THE PROTEUS OF THE MIND: CREATIVE IMAGINATION IN PSYCHOLOGY AND LITERATURE AT THE FIN DE SIÈCLE
Author:
Elizabeth McCormick
Year of Dissertation:
2009
This project will demonstrate the critical role writers played in the fin de siècle cultural conversation about the mental faculty of creative imagination through an analysis of the many characterizations of artists and scenes of creative action in biographies and fiction written by Oscar Wilde, Jean Lorrain, Una Ashworth Taylor, Rachilde, Maurice Barrès, W.B. Yeats, Arthur Symonds and A. Mary F. Robinson. While earlier philosophic orthodoxy had treated creativity as an essentially mysterious process, by the turn-of-the-century, the agnostic cloud that had settled over a post-Darwinian intelligentsia transformed these earlier notions of creativity in radical ways as biology came to dictate the terms of socio-medical discussions about psychology. New models for the imagination emerged out of the era's discourses about evolution, degeneracy, psychosis and the supernatural. Late 19th century biographies of artists - like those of Ernest Dowson, Rachilde, Emily Brontë and William Blake studied in this project - illustrate many of these new concepts. Jean Lorrain's "The Man Who Made Wax Heads" and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray explore the sexual, psychological and violent dimensions of human creativity. Ideas about gender and creativity in the period were challenged in texts like Rachilde's Monsieur Vénus and Una Ashworth Taylor's "The Truce of God."
The Open Wound: Writing Black Female Bodies
Year of Dissertation:
2011
This study explores the various methods that black women writers use to depict the black female body in pain. Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World theorizes that pain has a language-destroying power and that it often defies expression. Thus, I will argue that in endeavoring to express pain, the writers examined in this study utilize the creative process to work around the barriers presented in the effort to express pain. I discuss various creative approaches that the writers under discussion take up and what results from those approaches. Works examined in this study include: Suzan-Lori Parks' Venus, Robbie McCauley's Sally's Rape, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Gayl Jones' Corregidora, Edwige Dandicat's Breath, Eyes, Memory, Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother and Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother. The collection of writers that I have assembled for this analysis write the black female body into visibility, narrativize the history of black women's bodies in the West, and illustrate the difficulty in expressing black women's pain.
"'The Naked Gospel': Varieties of American Religious Poetry, From Richard Henry Dana to Herman Melville
Year of Dissertation:
2009
"'The Naked Gospel': Varieties of American Religious Poetry, From Richard Henry Dana to Herman Melville" examines the term "religious" in nineteenth-century America poetry. Without ignoring the enormous influence of European and British Romanticisms, it positions a rich but neglected body of nineteenth-century American religious verse vis-à-vis American commentary and criticism of the period. It surveys attempts by nineteenth-century American editors and writers to collect and represent a native religious verse and outlines the standards by which an American poem was judged as "religious." These judgments, my study argues, reflect how deeply rooted Romantic thought had become in American denominational identity, even before the influence of Emerson on American culture was widespread, and reveal the extent to which temperament, not theology, was the shared interpretive frame for the selection, as well as the production, of American religious poetry.
Gracious Affections: Affect and the Rise of Evangelicalism in Early America
Year of Dissertation:
2011
In this dissertation I build on current theorists of affect in order to critically foreground the centrality of embodied religious experience in the spread of evangelicalism through the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century United States and the larger Atlantic world. I argue that the social and embodied religious practices within evangelical public spaces altered the writing and reading practices of evangelicals in the early republic by attempting to recreate, but also limit, the powerful and embodied religious feelings created within those spaces. This dissertation is structured around the writing and embodied practices of lay publics who were animated by the ecstatic religious experiences found at revivals and other religious gatherings and the work of ministers who sought to both propagate and control that energy through the authority of the clergy. By bringing the fields of literary studies, religious history, queer theory, and theories of affect into conversation around evangelicalism, this dissertation revises the conventional wisdom of American religious history, and offers new ways to understand evangelicalism's complex influence on early American writing practices and the greater culture at large.
Everyday Masochisms: Charlotte Bronte, George Moore, D.H. Lawrence, and Jean Rhys
Year of Dissertation:
2012
This dissertation argues for the magnitude of a critical literary period in the development and exploration of theories about masochism. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth-century, discourses about sexuality become more publicly accessible. Circulating ideas by sexologists Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, and psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud, encourage a public conversation about sex, desire, and identity. Both novelists and their readers find themselves in a
Embedded Forms and the Progressive Wonders of The Winter's Tale
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Written in an age of theatrical experimentation, The Winter’s Tale stands out even amid the lively playhouse practices of its day for its allusions to multiple genres, ranging from the overt theatrical genres of tragedy and comedy, to contemporaneous subgenres such as pastoral tragicomedy and masque, to non–theatrical entertainments such as bearbaiting, broadside ballads, and statue–viewing. While prior critics have treated the play’s numerous generic allusions in isolation, this dissertation reads The Winter’s Tale as a progression of embedded forms meant to condition a sequence of affective and increasingly interactive audience responses, thus preparing Shakespeare’s audience for the redemptive, participatory wonders of the final act. My three chapters trace Shakespeare’s evocation of tragic tropes and rigid pageantry in the first half of the play; his nods to raucous, contemporaneous forms such as bearbaiting and pastoral tragicomedy in Acts III and IV; and the fading, nostalgia–inducing miracle plays and “old tales” he uses to frame the wonders of Act V. I argue that, through this progression, Shakespeare rejects the tyrannical, controlling visions of Leontes in favor of the participatory marvels of Act V, dismissing rigid, patriarchal forms such as Leontes’ show trial while ultimately elevating generative, interactive, feminine forms such as Marian miracle plays and old wives’ tales. Reading The Winter’s Tale as a late career ars poetica designed to test and reinvigorate the theatrical faith of Shakespeare’s audience, my dissertation explores the sprawling yet rigorous poetic logic behind the play’s generic mixing.
Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn: The Collected Letters
Author:
Claudia Moreno Pisano
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn: The Collected Letters presents the correspondence of twentieth-century American poets Edward Dorn and Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) between the years 1959 and 1965. Having seen several poems of Dorn's in various small literary magazines, Baraka began writing to him with praises and a request for poems for his own magazine, Yugen. During this time, Dorn lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico and then Pocatello, Idaho, while Jones lived in New York City. The major basis of their relationship, and these letters, is undoubtedly an artistic one, the early 1960s finding both poets just beginning to publish and becoming active, public figures. With the sense of art as not only a valid but a necessary means of grappling with and understanding both the beautiful and the horrific in the world fueling each poet, the letters become both reflection and place of creation, the ground upon which to experiment. Baraka's independent magazines Yugen and The Floating Bear and independent publishing house Totem Press were key in providing space for numerous artists from several different strands in the late 1950s and into the 1960s. He published two of Dorn's poetry collections through Totem/Corinth presses, and saw several of Dorn's poems into print in both Yugen and The Floating Bear. These two little magazines became focal points for mid-century artistic ferment, publishing new, highly outspoken and radical poets from all over the U.S. This publishing space helped break down the geographical and human isolation in which so many of these poets found themselves, which is part of the story of Dorn and Jones's friendship itself. If we think of a text as defining political boundaries and providing historical continuity, these letters constitute the history of these poets and their times better than many other forms of documented history. As both historical and autobiographical lens into two key writers at the very pulse of the turbulent cultural and political happenings of mid-century America, these letters reveal an extraordinary snapshot of American identity and history.
Beyond Agency: Women Writing Romance as Political Intervention in the English Revolution
Year of Dissertation:
2009
This project examines four sub-aristocratic seventeenth-century women who wrote romance and historical narrative as political interventions during the social upheaval of the English Revolution: Judith Man defends Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, to Parliament in her translation, An Epitome of the history of faire Argenis and Polyarchus (1640), of a French abridgement of John Barclay's Argenis; Suzanne Du Verger advocates for Catholics in her two translations of Jean-Pierre Camus' French romances, Admirable Events (1639) and Diotrephe (1641), as well as in Du Verger's Humble Reflections (1657), a vitriolic response to Margaret Cavendish's The World's Olio (1655); Anne Bradstreet rejects English "romance" for New English history in The Tenth Muse (1650); and Anna Weamys reexamines women's political roles in her royalist yet moderate A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia (1651).
"How Shall We Write History?": The Modernist Historiography Of Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford And Rebecca West
Year of Dissertation:
2011
This study explores how several British modernists applied the experimental methods of literary modernism to the writing of history and historical novels. In examining the works of Conrad, Ford and West, I pose several questions regarding the relationship of modernism and historiography: why in histories of the historical novel do modernist works get overlooked? What would a modernist work of history look like? Can contemporary historians searching for new forms find models in these writers?
SWAMP AESTHETICS: ENVIRONMENTAL EXPERIMENTS BY AMERICAN WOMEN FROM THE NINETEENTH TO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Year of Dissertation:
2011
"Swamp Aesthetics" proposes a theory of the origins of swamp aesthetics in the works of four visionary American women writers--Emily Dickinson, Mary Austin, Gertrude Stein, and Susan Howe--whose non-linear, non-hierarchical texts reflect patterns to be found in that ambiguous and particularly American landscape feature, the swamp. This project delineates new parameters for what constitutes environmental writing from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, and places American women writers at its forefront, arguing that these authors find in the swamp a position from which to re-imagine the relationship between the American mind and the natural world.