Browsing by Subject "Poetics"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    "In a shattered language": a feminist poetics of trauma.
    (2011-10) Griffiths, Amy Kathleen
    In a Shattered Language": A Feminist Poetics of Trauma, fuses theories of traumatic stress with studies of contemporary poetry and poetics. This project intervenes in debates over the ways trauma is experienced, remembered, and represented by positing poetry as an alternative form of discourse--one which endures the pressures of testimonial coherence while simultaneously preserving the aporias of knowledge and memory that characterize traumatization. My analysis also revises trauma theory from a feminist perspective by investigating domestic traumas such as rape, incest, and mental illness as portrayed in poetry by North American women writers in the twentieth century. The dissertation opens with a brief Prologue, which views the 2010 Korean film Poetry as a text through which the major concerns of this project are refracted. The first chapter, "Difficult Word: The Interpretation of `Trauma' and the Trauma of Interpretation," traces a genealogy of trauma as an intellectual concept prone to semantic slippage, and calls for a Poetics of Trauma to reconfigure the role of linguistic form in conceptualizing trauma and its aftermath. The second chapter, "`While Someone Else is Eating': The Dialectic of the Extreme and the Everyday in Frances Driscoll's. The Rape Poems," conducts close readings of poetry by a survivor of intruder rape, and argues that a feminist perspective qualifies the core tenet of trauma theory which locates traumata in extreme external events. The third chapter, "Traumatizing the Lyric `I': Poetic Subjectivity in Betsy Warland's. The Bat Had Blue Eyes," considers theories of the traumatized "self" as they pertain to an adult survivor of childhood incest, and argues that poetry-writing generates a phenomenological selfhood through which survival becomes perpetual revision. The final chapter, "Traumatic Consciousness: The Poetry of Interpretation in Hannah Weiner's Archive," encounters Weiner's work as a means of critiquing the psychopathology model of trauma. This chapter finds that Weiner's avant-garde poetics both does and does not evince symptoms of her struggle with schizophrenia, and as such, suggests how conventional language itself traumatizes consciousness. This chapter weaves together research in Weiner's unpublished journals with a personal narrative to form an implicit theory of the poetics of reading and writing trauma.
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    Satirizing The Audience: Shakespeare And The Uses Of Obscurity, 1594-1601
    (2020-05) Juberg, Marc
    This dissertation examines Shakespeare’s techniques of formal obscurity in four plays: Love’s Labour’s Lost, As You Like It, Hamlet, and Troilus and Cressida. Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Juberg shows, attached specific satirical and aesthetic functions to deliberately obscure writing. As satire migrated from page to stage in the last decade of the 16th century, Shakespeare recombined the generic codes and conventionally confusing language of print satire to create his own type of satirical theater, with which he challenged prevailing norms of literary and theatrical interpretation and tested the limits of audience understanding.
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    The style and structure of Minnesang.
    (2012-05) Oberlin, Adam
    The Style and Structure of Minnesang approaches a broad corpus of the medieval German love lyric from the perspective of historical phraseology and formulaicity. Overturning previous concerns of prosodic restriction in verse and the misapplication of contemporary notions of fixity, the dissertation provides an overview of the types of phraseological units in Middle High German verse literature while distinguishing norms and deviations within the context of compositional strategies, poetic ideolects, semantics, and syntax. Alongside chapters on historical phraseology and its application in Middle High German are a comparison of the German lyric to the Old Occitan and Latin traditions as well as phraseological studies of proverbial syntactic frames and non-verbal phrasemes expressing emotion (kinnegrams). Turning to literature, in particular verse, has both countered a trend in previous scholarship by opening a new area of research and provided evidence for the different uses of phrasemes in literary contexts. The wider importance of phraseological research in Middle High German literature lies in three facets of the studies presented in this dissertation: 1) the lexical inventory and compositional strategies of Middle High German verse are inextricably tied to the phraseological elements of general formulaicity, rhetoric, and poetics, even if they are not always reflective of speech; 2) insofar as one can identify and answer questions of socio-pragmatic, non-verbal, and contextual meaning in dead languages, corpus-based phraseological analysis provides greater supporting evidence for interpretive positions than analyzing individual passages; and 3) the availability of large parsed and unparsed corpora, in conjunction with advanced search functions, provides not only frequency data and the range of variations for any given phraseme but also a more nuanced picture of the thematic and intertextual connections between genres and individual texts.
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    The urgency of community: the suturing of poetic ideology during the early years of the Loft and the Jack Kerouac School of disembodied poetics.
    (2011-05) Weaver, Rebecca
    The Urgency of Community is deeply engaged with understanding a significant but often under-examined moment in the history of 20th century American poetry, wherein two poetry communities of the 1970s, the Loft in Minneapolis, Minnesota and the Poetics School at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, created community around poetic work during the 1970s. The Loft was formed in 1974 above a Minneapolis bookstore by culturally and politically active poets who urgently felt the need for a poetic community outside of academia. The Poetics School was co-founded in 1974 by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman to continue the poetic work of the New American Poetry (1960), the Donald Allen anthology that sparked a poetic revolution. Poets who had participated in the cultural and artistic upheavals of the 1960s were compelled to re-group in the 1970s. My project argues, using the theoretical concepts of ideological suture (derived from feminist film theory) and the symbolic construction of communities (derived from the social sciences), that the Loft's and the Poetics School's responses to the upheavals of the 1960s and the new realities of the 1970s shaped current poetic trends and issues. Suture is usually a pejorative term that describes how viewers of classic films are "sutured" into dominant ideologies of gender. This happens when elements of a film are designed to "rupture" cultural gender norms through an unconventional character and then punish or reform that character as the film progresses, "suturing" the audience back into "normalcy." Theorists such as Kaja Silverman read suture as a mechanism by which difference is obliterated and ideology takes hold. Yet these theorists also acknowledge that we are never outside of ideology, and that it behooves us to be aware of the productive ideologies, such as a sense of political or cultural belonging, into which we are sutured. I take the idea of ideological suture into poetry studies to describe the work--both repressive and liberating--undertaken in poetry communities of the 1970s. These communities created ruptures and intervened in poetry and culture in the 1960s by challenging received notions of poetry readings and by erasing the lines between poetry and activism. They responded to the larger ruptures and changes in culture and society in the 1960s and `70s, including economic recessions, new social realities involving race and gender, and increases in governmental and private arts funding. Such ruptures, or crisis moments, forced these communities to commit to goals and desires for their organizations. Ethnographer Anthony J. Cohen calls these commitments "symbols" that are perceivable on the boundaries of these communities, as they demonstrate to members and non-members what the groups' values are. Communities are thus constructed symbolically. Sometimes disagreements within communities occur when members cease to agree on the primacy of one value or another. Boundaries are thus ruptured, and communities need to re-suture their members, usually by evolving. Both the Loft and the Poetics School have had such moments, and my two middle chapters explore how these crises changed the groups and their poetic work. By deploying methods from history, the social science of communities, literary analysis, and the economics of fringe venues and publications, my focus on poetry communities is decidedly interdisciplinary. The Urgency of Community is part of a critical discourse in American poetics studies that rejects traditional models of poetry scholarship focusing on biography or close-reading techniques of a few poets or works. Rather, the emerging inquiries investigate discourses, communities, and institutions in American poetry.
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    Wittgenstein's Poetics.
    (2009-08) Kortbein, Joshua Alan
    Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is an unconventionally written sequence of about 700 short remarks which often contain brief dialogues between the author and many unidentified voices. This unconventional form poses major difficulties to interpretation, particularly together with Wittgenstein’s professed intentions of criticizing the very activity of philosophy, maybe to the point of ending it. Between two broad camps of interpretation—readings attempting to paraphrase the book into standard argumentative forms, and ‘therapeutic’ readings which see the book’s criticism of philosophy as an achievement of certain of its elements fundamentally resistant to paraphrase—this dissertation supports the latter, arguing that the Investigations lacks a complementary relationship between its formal structure (distinct, non-hierarchicallyordered remarks) and its rhetorical structure (in its use of ‘signposting’ at salient structural locations to guide the reader’s progress). Failing to satisfy these conventions, the book does not permit an argumentative reading, and thus lacks a structure permitting paraphrase into argumentative form. This reading begins with a survey of ‘signposting’ rhetoric through the entire text, then selects four key locations for suggesting argumentative structure: §1, §65, the ‘philosophy sections’ 89–133, and the final remark. A close reading of each shows that the text permits a conventional, ‘argumentative’ interpretation only when the reader distorts the text; and that it permits an unconventional, ‘therapeutic’ interpretation when the reader attends more carefully to his own role in identifying what happens in the text, using its formal and rhetorical features as checks on interpretation. After this argument concerning large-scale structure, an objection that the book’s many brief dialogues constitute arguments is addressed with an interpretation of the unusual dialogue in §28. The dissertation concludes with two essays in practical criticism. The first concerns textual features and critical concepts which must be at the forefront of any attempt to capture a stronger sense of resistance to paraphrase—that the reader has to read the Investigations ‘for himself’. The second considers how a paraphrase-resistant reading and a focus on ‘therapeutic’ criticism of philosophy are reinforced by a different perspective on the Investigations’ place in the history of philosophy.