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- Member of: Theses and Dissertations
Description
Ranging in subject from a Tuareg festival outside Timbuktu to the 1975 "Battle of the Sexes" race at Belmont track to a Mississippi classroom in the Delta flood plains, the poems in The Body Snatcher's Complaint explore the blurring of self hood, a feeling of foreignness within one's own physical experience of the world, in the most intimate and global contexts.
ContributorsMurray, Catherine (Author) / Hogue, Cynthia (Thesis advisor) / Ball, Sally (Committee member) / Hummer, Terry (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Cruz del Sur is an exploration of what it means to be an outsider: as a resident, as a foreigner, from the perspective of the human eye, or from the perspective of a camera lens. An unlikely blending of voices, these poems embark the reader on a journey across a continent, and also into an interior: a mystical quest.
ContributorsMontgomery, Scott (Author) / Dubie, Norman (Thesis advisor) / Hogue, Cynthia (Committee member) / Hummer, Terry (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Black Laurel is a book-length manuscript which has at its center poems that reveal and explore issues related to Michele Poulos's identity as a Greek-American writer, discovering the connections that link the past and present of both Greece and America. These poems often work as a quest to recover identity. They explore the idea that it is her own privileged perspective as an educated Greek-American woman that both allows and in some ways prevents her seeing herself in the Greeks who today are struggling economically, emotionally, and psychologically. Many of the poems work to achieve a complex understanding of both an individual as well as a broader cultural history. These poems sometimes take on the personas of striking figures from other times and other landscapes, while others draw on materials which are somewhat more autobiographical. In one poem titled "Before My Mother Set Herself on Fire," the speaker is an imagined daughter in a modern-day Greek family. The poem, inspired by a news story about an elderly man who shot himself in the head in front of Syntagma Square in Athens to protest the austerity measures imposed on the Greek population, explores the various ways in which a national crisis may affect an individual family. Alternatively, Poulos delves into her personal family history in "When the Wind Falls," a poem about the Nazi invasions of northern Greece. At the same time, this focus on past and present Greece is only one strand in a wide-ranging manuscript woven of materials which also include a variety of subjects related to science, history, eroticism, mysticism, and much more.
ContributorsPoulos, Michele (Author) / Dubie, Norman (Thesis advisor) / Hogue, Cynthia (Committee member) / Hummer, Terry (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This project examines C.L.R. James, V.S. Naipaul, and George Lamming's appropriation of the European Bildungsroman, a novel depicting the maturation of the hero prompted by his harmonious dialectical relationship with the social realm (Bildung). I contend that James, Naipaul, and Lamming use the Bildungsroman genre to critique colonialism's effects on its subjects, particularly its male subjects who attend colonial schools that present them with disconcerting curricula and gender ideologies that hinder their intellectual and social development. Disingenuously cloaked in paternalistic rhetoric promising the advancement of "uncivilized" peoples, colonialism, these novels show, actually impedes the development of its subjects. Central to these writers' critiques is the use of houses, space, and land. Although place functions differently in Minty Alley, A House for Mr. Biswas, and In the Castle of My Skin, the novels under consideration here, the corresponding relationship between a mature, autonomous self and a home of one's own is made evident in each. Tragically, the men in these novels are never able to find communities in which they cease to feel out of place, nor are they ever able to find secure domestic spaces. Because the discourse of home so closely parallels the discourse of Bildung, I contend that the protagonists' inability to find stable housing suggests the inaccessibility of Bildung in a colonized space. Further, I assert that this literal homelessness is symbolic of the educated male's cultural exile; he is unable to find a location where he can live in dialectical harmony with any community, which is the ideal aim of Bildung. Leaving the Caribbean proves to be the colonized male's only strategy for pursuing Bildung; thus, these novels suggest that while Bildung is impossible in the Caribbean, it is not impossible for the Caribbean subject.
ContributorsPate, Leah (Author) / Castle, Gregory (Thesis advisor) / Codell, Julie (Committee member) / Bivona, Dan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This dissertation addresses the representation of women in the poetry of the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella. Using a variety of theoretical approaches, including historical criticism, French feminist theory and Jungian psychoanalytical theory, I argue that although women are an integral part of Kinsella's ongoing aesthetic project of self-interrogation, their role in his poetry is deeply problematic from a feminist perspective. For purposes of my discussion I have divided my analysis into three categories of female representation: the realistically based figure of the poet's wife Eleanor, often referred to as the Beloved; female archetypes and anima as formulated by the psychologist C.G. Jung; and the poetic trope of the feminized Muse. My contention is that while the underlying effect of the early love and marriage poems is to constrain the female subject by reinforcing stereotypical gender positions, Kinsella's aesthetic representation of this relationship undergoes a transformation as his poetry matures. With regard to Kinsella's mid-career work from the 1970s and the 1980s I argue that the poet's aesthetic integration of Jungian archetypes into his poetry of psychic exploration fundamentally influences his representation of women, whether real or archetypal. These works represent a substantial advance in the complexity of Kinsella's poetry; however, the imaginative power of these poems is ultimately undermined by the very ideas that inspire them - Jungian archetypal thought - since women are represented exclusively as facilitators and symbols on this male-centered journey of self-discovery. Further complicating the gender dynamics in Kinsella's poetry is the presence of the female Muse. This figure, which becomes of increasing importance to the poet, transforms from an aestheticized image of the Beloved, to a sinister snake-like apparition, and finally into a disembodied voice that is a projection of the poet and his alter-ego. Ultimately, Kinsella's Muse is an aesthetic construction, the site of inquiry into the difficulties inherent in the creative process, and a metaphor for the creative process itself. Through his innovative deployment of the trope of the Muse, Kinsella continues to advance the aesthetics of contemporary Irish poetry.
ContributorsLeavy, Adrienne (Author) / Castle, Gregory (Thesis advisor) / Hummer, Terry (Committee member) / Hogue, Cynthia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This dissertation explores how American Indian literature and the legacy of the Red Power movement are linked in the literary representations of what I call "Indigenous Cosmopolitics." This occurs by way of oral tradition's role in the movement's Pan-Indigenous consciousness and rhetoric. By appealing to communal values and ideals such as solidarity and resistance, homeland, and land-based sovereignty, Red Power activist-writers of 1960s and 1970s mobilized oral tradition to challenge the US-Indigenous colonial relationship, speak for Native communities, and decolonize Native consciousness. The introductory chapter points to Pan-Indigenous practices that constructed a positive identity for the alienated and disempowered experience of Native Americans since Relocation. Chapter one examines the Red Power newspapers and newsletters ABC: Americans Before Columbus, The Warpath, and Alcatraz Newsletter among others. These periodicals served as venues for many Natives to publish their poems in collaborating with the politics of the Red Power movement. Among the poems considered is Miguel Hernandez's "ALCATRAZ," which supports the Native resistance and journey towards sovereignty during the Island's occupation. Chapters two and three explore the use of oral tradition in the journalism of Simon Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo), who was then working within the collaborative contexts of the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) and ABC: Americans Before Columbus, which represents the Indigenous cosmos and appeal to Indigenous peoples' cosmopolitical alliance and resistance throughout the hemisphere and across the world. The final chapter turns to the work of two poets, Joy Harjo (Muskogee Creek), Wendy Rose (Hopi/Miwok), and a singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie (Cree), showing their appropriation of storytelling modes and topics from within the inclusive functions of oral tradition - storyweaving, employing persona, and performing folk music. Harjo, Rose and Sainte-Marie push on the boundaries of the movement's rhetoric as they promote solidarity between colonized women in and beyond the US. The Red Power movement's cosmopolitics remains persistent and influential in Native nationalism, which stands as the master expression of the decolonizing process. The flexibility of oral tradition operates as a common ground for reciprocal, transformational, and inclusive interactions between tribal
ational identity and Pan-Indigenous identity, developing Native nationhood's interactions with the world.
ational identity and Pan-Indigenous identity, developing Native nationhood's interactions with the world.
ContributorsKim, Seong-Hoon (Author) / Horan, Elizabeth (Thesis advisor) / Ortiz, Simon J (Committee member) / Castle, Gregory (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
New Pastoral journeys through the altered states of the American West. Readers witness dream-fields at harvest time, watch humans become agro-industrial test subjects, and overhear an exchange of letters set in an alternate (?), [more] dystopian present. Fractured, fragmented, leaping, and stitched, the poems use disjuncture, within and/or between poems, to see with clarity and complexity a landscape that is increasingly all ecotone. In addition to environmental violence, this work explores disclosure and secrecy, intimacy and estrangement, voyeurism, political policing, and, inevitably, the mysteries of making art. Pastoral landscapes have often been compared to patchwork. Now, heavy with guilt, we walk a wounded quilt, searching, with little hope, for bandages.
ContributorsSlinker, Nathan (Author) / Dubie Jr, Norman (Thesis advisor) / Hummer, Terry (Committee member) / Ball, Sara (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
The poems in this book are lyric, meditational, and narrative approaches to autobiographical tales. These works, through various poetic forms, are an attempt to assess and equate personal life experiences with those larger human and universal occasions. Spanning both physical time (a cross-country move from Virginia to Arizona) and spatial time (Virginia and Mississippi during the civil rights movement), the works evaluate and validate the human experiences of loss. Through poems addressed to various family members and historical figures, the book attempts to terms with the often humorous, often terrifying experience of being an African American male in the United States in the 21st Century.
ContributorsBooth, Dexter (Author) / Dubie, Norman (Thesis advisor) / Hummer, Terry (Committee member) / Fritz-Goldberg, Beckian (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
DescriptionAt its core, Leaning finds profound significance in unlikely moments of intimate
detail; the upkeep of a brother's gravesite, for example, is as quietly important as rummaging through a collection of sex toys. Haiku-like in their simplicity, meditation, and declaration, these poems give meaning to the smallness of our world.
detail; the upkeep of a brother's gravesite, for example, is as quietly important as rummaging through a collection of sex toys. Haiku-like in their simplicity, meditation, and declaration, these poems give meaning to the smallness of our world.
ContributorsBender, Brian, M.F.A (Author) / Ball, Sara (Thesis advisor) / Hummer, Terry (Committee member) / Dubie, Jr., Norman (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
This thesis focuses on the play-space as a realm of impossible desire in the novels Hopscotch and Lolita. Play-space, which I borrow from Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens, is a space within which play can erect its own epistemological system that regulates the game and the players. These novels are concerned with the free play of language which subverts a stable discourse about how desire operates within the play-space of the novels. To this end, I will employ the Derridean sense of free-play (writing) that is decidedly the result of the loss of the "center" of structure that historically served to orient and limit the "play of the structure." Thus, free play destabilizes the discourse of desire in its use of various ludic linguistic elements, like the word game, in addition to how these novels play with genre and the form of the novel. Both novels are fundamentally concerned with how the written word constructs a puzzle-like world in which each of the narrators direct their own subjectivities towards objects of desire which they cannot ultimately possess. These objects (Lolita and La Maga) are themselves constructed by the playful language of the solipsistic narrators whose desire, finding no object to which to attach itself, turns in on itself and drives them mad. In these novels, the quest for lost lovers becomes a more important game than the actual act of sexual congress. The ecstasy of desire is not in sexual consummation but the pursuit of the infinite puzzle, the cryptic code of desire, that Humbert and Oliveira follow through the American (waste)land and the Franco-Argentine intellectual scene, respectively. By exploring the play-space as a realm of the free play of language, we are aided in our reading of these difficult postmodern texts as deconstructions of stable narratives of desire.
ContributorsBabanovski, Ivan (Author) / Castle, Gregory (Thesis director) / Horan, Elizabeth (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor)
Created2015-05