The Omnidirectional Microphone: Performance Literature as Social Project
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Beginning with the metaphor of an omnidirectional microphone--which detects sound
She's Poetry in Motion: Metaphors of Movement in Some Contemporary American Women's Poetry
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Advisor:
Wayne Koestenbaum
Being able to move, and being constrained from moving, have always been important poetic metaphors for female writers. Thus it comes as no surprise that motion is a recurring theme in women's poetry in the 20th and 21st centuries. The ability to move is not taken for granted by women; one must be free in order to move, and women have often found their range of physical motion limited by familial and societal constraints. When contemporary American women poets use metaphors of motion, then, freedom lies at the heart of their work.
"I Will Not Call Her Servant": Ambiguity and Power in Master-Servant Relationships in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Advisor:
Rachel Brownstein
Abstract
"The Wounds Become Him": Sacrifice, Honor and the Hazard of Much Blood in Shakespeare's Roman Plays
Year of Dissertation:
2009
The project centers around representations of the martyred body in Shakespeare's Roman plays, and focuses on the ambiguous nature of ceremony, to consider the way ritualized presentations of the body complicate, undermine, or oppose the language used to represent the body. For Shakespeare's sources, dying in the high Roman fashion was valorized as a deed strengthening the social body of Rome, but for Shakespeare, such a manner of death acquires a Catholic, Eucharistic aspect that is exposed as grotesque and bathetic. What emerges in each play is a struggle between the visual spectacle of onstage violence and refining speech. In Shakespeare's Rome, violence elicits an expectation of social purification, and Shakespeare's refusal to provide this redemption makes the violence that we do see all the more repulsive.
"Making the Devil Useful": English Teachers and the Movies in America, 1910-1941
Author:
Mikhail Gershovich
Year of Dissertation:
2009
From its earliest stages of development in the late 1800s, the academic discipline of English has been characterized by a split into two distinct, variously valued academic activities. The putative "high" side of the binary, the teaching and study of works of literature, has traditionally been privileged as the true, noble calling of the discipline, while the "low" side, composition, has functioned as the service sector of the field, serving to acculturate beginning writers to official, authorized conventions of written discourse. English, as bifurcated as it is, has by and large had a fairly long, healthy and quite productive relationship with the movies, having meaningfully incorporated film on either side of the composition/literature split. The cultural relevance and pedagogical possibilities of film have even from very early on intrigued enough teachers and scholars to merit a substantial degree of attention to both the film medium and film-based approaches to teaching both literature and composition in well-known professional publications like The English Journal and The Educational Screen. From the 1910s, narrative fiction films have served as an adjunct for literary study or even as an object of analysis itself, on the one hand, and as a heuristic of various sorts for composition instruction, on the other, at both the secondary and post-secondary levels.
The Dramatic Milton
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Abstract
Crossing the Line: Kathy Acker, William S Burroughs, and the Politics of Piracy
Year of Dissertation:
2009
"Crossing the Line: Kathy Acker, Williams S. Burroughs and the Politics of Piracy" investigates Kathy Acker and William S Burroughs' insistence that pirates and acts of piracy are models for political action in late capitalism. Acker and Burroughs' later texts, Don Quixote, Empire of the Senseless and Cities of the Red Night and Ghosts of a Chance respectively, use pirates as both aesthetic and narrative tropes. I seek to show that Acker and Burroughs' use of pirates is an attempt at fashioning a wide-ranging critique of late capitalism and changing and expanding forms of control and power. The pirate, for Acker and Burroughs, becomes a figuration, a vessel, for the re-imagining of a politically active, restive, mode of being. By investigating the role of piracy in their texts, I open a space of discussion that highlights Acker and Burroughs' commitment to revolutionary politics indebted to their deep belief in the power of literature to shape and engender communities. The literary enunciation of affective communities illuminates the gap between literature and theory. Acker and Burroughs maintain the importance of affect in human relations. In other words, in the face of what Fredric Jameson labels the waning of affect under late capitalism, Acker and Burroughs posit highly charged affective relationships between people.
Creative Nonfiction: Chasing Its Own tale
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Abstract
Reading Through Prayer: Lectio Divina and "Liturgical Reading" in Some Medieval Texts
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Advisor:
E. Gordon Whatley
Prayer texts found in a variety of medieval genres merit more careful scrutiny from literary critical perspectives. Such attention to the verbal artifacts, prayers, that memorialize an activity of central importance in medieval culture, praying, deepens our understanding not only of the prayers and the works in which they are found, but also of the milieu that produced them. This study seeks to model such a critical turn by reading three particular works "through" the prayers that constitute, punctuate and frame them -- privileging the prayers as the starting points for the investigation of their literary and devotional settings. This vantage yields fresh insights into an Anglo-Latin prayerbook -- The Book of Nunnaminster, Cynewulf's Old English poem Elene, and the Middle English prose Seinte Margarete of the Katherine Group. This approach reveals as well the high degree of association between prayer and reading in medieval culture where prayers are most often highly formal or formulaic texts intended to be read (rather than spontaneous speech) and praying is often figured as an interpretive activity akin to reading. Two medieval reading practices, lectio divina and "liturgical reading," have shaped both the discrete prayers and the whole works examined here. The full appreciation of these texts, and perhaps many others, requires close attention to the prayers within them and an understanding of these habits of prayerful reading.
Significant Little Wrecks: Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, and the Question of "Small Poetry" in Twentieth-Century American Writing
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Advisor:
Wayne Koestenbaum
Certainly a great deal of critical attention has been paid to collage and disjunction in experimental poetry; likewise, there are valuable discussions of poetic brevity and concision. But there is not yet sufficient work on how the conjunction of these two features constitutes a unique poetic strain, a sort of "genus": spare, damaged groups of words posited as page-contained, emphatically material, readable objects. In this study I argue that there is indeed such a poetic type in twentieth-century American poetry, that it is mainly characterized not by lyric criteria (of voice and subjectivity) or mere size ("short" poems) but by an emblematic use of form, and thus that the significances of this type can best be drawn out through a textual-semiotic approach to the relevant words, pages, and books. I explore a notion of form that entails both the material qualities embodied in these words, pages, and books, and also, much more narrowly, the exclusive potential in constructed things or objects to function as conceptual shells, totem-like vehicles that can figure accretions of ideas, feelings, and associations. Though the study of experimental poetry has regularly made use of semiotics, it has relied almost exclusively on the work of Saussure, neglecting the rich earlier work of thinkers like the American Philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. In my dissertation I use Peirce's semiotics to help construct a theory of "small poems" in America, focusing on the works of Lorine Niedecker and George Oppen, and, continuing into the present moment, Susan Howe and Myung Mi Kim. The written output of all four poets is almost exclusively limited to disjunctive, spare, page-bound verses. In response to the enveloping, relentless violence and upheaval of modern experience, both before and after the Second World War, these poets present the irreducible facts of their cryptic hand-marked forms. According to my reading, a disciplined commitment to small poems constitutes an investment in negative values of refusal, transience, and inscrutability --what Theodor Adorno calls "barbaric asceticism in the arts" (Minima Moralia)--as means of articulating an emblematic response to twentieth-century violence and superfluity. I also contend that, in spite of these negative postures or gestures, Niedecker, Oppen, Howe, and Kim do not enact the strict Nominalist skepticism about language often claimed for modernist (or "post-modernist") poetics. Instead, in ways consonant with Peirce's philosophical Realism, their poems affirm the adequacy of language to human experience by insisting on their own material status as incised documents of witness and as emblems of dissent.