Matching Items (6)
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- All Subjects: English Literature
- All Subjects: Poetry--Authorship.
- Genre: Masters Thesis
- Creators: Maring, Heather
- Creators: Rios, Alberto
- Creators: Bassett, Kyle
- Resource Type: Text
- Status: Published
Description
Raised on card-catalogues, then expected to save the world with microchips, there is a generation that was left straddling two millennia. Often lumped in with the X’ers or Millennials, this generation didn’t grow up with or without technology, technology grew up with them. The poems in The Aerodynamics of Hunger strike a balance between the easy-going materialism of the 90’s and our current culture of instant gratification, between the tendency to treat science like a God and prescribe God like science. These poems see straight through the world of hypersex and click-bait, yet they admit their complicity in its creation and distribution. They watch the world become connected on a new level, but testify to the resulting struggle of place one’s self in relation to something, anything. The burden is great, but journeying through it is an undeniable pleasure.
ContributorsBassett, Kyle (Author) / Rios, Alberto A (Thesis advisor) / Dubie, Norman (Committee member) / Bell, Matthew (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Rural Thrill is a broken fruit, an electric fence, and, at the end, the absence of body. It comes in three sections, with the first laying the foundation for the world in which the collection takes place—a small southern town, where there is obvious economic disparity and the supernatural is easily expected, believed, and in some cases, assumed. The second section focuses more closely on the main speaker of the collection who is growing into her own sexual desires against the backdrop of a murder which has swept through her town, complicating the speaker’s relationship to her body and the way she communicates desire. In the final section of the book, the poems come even closer as they explore the internal landscape of the speaker’s body and the many versions of the speaker that inhabit that place. The internal happenings of the third section of the book, reflect back on the external world mapped out in both the first and second sections. At the end, the energy of the body is all that remains with all boundaries of physicality erased, an example of how the body and mind negotiate safety in the face of risk and desire.
ContributorsAlbin, Lauren (Author) / Rios, Alberto (Thesis advisor) / Goldberg, Beckian F (Committee member) / Ball, Sally (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
This thesis surveys several works of 17th-century English cleric, theologian, and poet Thomas Traherne (1636 or 1637 - 1674) to consider Traherne’s understanding of the contemplative self as formed in relation to a Divine Other, human Others, and natural objects. The paper focuses on Traherne’s use of images of mirrors and reflection to illustrate the relationally developing self in primary works concerned with contemplative formation: the Centuries of Meditation and two poetic sequences describing the experiences and perceptions of the poet’s infant persona, contained within the Dobell manuscript and the Poems of Felicity. Jacques Lacan’s speculative theory of the stade du miroir is employed to illuminate Traherne’s conception of identity as structured, reversible desire for a perceived Other or Others. The project situates Traherne within a contemplative tradition originating in the sixth century with Maximus the Confessor that includes sensory contemplation of material objects as wellas spiritually or intellectually directed meditation. Finally, the paper considers the ethical implications of Traherne’s relational model of dynamic mirroring exchange as grounded in mutual perceptions of the Divine-in-Other and suggests areas for further research.
ContributorsLeonard, Olivia (Author) / Lussier, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Bate, Jonathan (Thesis advisor) / Maring, Heather (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
In Writing the Goodlife Ybarra details the reasons why Mexican American Literature emphasizes domestic life while seeming not to address human relationship to the environment. Ybarra reveals how environmental relationships take shape within the domestic lives of characters in Mexican American Literature, rather than in ‘wilderness’ settings as is often the case with Anglo American literature. In my own reading of Mexican American novels, I have been interested in how affect, or the emotional, also illuminates the human-nonhuman relationships within and outside of domesticity. To explore this area of interest and analysis, I call upon Teresa Brennan’s Transmission of Affect, which provides a technical language for understanding emotion. Brennan writes that the transmission of affect occurs “via an interaction with other people” [and] that the emotions of “one person, and the enhancing and depressing energies these affects entail, can enter into another” (Brennan 3). Describing the limits of her work, Brennan states that the environment in which human affective interactions occur are always a factor but, in her book, she is not “investigating environmental factors” if the word “environment” means human-nature relationships. That area of analysis falls “outside the scope of [her] book” (Brennan 8).
Stepping into that opening, I bring Ybarra’s insights on ‘the good life’ together with Brennan’s technical language of affect to lay out the argument of my thesis. I build and expand understandings of domesticity, perceptions of environment, and transmission of affect with an analysis of three representative works of Mexican American Literature: Like Water For Chocolate 1989 by Laura Esquivel, So Far From God 1993 by Ana Castillo, and Bless Me, Ultima 1972 by Rudolfo Anaya. Linking analysis of affect to analysis of Mexican American domestic literary representations (that are replete with concepts of human-nonhuman relationships) highlights the intersectionality and multisubjectivity of these three important novels. I also trace Ybarra’s discussion of the “good life” to its South America roots in the concept of “buen vivir” as I explore how understanding traditional indigenous scientific literacies helps fortify Ybarra’s notion that the environmental is always at work within representation of the domestic in Mexican American literature.
ContributorsVaron, Alma Victoria (Author) / Adamson, Joni (Thesis advisor) / Maring, Heather (Committee member) / Jensen, Kyle (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
The generation following post-modernism has been left with little to the imagination. In a world defined by continual technological distraction, Millennials absorb their world primarily through visual media. Where, then, is there a place for poetry, and how do writers reconcile a narcissistic world monopolized by "selfies" and virtual communication? How does a poet use the "I" selflessly in order to achieve the universal? "Poetry as a Development of Human Empathy" attempts to bridge the divide between everyday society and poets that has been growing since experimental writing became more widely accepted after the atomic bomb, while exploring reasons as to how poetry has alienated itself as an art and ways in which poets might find a way back into being an important force in the world.
ContributorsAsdel, Bryan (Author) / Dubie, Norman (Thesis advisor) / Rios, Alberto (Committee member) / Goldberg, Beckian (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
The study of genre literature in general, and fantasy or fairy tale literature in particular, by its very nature, falls outside the normal course of literary theory. This paper evaluates various approaches taken to create a framework within which scholarly research and evaluation of these types of genre literature might occur. This is done applying Secondary World theory to better-established literary foci, such as psychological analysis and monster theory while still respecting the premises posited in traditional literary inquiry.
ContributorsAttwood, James (Author) / Bjork, Robert E (Thesis advisor) / Corse, Douglas (Committee member) / Maring, Heather (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019