English Dissertations

Third way poets: navigating the streams of modern and postmodern poetic uncertainty

James A. Richie — Mon, 13 May 2013 10:07:03 PDT

This dissertation examines the career arcs of four representative current poets in order to develop a tentative narrative to account for recent and emergent poetic practice. Poets who began publishing between the 1970s and 1990s inherited two powerful aesthetic traditions. On the one hand, they write in the shadow of postmodern poets who find liberation in the embrace of radical linguistic, epistemological/ontological, or subjective uncertainty and exhibit intense skepticism about intellectual closure or claims of privilege for aesthetic production. On the other hand, they also find aesthetic reserves in the work of high modernists who felt they faced similar philosophical...

Creole domesticity: women, commerce, and kinship in early Atlantic writing

Danielle Catherine Skeehan — Fri, 10 May 2013 08:39:31 PDT

This dissertation examines the parallel lives of texts and textiles in the long eighteenth century. Looking at the textile trade alongside early Atlantic printing and paper making practices invites us to consider how these two related mediums were fundamental to the social fabrication of Atlantic subjects and creole societies. While scholars have posited that the circulation of texts and images allowed readers to forge transatlantic communities, in an age of paper shortages, relatively low literacy rates, and fairly limited access to printed texts, far more people had ready access to one of the most basic—and yet most valuable—items of household...

"Severer interventions": William Wordsworth and the play of the line

Arturo Zilleruelo — Mon, 06 May 2013 07:58:47 PDT

This dissertation introduces attention to the materiality of William Wordsworth's verse into a critical discourse that habitually limits itself to considerations of the verse's ideas and ideologies. Adopting the working premise that all poems must be recognized as physical artifacts crafted from the raw materials of letters and lines, I explore the friction that occasionally arises between the semantic content that poetry contains or transmits and the material structures (letters, lines, and punctuation) that provide a vehicle for that content. This exploration considers the possibility that some of the most dramatically affecting moments in Wordsworth's verse derive their aesthetic force...

Testing reality's limits: 'mad' scientists, realism, and the supernatural in late Victorian popular fiction

Jennifer Sopchockchai Bankard — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 10:07:39 PDT

In the late Victorian period, approaching the fin de siècle, popular fiction frequently featured what critics would now call mad scientists. These mad scientist characters served as a vehicle for Victorian authors to explore the epistemological relationship between humans and the material world, often highlighting the shortcomings of the human eye or subjective perception of reality. By tracing the scientific and supernatural discourses surrounding representations of scientists featured in works by H.G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Arthur Conan Doyle, this revisionist literary history demonstrates that Victorian popular fiction and "classic realist" novels share a common interest in...

Victorian voices: gender ideology and Shakespeare's female characters

Mary Balestraci — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 09:51:21 PDT

The Victorians loved Shakespeare and, during this period, the study of Shakespeare became a popular form of education for middle class women, some of whom began writing about the female characters who populated these plays. Ongoing debates about the inherent nature of womanhood and the role of women in society—collectively known as the Woman Question—were also taking place in England at this time. These two areas converge in the writing produced by nineteenth-century female critics who used their criticism of Shakespeare's female characters to express their views about Victorian gender ideology. Through their commentary on Shakespeare's plays, Anna Jameson, Constance...

Research shows: recasting research instruction in Writing-about-Writing approaches to first-year composition

Stephanie Loomis Pappas — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 13:43:42 PST

This dissertation argues that Writing-about-Writing (WAW) scholarship could strengthen its commitment to teaching writing and rhetoric through lenses of composition scholarship by paying more attention to its treatment of secondary research. WAW scholarship has enriched composition's understanding of genre and transfer, and has allowed its practitioners to use disciplinary writing to teach genre awareness. But while such pedagogies depict primary research in nuanced and recursive ways, they at times portray secondary research as a mechanical process of retrieval. Such a depiction threatens to perpetuate the very generic view of writing WAW advocates wish to subvert.

A similar tension was observed...

Ambivalent recognition: mapping intimacies in the novels of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Virginia Woolf

Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 09:31:20 PDT

What we now call "psychological realism" centers upon representations of intimacy as the genre's authors strive toward "narrative realism and the mimesis of consciousness" (Cohn 8). According to Dorrit Cohn, psychological realism spans the years between 1850 and 1950, and its "inward turn" searches out the least accessible aspects of character. Intimate knowledge of characters in fiction make those characters "rounder," more "realistic," though this kind of intimate representation depends upon what Cohn calls "fabrication," what authors imagine unknown inner lives are like (6). The multiplicity of intimate inner lives and intimate relationships represented in novels of psychological realism creates...

The poetics of the incomplete in the works of Thomas Traherne (ca. 1638-1674)

Tanya Zhelezcheva — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 06:34:06 PST

This dissertation attends to the problems of the practice of writing in the early modern period and more particularly in the works of the seventeenth-century poet and prose writer Thomas Traherne (ca. 1638-1674). His works, which were discovered for the first time during the end of the nineteenth century and have been emerging in a series of chance discoveries throughout the twentieth century, are only now being read more fully for the first time. The dissertation, which takes into account the unfinished status of Traherne's manuscripts, focuses on Traherne's practice and method of generative writing in the context of seventeenth-century...

"Objects of Emancipation": The political dreams of modernism

Hanna Musiol — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 09:27:38 PDT

In the first part of the twentieth century three interconnected modernist trends, primitivism, consumerism, and nationalism, imagined the inclusion of new persons in the national polity through their engagement with what I call "objects of emancipation." In such modernist imaginings, "quasi (legal) persons," to use Bruno Latour's idea, could become New Women, New Negroes, or New (and "civilized") Americans through their intimacy with empowering objects such as consumer products, keepsakes, cultural artifacts, commodified natural resources, and even waste. Such person-thing fabrications were central, in my view, to modernist politics and aesthetics, and I argue that literary genres often considered to...

Raising a nation : Anna Letitia Barbauld as artistic and pedagogic mother of the romantic citizen

Jennifer Krusinger Martin — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 13:33:20 PDT

In addition to artistically representing the ideal human, a.k.a. the Romantic citizen, and his development, Anna Barbauld was invested in the actual practice of raising him, devoting much of her life to co-directing the Palgrave School for Boys, a Dissenting academy. Her pupil Lord Denman ultimately drafted the Reform Act of 1832. As Barbauld recapitulates the path of human development through her Lessons for Children, Hymns in Prose for Children, political treatises, and poetry, she traces the process of becoming a poet, a citizen, an ideal human being, a nation, and a global community. Her career of artistic and pedagogical...

William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, and the construction of the Green Atlantic World

Kurt A. R. Moellering — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 11:38:48 PDT

This project presents a historically informed, paired reading of William Wordsworth and Henry David Thoreau as they work within the disciplines available to nineteenth-century writers engaged in the study of the natural world. These various disciplines comprise the many ways nature was figured in popular, artistic, and scientific discourse, and each of these genres of nature writing brought with it particular ways to see, understand, value, and describe the natural world. The guidebook, the cartographical study, aesthetic theories, natural history essays, travel writing, and geological discourse were just some of the ways to write about nature in the nineteenth century...

Junctions : the railroad, consumerism, and deep time in nineteenth-century literature

Laurel Ann Kornhiser — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 11:33:45 PDT

The railroad was both the icon of the Industrial Revolution and one of the most significant transformative forces of the nineteenth century. Despite this, as Herbert Sussman suggests, "With few exceptions, during the Victorian period, the machine appears in the minor works of major poets and the major works of minor poets" (2). The same can be said of prose writers. This study examines four major prose works, two written by American authors and two by British writers, in which the railroad plays more than a minor role: Walden by Henry David Thoreau, Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens, Middlemarch...

"Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say" : political dissent in Grigory Kozintsev's Shakespeare

Tiffany Ann Conroy — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 10:06:05 PDT

This project is a study of Shakespeare in Russia and the Soviet Union that pays special attention to the works of scholar, filmmaker and theater practitioner Grigory Kozintsev. The central purpose of this investigation is to present a narrative of the role of Shakespeare in Russian and Soviet arts and letters from the 18th to 20th centuries, which emphasizes the ways in which artists, translators and critics have used Shakespeare's plays as a means of responding to their cultural and political situations, often in a critical or subversive manner. Kozintsev's theatrical and film versions of Hamlet and King Lear, as...

Cyborgs and clones : production and reproduction of posthuman figures in contemporary British literature

Michele Braun — Mon, 17 May 2010 11:40:30 PDT

As a replacement for, or supplement to, the human, the posthuman produces figures that highlight the socially constructed nature of human identity. This dissertation undertakes to demonstrate how several British novelists have used the concept as a supplement or replacement for the human in order to re-imagine the experience of the outsider. It argues that the importance of the posthuman is not its portrayal of a potential utopian or dystopian future or change for the human, but in how the posthuman draws our attention back to how we define ourselves as “human.” Fictional posthuman figures differ from the human both...

The limits of my language : Wittgenstein and contemporary American poetry

Benjamin J. Leubner — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 08:20:28 PST

Applications of Wittgenstein in literary studies are far from copious. There are, to be sure, many significant works, including Marjorie Perloff's Wittgenstein's Ladder, Walter Jost's Rhetorical Investigations, and the small but thriving industry of Ordinary Language Criticism (where work by both Perloff and Jost, among others, can be found). The present study seeks to contribute to this growing body. But where Ordinary Language Criticism often champions Wittgenstein for the resistance he offers to theory, this study, while acknowledging his emphasis on description over explanation, finds much in his philosophy which bears upon continental modes of thought, modes which his so-called...

Subversive merit : the revision of the classical clever slave as witty servant and social satirist in the comedies of Ben Jonson

Cory Grewell — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 08:20:27 PST

This dissertation argues that the key to Jonson's revision of the classical comic paradigm is his employment of an unsettled and subversive English servant figure, derived literarily from the clever slave that is at the heart of the action in classical comedies, and employed by Jonson as an on-stage satirist. This character's literary inheritance from the classical clever slave and his relationship to the contemporary stereotype of the English servant figure are explored in detail. The dissertation goes on to analyze the ways that Jonson uses these servant figures to expose and ridicule vices specific to the social contexts of...

"A plague 'o both your houses" : Shakespeare and early modern plague writing

Nichole DeWall — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 08:20:26 PST

This dissertation investigates what Shakespeare's drama seems to do with the anxieties and fantasies attendant upon the early modern plague experience. At times, it seems, the plague exerts its presence in its absence, at others, the plague seems to saturate every aspect of the plays' fictive worlds. Moreover, my inquiry seeks to understand what kind of cultural and psychical work Shakespeare's plays performed, both for himself and for his audience members. What was it about the plague experience that compelled Shakespeare to return to it in his works, despite how devastating it was to his creative and financial prospects to...