Department: Arts and Sciences: English and Comparative Literature ![[clear]](close-x.png "Remove this limiter")
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1.
Bliman, Eric.
By Underground Light.
Degree: PhD, Arts and Sciences: English and Comparative Literature, 2012, University of Cincinnati
► Abstract: This creative dissertation consists of two parts: a book-length collection of…
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▼ Abstract: This creative dissertation consists of two parts: a book-length collection of poems and an extended critical essay. The creative portion of the dissertation is By Underground Light. The composition of these poems is informed by my interest in 20th Century American and British poetry, particularly in poets whose work combines elements of modernist and confessionalist traditions. The poems in the dissertation are linked by their preoccupation with personal relationships, work, cultural differences between places where the speaker visits or lives (or has lived), ancient myths, art, and literature. Formally, the poems range from sonnets and ballads to free verse meditations. This formal variety is echoed by the poems’ variety of content, setting, and tone. Among other artistic and literary figures, Thelonius Monk, Weldon Kees, Nora Barnacle, and James Brown appear here. The speaker’s voice blends “high” and “low” diction, which permits a great deal of flexibility in terms of tone, which often shifts from humor to seriousness, and vice versa. The poems are arranged in three sections, which are loosely based on geography. The critical portion of the dissertation is “Unusual Children: Mediation, Estrange-ment, and Growing Up in An Explanation of America and Mercian Hymns.” The critical essay reflects my interest in the contemporary British and American poets Geoffrey Hill and Robert Pinsky; in it, I discuss how their use of children as mediators, who don’t fit in with the society at large, enables them to grapple with the issues of war, estrangement, and the difficulties of growing up. For Pinsky, a more traditional notion of the identity of his eldest daughter (tempered by the speaker’s awareness of her character as an “idea”) allows the reader to sympathize with the girl who spends most of her childhood as an outsider struggling to come to grips with American democracy, which she finds flawed and often ugly. For Hill, the child-poet-king narrator complex challenges our notions of any settled, stable identity in the speaker. This device invites the reader to engage in the difficult process of etymological sifting, and to learn the complex net of associations of words which, for Hill, is serious “[c]hild’s play.”
Advisors/Committee Members: Bogen, Donald.
Subjects: Comparative Literature
Keywords: Poetry; Literature; Pinsky; Hill
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2.
Branscum, John.
One in the Head: A White Trash Memoir.
Degree: PhD, Arts and Sciences: English and Comparative Literature, 2010, University of Cincinnati
► This dissertation consists of two parts: One in the Head: A White…
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▼ This dissertation consists of two parts: One in the Head: A White Trash Memoir, a spiritual memoir, and a scholarly article entitled “The Haunting of Days: The Use of Temporal Models in William Kennedy’s Ironweed.” The memoir, One in the Head, offers a study of spiritual conversion rooted in the socio-cultural particularities of lower class America, and a detailed examination of the racial and class politics that accompanies social ascension. A range of characters – including a violent teenage criminal who plays the protagonist, a non-practicing homosexual politician and mystic, a lower-class homophobic mathematical genius, the schizophrenic sister and itinerant father of the protagonist, and a single mother in pursuit of the perfect man – navigate the trials and tribulations that arise from dysfunctional families, poverty, the conflict between the individual experience of spirituality and particular religious traditions, and the myriad social scripts of masculinity and femininity. Through first person narration, the author explores these subjects through the concept of demonic possession in both metaphorical and literal elaborations, including the influence of words, stories, and other personalities. Combining the tropes and techniques of magical realism with the genre trappings of memoir, the book’s disparate sections are tied together through a progression through the stages of the mystical journey: awakening, the dark night of the soul, purgation, illumination, and unity. While tracing these stages, the book also complicates them via continuously drawing alternately on sacred and secular temporal models and materialist and ideational realities. The critical section entitled “The Haunting of Days: The Use of Temporal Models in William Kennedy’s Ironweed,” is connected to the memoir by virtue of the fact that it explores a similar tension between the material and spiritual realms. The article investigates the use of both sacred and secular models of temporality in contemporary fiction in general, and William Kennedy’s Ironweed in particular. After examining the political consequences of materialist linear, archetypal cyclical, and qualitative rhythmic models of time, and their associated worldviews – evident in fantastic and realist modes of literature, the author examines how rhythmic time offers a psychologically more accurate and existentially more useful model of both linearity and cyclicity. The author concludes that a rhythmic model of time successfully overcomes the subordination of the individual body to cosmic archetypes, which is an inescapable consequence of the cyclical model of time, as well as the loss of psychological meaning and the depiction of the individual body as an ever-decaying object, which arises from a materialist linear model of time. The author argues that through this elaboration of these other models of time, rhythmic time is a model that embraces both the material and spiritual worlds, and makes room for the cohabitation of both ideational and materialist philosophies.
Advisors/Committee Members: Griffith, Michael.
Subjects: American literature
Keywords: Fantastic Literature; Memoir; White Trash Studies; Religion
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3.
Cassel, Adrienne M.
Field Guide to the Heart.
Degree: PhD, Arts and Sciences: English and Comparative Literature, 2011, University of Cincinnati
► Field Guide to the Heart is a collection of poems that explores…
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▼ Field Guide to the Heart is a collection of poems that explores the intersection of nature, ecology, and grief. It draws on the poetic tradition of Robinson Jeffers, Margo Berdeshevsky, Gary Snyder, Annie Dillard, and other contemporary poets to encourage the reader to look again at the marvels of everyday occurrences. Using the heart as a symbol of the connection among and between species, the collection draws out the interconnectedness and interdependency of all things. As John Felstiner explains, in Can Poetry Save the Earth: "First consciousness then conscience." In addition to a collection of original poems, Field Guide to the Heart also includes a critical paper, Muddying the Waters: June Jordan and the Prose Poem, which interrogates the psychological geography of the prose poems in Jordan's Things That I Do in the Dark. Cassel argues that by exploring the psychological integrity of a physical place in her poetry, Jordan has been able to make peace with the relationship she had with her parents.
Advisors/Committee Members: Bogen, Donald.
Subjects: Literature
Keywords: poetry; ecology; grief; prose poetry; heart
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4.
Cornelson, Jesseca Ann.
Tiny Lives.
Degree: PhD, Arts and Sciences: English and Comparative Literature, 2011, University of Cincinnati
► My dissertation, Tiny Lives, consists of a collection of poems of the…
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▼ My dissertation, Tiny Lives, consists of a collection of poems of the same title and a critical essay, ““This Is the Place That You All Made Together”: Traversing the Fantasy of the Global Village in Lost.” The poetry collection is composed of four sections. The first three sections— “Tiny Lives,” “Word Problems,” and “In the Church of Loneliness”—form a single book-length manuscript. The fourth section, “Thirteen Coiled Loops in a Borrowed Rope,” represents, in a still very much raw form, my current work and experimentation towards a new manuscript that takes as its subject the history of my native city, Mobile, Alabama. Each section of the poetry manuscript develops around a central theme. “Tiny Lives” examines both the smallness of individual and animal lives. “Word Problems” is concerned with the limitations of language (and thus poetry) as well as the limitations of “small math” and science as discourses to adequately and completely represent subjective experience. “In the Church of Loneliness” operates out of my poetic philosophy of loneliness as a prime mover, that the desire to connect with others is fundamental both to motivation and identity. Finally, as a coda, “Thirteen Coiled Loops in a Borrowed Rope” represents my recent experiments with documentary poetry rooted in Alabama history; I hope that it will ultimately grow into its own book-length manuscript. The critical portion of my dissertation analyzes how the final season of the television program Lost functions as an ideological fantasy of a global village that covers over the fundamental antagonisms of late capitalism, namely the divide between the First and Third worlds. I ground my discussion in the work of Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek.
Advisors/Committee Members: Drury, John.
Subjects: Literature
Keywords: poetry; American; 20th Century; Lost (Television Program)
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5.
Frank, Rebecca M.
The Last Time I Saw Manila.
Degree: PhD, Arts and Sciences: English and Comparative Literature, 2012, University of Cincinnati
► This dissertation consists of two parts: a book-length collection of poems and…
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▼ This dissertation consists of two parts: a book-length collection of poems and a critical essay. The creative portion of the dissertation is The Last Time I Saw Manila, a volume of poems that examines American and Japanese occupation of the Philippine Islands from the Spanish American War through World War II. While one hybrid family’s narrative serves as a unifying thread in this collection, multiple personae allow the actions and impact of imperialism and war to be depicted from shifting points of view that encompass characters of different ethnic, religious, and national identities. Varied poetic forms and personae mirror the complexity of mestizo and colonial identity in a colonized territory, while the unified lyric voice serves to both argue for, and question, the presence of a fixed moral viewpoint in the face of the atrocities of war and occupation. This collection serves as historical documentation in snapshots, deconstructed family narrative, and contemporary commentary on the legacy and consequences of American imperialism. The critical portion of the dissertation is an examination of the poetic structures used in C.S. Giscombe’s Giscombe Road and Kevin Young’s Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebellion to interrogate dominant historical narratives that have traditionally erased African American experience and history. Giscombe engages in deconstruction of language and the apparently fixed and “true” object, the map, through disruption, fragmentation, and the inclusion of visual typographical and topographical elements. Young revisits and recontextualizes images and texts from John Warner Barber’s 1840 history of the Amistad rebellion through the use of personae that voice the African perspective and through doubling within poetic figures. Each poet offers structural solutions to problems that arise in poetic explorations of historical narratives.
Advisors/Committee Members: Bogen, Donald.
Subjects: American Literature
Keywords: Poetry; Manila
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6.
Green, Charles.
The Gospels of Faith and Doubt: A Novel.
Degree: PhD, Arts and Sciences: English and Comparative Literature, 2010, University of Cincinnati
► The Gospels of Faith and Doubt: A Novel explores the relationship between…
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▼ The Gospels of Faith and Doubt: A Novel explores the relationship between knowledge and belief. The narrator, Thomas Miller, tells the story of his best friend from childhood, Adam Ellison, who claims to be the second son of God. Though Thomas doubts the existence of God, much less Adam's divinity, from an intellectual perspective, often he feels an instinctive, emotional pull toward faith. To reconcile these contradictory views, he writes the story of Adam's life in two parts: one as a straightforward biography or memoir, the other as his own Gospel version of Adam's life. With that structure in mind, the novel carries forward the structural interests of such novels as Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire and Steven Millhauser's Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright. That dual structure allows me to merge two diverse traditions of fiction: the realistic and the speculative. Merging those traditions enables the novel to investigate the relationship between one's experience of life and one's interpretation of the mystical events of Christian texts.
Advisors/Committee Members: Griffith, Michael.
Subjects: American literature
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7.
Grimes, Peter J.
Toadman and Other Encounters.
Degree: PhD, Arts and Sciences: English and Comparative Literature, 2011, University of Cincinnati
► Toadman and Other Encounters is a collection of short fiction exploring the…
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▼ Toadman and Other Encounters is a collection of short fiction exploring the boundaries of human experience, at times experienced by the reader through narrative boundaries. Questions about what makes us human are framed and echoed by questions about what constitutes a story. In one essay and nineteen stories, Toadman and Other Encounters describes and portrays encounters between humans and each other, humans and animals, humans and texts, meanwhile underscoring these encounters with the encounter between narrative and non-narrative modes, distinct moods and tones, conflicting voices and points of view.
Advisors/Committee Members: Griffith, Michael.
Subjects: American Literature
Keywords: Short fiction; Death; Stories; Animals; Mothers; Houses
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8.
Harmon Threatt, Elizabeth A.
The Dreams of Daughters.
Degree: PhD, Arts and Sciences: English and Comparative Literature, 2012, University of Cincinnati
► The Dreams of Daughters is a collection of poems that explores the…
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▼ The Dreams of Daughters is a collection of poems that explores the connections between family, domesticity, death, love and grief. Organized into four sections, the creative portion of my dissertation follows a trajectory that explores internalized and externalized grief and familial relationships. With a nearly consistent female narrator, the manuscript begins by looking at highly personal interactions between mothers, daughters, and sisters. As the sections progress, the narrator moves from the dreams of daughters, to those of lovers, husbands and wives, and fathers, ultimately returning to the moment that sparks the entire book – the mother’s death. Together, these poems provide a creative look at what happens to individuals and families when death alters the perspective of every relationship. This dissertation also includes a critical essay that focuses on the poetry collection Domestic Violence by the Irish poet Eavan Boland. The essay argues that these poems work to critique and dismantle mythologies of women that nationalist rhetoric often creates. Through a close examination of several poems in this collection, I show how Boland poetically subverts the woman-as-muse trope and strives to create a new and empowered space for women.
Advisors/Committee Members: Bogen, Donald.
Subjects: Literature
Keywords: poetry; grief; nationalism; Boland
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9.
Lynch, Julianne.
Mother, Mother (a novel).
Degree: PhD, Arts and Sciences: English and Comparative Literature, 2010, University of Cincinnati
► Continuing a tradition of literary retellings, the creative portion of my dissertation,…
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▼ Continuing a tradition of literary retellings, the creative portion of my dissertation, a novel currently titled Mother, Mother, is a loose reimagining of the Grimm fairytale "Snow White." Set in modern day, the novel does not simply revisit each element of the original tale, but instead explores the complexities of mother-daughter dynamics, as well as the cultural definitions and demands on female beauty and the ways women are (de)formed by such forces. Beginning with Blair's miraculous birth in a snowstorm, the novel follows her childhood and early adult years as she attempts to come to terms with the death of her mother and her thorny relationship with her stepmother, Vivian. Rather than creating a distinct polarization of good and evil, this version attempts to present its characters as fully-developed women who struggle with their roles, both as (step)mother/daughter, as well as women in a contemporary society obsessed with youth and beauty. The novel is particularly concerned with mirrors and how they shape not only our present but also our past and future selves. The first-person, retrospective narrative also creates a certain amount of ambiguity surrounding the truth of the magical experiences of Blair's early childhood and asks the reader to consider the artificial aspect of all memory.
Advisors/Committee Members: Griffith, Michael.
Subjects: English literature
Keywords: mother; retelling
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10.
Maxwell, Kristi.
PLAN/K (poems) and “From No Body to Some Bodies: A Reading of Footnotes and Endnotes as Form in Jennifer Martenson’s Xq28 and Jenny Boully’s The Body and [one love affair]*”.
Degree: PhD, Arts and Sciences: English and Comparative Literature, 2010, University of Cincinnati
► Poems in this manuscript were borne out of a curiosity about—and further…
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▼ Poems in this manuscript were borne out of a curiosity about—and further research into—pirates and piracy. The title, PLAN/K, is a nod to the primarily fictionalized practice of walking the plank and a play on Plan B. Plan B, of course, signifies alternative plans in general, but it is also the name for the emergency contraceptive pill. If Plan B manages accidents, then Plan K cultivates accidents through writing strategies that privilege mishearing and misreading. Furthering the spirit of piracy, and pilfering particularly, the poems incorporate anagrams and puns, figures of speech often considered base or crude, but which can also be considered as devices that disrupt and reroute language while allowing the uncanny in language to surface. The essay explores footnotes and endnotes as forms in three contemporary books of poetry written by women. Martenson’s Xq28 and Boully’s first book, The Body, radically foreground the footnote by making it the sole textual component on the page. Through her use of footnotes, the essay argues that Martenson highlights an erased body in order to critique lesbian erasure and uses the margins to frame a subversive anti-hegemonic speaking position. In contrast, the essay argues Boully invests in psychological reactions to a missing body by staging repression and the return of the repressed through alternately subsuming and subsiding footnotes and the covering over (more or less successfully) of the missing body of a dead lover who is figured in the blank textual body. Whereas The Body and its form are motivated by the tenets of melancholia, in her second book, [one love affair]*, the essay argues Boully stages processes of mourning. Following Jeffrey Adams, the essay considers intertextuality in terms of “aesthetic object-relating.” The essay argues that palimpsest and endnotes perform a reactivation of object-relating and help the speaker of the poems reinvest in relationships with other subjects rather than withdraw from such investments because of an inability to grieve the lost object.
Advisors/Committee Members: Bogen, Donald.
Subjects: Literature
Keywords: Footnotes; Contemporary Poetry; Pirates; Piracy; Language; Endnotes
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11.
Osborne, Virginia.
Dark And Bloody Ground: Southern Literature After the Bomb.
Degree: PhD, Arts and Sciences: English and Comparative Literature, 2010, University of Cincinnati
► My dissertation, “Dark and Bloody Ground: Southern Literature After the Bomb,” considers…
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▼ My dissertation, “Dark and Bloody Ground: Southern Literature After the Bomb,” considers the generation of postwar Southern authors and the effect of the Cold War on their work. Focusing on texts by William Styron, Lillian Smith, Walker Percy, James Dickey, and Ellen Douglas, I demonstrate the presence of nuclear anxiety and other cultural trends specific to the atomic age in a region typically viewed as too intellectually and culturally insular to look abroad. Characters in the novels I consider live in suburban neighborhoods, watch television, go to movies, and buy cars and houses typical of postwar American society, yet they also remain preoccupied with Southern history. The key players in my dissertation simultaneously grapple with the uncertain national future and the objectionable regional past and are unsure of how to reconcile these two seemingly disparate perspectives. Yet the Southern and the American experience are not as dissimilar as has been previously believed, and this is the crux of my argument. Drawing from recent historical and sociocultural studies which connect idiosyncratically Southern social conventions such as segregation with Cold War attitudes such as anticommunism, I claim that national and global concerns affect Southern authors more than has been previously believed and suggest that the regional experience of cultural conservatism and racial strife in the decades after World War II may be attributed to the American Cold War experience.
Advisors/Committee Members: Rieke, Alison.
Subjects: American literature
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12.
Palmer, Soren G.
The Swimming Rabbit.
Degree: PhD, Arts and Sciences: English and Comparative Literature, 2011, University of Cincinnati
► The same week three friends open a restaurant called The Swimming Rabbit…
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▼ The same week three friends open a restaurant called The Swimming Rabbit in Elora, South Carolina, a woman is murdered across town, leaving her twelve-year-old daughter, Jasmine, pregnant and orphaned. In the wake of the murder several lives are thrown into chaos. Swimming Rabbit owner Boyd Tennor wants to use the tragedy to his advantage, hoping a fundraiser for Jasmine will increase the restaurant's reputation and revenues. NFL icon Sterling Carroll offers to participate, wanting to help Jasmine stay at the home run by Boyd's ex-girlfriend Emily. Boyd and his business partners are thrilled, but Boyd's employee Lamont is not. Lamont has been keeping secret not only that he's Sterling's brother, but that Sterling was kicked out of the NFL for gambling and is currently a bookie for Elora's biggest criminal. Lamont, a PhD candidate, waits tables only to help Sterling pay off his gambling debt. Preoccupied with his brother's financial troubles, his own struggles within the philosophy department, and his longing for an unavailable woman, Lamont fails to ask the most important question: Why is Sterling, recently fallen on hard times himself, so interested in helping this little girl? What might his involvement be in her mother's death? As the fundraiser draws near, Sterling’s past gambling problems begin to jeopardize The Swimming Rabbit’s delicate balance. While the owners fight for control of the restaurant, Jasmine fights for a place to live.
Advisors/Committee Members: Stewart, Leah.
Subjects: American Literature
Keywords: Novel; Restaurants; Theology; Southern; Race; Nietzsche
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13.
Poissant, David James.
The Cost of Living: Stories.
Degree: PhD, Arts and Sciences: English and Comparative Literature, 2011, University of Cincinnati
► The Cost of Living: Stories is a collection of thematically linked short…
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▼ The Cost of Living: Stories is a collection of thematically linked short fiction that explores the drama of the everyday in the lives of children, women, and men. In fifteen stories, The Cost of Living illuminates life in and beyond the contemporary urban and suburban southeastern United States. Characters, plagued by hardships of their own making, struggle with relationships and the demands of family. Animals, too, find their way into the fiction, as characters intrude on the natural world. By turns comic, dramatic, and frightening, and written in modes both realist and experimental, this collection gives voice to the heroes of the conflicts that often go unnoticed in our own backyards.
Advisors/Committee Members: Griffith, Michael.
Subjects: Literature
Keywords: fiction; short stories
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14.
Potter, George E.
Global Politics and (Trans)National Arts: Staging the “War on Terror” in New York, London, and Cairo.
Degree: PhD, Arts and Sciences: English and Comparative Literature, 2011, University of Cincinnati
► In the post-9/11 era, over a hundred theatric performances exploring the fallout…
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▼ In the post-9/11 era, over a hundred theatric performances exploring the fallout from the “war on terror” have been staged in Cairo, London, and New York. Though never discussed in relation to one another, the works from major cultural centers on three continents provide valuable insights into how people from three cultures have responded to the wars and political policies since 9/11, as well as how they have attempted to form their resistance to those policies. To explore this, my study begins with a historiography of “terrorism,” exploring the term’s roots in the French Revolution as a means by which to discuss state violence, a use that was standard throughout the nineteenth century. However, during the twentieth century, as the nation-state became the normative structure for political organization, resistance to it—“subnationals,” as they would come to be called in State Department parlance—were redefined as “terrorist.” Therefore, the construction of the United Nations, the development of human rights discourse, and the codification of terrorism laws occurred within the same era of organizing (un)acceptable political behavior. The next three chapters of the dissertation then undertake examining theatric works within each of the nations under consideration alone. From there, the following five chapters focus on formal or thematic concerns—the political efficacy of musical theater, representations of Afghanistan, the staging of Iraqi voices, stories of soldiers returning from war, and diasporic theater—in cross-cultural analyses, comparing how similar narratives and structures have been used in different cultural contexts to resist both the “war on terror” and local forms of political oppression. The final chapter of the dissertation looks at Naomi Wallace’s theater-making practices, before closely examining her play The Fever Chart: Three Visions of the Middle East, one of the few American dramas to draw connections between Palestine and Iraq, as well as one of the few plays about the “war on terror” to have been staged in Cairo, London, and New York. Through an examination of these performances, I argue for the necessity of a more intimate form of transnationalism, one that can understand the effects of global political events on the smallest spaces of distant lives, as well as one that resists the underlying systems of oppression, rather than their symptoms. The conclusion then expands on this argument as not only a call for artistic production, but also for scholarly endeavors in a world where artistic production has become more global and diffuse.
Advisors/Committee Members: Braziel, Jana.
Subjects: Theater
Keywords: theater; war on terror; Egypt; United States; United Kingdom; transnational
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15.
Schoesler, Matthew.
The Macaw in the Supermarket.
Degree: PhD, Arts and Sciences: English and Comparative Literature, 2012, University of Cincinnati
► This dissertation consists of two parts: a book-length collection of poems and…
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▼ This dissertation consists of two parts: a book-length collection of poems and a critical article. The poems have been sorted into five sections, each of which focuses on a particular theme, mood, or form found throughout the entire collection. Beginning with explorations of familiar experiences and ending in a search for spiritual transcendence, these poems attempt to discover what is mysterious about the ordinary and what is ordinary about the mysterious. The critical article explores how the social, cultural, economic, and political transformations that occurred within the United States after World War II made T. S. Eliot’s concept of the historical sense newly relevant to poets like Richard Wilbur. Drawing on two studies of postwar poetry—Robert van Hallberg’s American Poetry and Culture: 1945-1980 and Edward Brunner’s Cold War Poetry—it closely examines selections from Wilbur’s poetry and criticism to determine how he refashioned Eliot’s idea for a broad American audience
Advisors/Committee Members: Bogen, Donald.
Subjects: American Literature
Keywords: American Poetry; Richard Wilbur; T. S. Eliot; the historical sense; postwar
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16.
Warren, Suzanne E.
Bad Gift: Stories and Essays.
Degree: PhD, Arts and Sciences: English and Comparative Literature, 2011, University of Cincinnati
► My dissertation comprises six parts: three selections of short stories, two groupings…
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▼ My dissertation comprises six parts: three selections of short stories, two groupings of personal essays, and a scholarly essay. Parts I and V include personal essays on travel, cockroaches, the functions of religion, family, joy, and taste, to name a few topics. Formally, the pieces range from conventional essays drawing on journalistic and academic conventions to more experimental, fragmented narratives. All deploy autobiography in service of larger statements about the world beyond the self. The movement of a writing mind “essaying” to understand self and world determines the shape of these idiosyncratic visions; the unpredictable oscillation between inner and outer worlds generates narrative momentum and energy. Part III follows protagonist Nora Halpern from girlhood to middle age through a series of linked stories. The stories function both individually, as independent stories, and together, as a single novelistic enterprise. As domestic fiction, the collection focuses on familial and intimate relationships and the texture of women’s lives. At the same time, the stories are not divorced from the world at large; they aim to investigate how broader issues of power are played out in the private interactions between men and women, children and adults. As the stories follow Nora from suburban childhood to urban adulthood, they explore the ways history and place shape the experience of individual characters. Parts II and IV also explore the social and psychological realities of female lives. However, these works move beyond the formal conventions of domestic realism in favor of a broader generic range encompassing satire, fantasy, and fable. Finally, in the critical portion of this dissertation, I use Michel de Certeau’s understanding of glossolalia to read Toni Morrison’s approach to language and storytelling in Beloved.
Advisors/Committee Members: Griffith, Michael.
Subjects: American Literature
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17.
Wilkinson, Catherine S.
Pleasant Bluff.
Degree: PhD, Arts and Sciences: English and Comparative Literature, 2011, University of Cincinnati
► Pleasant Bluff is a collection of poems that explores the dramatic possibilities…
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▼ Pleasant Bluff is a collection of poems that explores the dramatic possibilities of poetic form within a contemporary context. The poems center on a handful of characters in a small, rural town, among them a cosmetologist, a weatherman, and a historical interpreter named Wynona Stone. The esoteric nature of these characters’ occupational personae often serves as a counterpoint to their private lives, and to this end Wynona Stone emerges as the book’s real star. Together, the poems provide a glimpse of Wynona’s world, past and present—the roles she plays as well as her efforts to subvert them. The dissertation also includes a critical paper titled “‘I Court His Speech, Not Him ’: Reading Behind Medbh McGuckian’s Shelmalier.” Focusing on the presence of other texts and authors in Medbh McGuckian’s 1998 collection Shelmalier, this paper offers close readings of several poems in which a collage method of composition allows McGuckian to access conversations and contexts from which she was previously excluded.
Advisors/Committee Members: Bogen, Donald.
Subjects: Literature
Keywords: Poetry; Medbh McGuckian
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