowning, in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856), paying close attention to the influence of Romantic writers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Wordsworth. I analyse the ocean and waterfalls in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796), and the relationship between drowning, flooding and subjectivity in William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1850), comparing them with similar scenes in Aurora Leigh. This thesis asks how EBB’s feminist aim to re-write the previously masculine genre of epic poetry shaped her imaginative depiction of oceans and lakes. Focusing on the pervasive fear of drowning and on poetic descriptions in which bodies appear to dissolve, my thesis explores how the ocean in Aurora Leigh is key to understanding the importance of this poem in the context of its Romantic predecessors.
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    Burrowing on the beach: satire in the poetry of A.D. Hope, John Forbes, and J.S. Harry
    Eales, Simon ( 2014)
    This thesis proposes a new method of reading satire in the work of three white postcolonial Australian poets. Making detailed use of French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, the thesis argues that the satire of A.D. Hope, John Forbes, and J.S. Harry can be read as a dually deconstructive and generative machine. Such a view questions the existent, structural models of satire proposed by theorists in the field, as well as the stylistic designations made regarding each of these poets’ work. The thesis begins with a nominal definition of the genre of satire which is thereafter deployed in the three chapters of close-readings: it is crucial to the method that such a definition must itself be questioned by the poets themselves. Such a method, in its dual movement of proposition and self-critique, performs what this thesis regards as the very process of satire, thereby embodying the kind of reading for which the thesis argues. Chapter One examines the theme of self-sacrifice in A.D. Hope’s work and argues that it constitutes his satirical will to criticism; Chapter Two places the 1988 bicentenary of European settlement as the satiric object of John Forbes’ collection, The Stunned Mullet; and Chapter Three tracks the nomadic, satirical movement of J.S. Harry’s rabbit character, Peter Henry Lepus, and his interactions with the figure and philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The thesis therefore tries to think about the intersection of genre, poetics, and nation. In doing so, it demonstrates a model for interpreting such discourses as ecopoetics and decolonising poetics, and for revisiting texts not commonly associated with these contemporary movements.
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    R.S. Thomas: poetic horizons
    Trapp, Karolina ( 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.