Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1965, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1971, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, English

Pain Management in Nineteenth-Century American Literature explores how three writers, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Charles Chesnutt, imagine and theorize pain and pain relief during a period of burgeoning medical and political upheaval in the nineteenth-century United States. To situate these writers within their historic moment, I trace a trajectory of the cultural and medical attitudes toward pain. In theorizing human suffering, each of these three writers actively revises the cartesian division between the body and mind that still persists in writing about pain today, as demonstrated by the dominance of Elaine Scarry's 1985 argument that pain actively destroys language. This dissertation fundamentally revises Scarry's claim by illustrating how literature from my three case studies works to redefine the relationship between the phenomenology of pain and each writer's respective representational projects. Overall, I offer a way out of Scarry's insistence on the inexpressibility of pain and embrace these authors' success in rendering pain and in fashioning literary strategies for pain management and relief. For Dickinson, I situate her poetics of the sublime within the context of the newly developed technology of anesthesia. I argue that Dickinson portrays sublime encounters with art as analogous to the pain relief provided by anesthesia, which demonstrates her poetry's ability to oscillate between metaphorical and literal pain management methods. To the field of Whitman studies, I provide a new investigation of Whitman's rendering of soldiers' pain through a cluster of his earliest Civil War poems. These poems, I argue, demonstrate Whitman's attempt to find the most precise language possible to depict the immediacy and immanence of soldiers' pain. In my third chapter, I contribute a new way of reading Charles Chesnutt's Uncle Julius tales, in which Chesnutt demonstrates how the act of storytelling is similar to Black conjure magic in its ability to help miti (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Elizabeth Hewitt (Advisor) Subjects: Literature

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1959, English

Committee: J. Robert Bashore (Advisor) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, English

No surviving medieval text puts forward an explicit theologia tangendi (a “theology of touching”). Still, the religious literature of the English Middle Ages is nonetheless replete with devotional acts of touching, reaching, grasping, holding, shaping, and caressing. Touch may constitute one small facet of the phenomenology of religion, but it requires more scholarly attention. That the literature and material culture of the Christian Middle Ages were often oriented toward achieving contact with the divine underscores the need to consider the theological implications of touch. This dissertation puts a name to these myriad, disconnected references to touching that crop up across medieval English literature — a “tactile theology” that acknowledges the centrality of the hands in medieval texts, the lives of those texts, and the lives of their writers and readers. Put simply, tactile theology is a reciprocal process: just as theology shaped medieval understandings of touch, acts of touching, in turn, were avenues for approaching theological questions. The dissertation takes as its primary focus the touch and embodied experience of medieval women because gender difference in the Middle Ages was often described in theological and sensory terms. Using tactile theology as a lens for teasing out the significance of tactile language and metaphor, the following chapters explore how medieval readers and writers considered (sometimes in conflicting terms) women's embodiment and women's participation in religious life. Individual chapters offer case studies in the Junius 11 manuscript of Old English biblical poetry (particularly Genesis B, ca. 960–990), the thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse (ca. 1225) alongside one of its fifteenth-century Latin translations, and the Book of Margery Kempe (ca. 1438). A final chapter on the medievalism of Emily Dickinson further underscores how tactile theology supports productive readings of women's writing beyond the tradi (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Leslie Lockett (Advisor); Ethan Knapp (Committee Member); Christopher Jones (Committee Member); Karen Winstead (Advisor) Subjects: Gender Studies; Medieval Literature

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2020, English (Arts and Sciences)

In an age of both religious revival and upheaval, Emily Dickinson was not concerned in showing how Christian or un-Christian she was in her poetry, but her affections focused on the rationalization and deconstruction of religious beliefs in the nineteenth century. Previous studies vary from claiming Dickinson as a devoted saint to her as a blasphemous woman poet rebelling against a patriarchal God. She was determined to scrutinize God and the assumptions surrounding religious beliefs of her time in search of a line of inquiry that includes doubt and uncertainty. The problem with defining Dickinson as a religious poet (or not) derails readers from unravelling and appreciating the way Dickinson's poems create a dialectic approach to perceiving the world. She is not a theologian who argues about faith. Rather, Dickinson uses the performativity of roles such as the rejected and rejecting outcasts, passive supplicant, and the playful warrior to present the paradoxical tensions of faith. By challenging rigid religious belief that shun the unknown and uncertainty, Dickinson concerns herself with the validity, methods, and scope of belief to expose the dangers of homogenous ideology and religious rhetoric which limits the possibilities of knowledge. I argue that Dickinson's process of determining aspects of Christian beliefs—the tension between her need for rationalized epistemology and her longing for faith in God—point toward her resilience in seeking the truth of things. Dickinson is concerned with a system of belief which is both epistemological and faith based. By tracing Dickinson's treatment of the unknown through a paradoxical framework of belief and unbelief, especially the way she embraces and discards both scientific methods and conventional aspects of faith—often seen as necessary and essential—reveal a line of inquiry which is multifocal and erratic. She wants to “tell all the truth and tell it slant.”

Committee: Thomas Scanlan (Advisor); Paul Jones (Committee Member); Mark Halliday (Committee Member) Subjects: Bible; Biblical Studies; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2017, English (Arts and Sciences)

The dissertation is divided into two sections: an essay titled "God Trap: Faith and Lack in the Poetry of Anne Carson and Emily Dickinson" and a book manuscript titled To You. "God Trap: Faith and Lack in the Poetry of Anne Carson and Emily Dickinson " uses Anne Carson's conception of the erotic to analyze religious poetry by Carson and Emily Dickinson. When we view our relationship with God through the lens of Carson's eros, our religious fervor and desire to know God become a symptom of what Carson calls “lack,” our inability to become one with the beloved—in this case, God. Given that this “lack” is an integral part of the way the erotic works, doubt, then, becomes an integral part of our faith in God. To You is a collection of poems that explores doubt, God, and feminism, and the possible connections between these subjects. The speaker of these poems, by turns, feels defiant toward, oppressed by, or skeptical of the God character or His stand-ins. Themes of power and the ways we might question it unite the collection.

Committee: Jill Rosser (Committee Chair); Mark Halliday (Committee Member); Carey Snyder (Committee Member); Cory Crawford (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Musical Arts, The Ohio State University, 2015, Music

The project Illuminated Scores and the Architectural Design of Musical Form is designed as an approach to making scholarly editions for performing artists and educators that will portray the form and structure of a musical composition. It incorporates semiotic tools into the study of musical language intended to make the architectural design visible in a coherent format. This study develops a method of representing music graphically that differs from the established score layout, reorganizing content in a manner that allows one to overcome the constraints within which musical skills are developed under the current model of publishing music. The motivation for such a study grew out of the need to enable students to experience an immediate representation of the overall formal design of a musical composition. Initially thought of as overlaying a Schenkerian analytical sketch over the published work horizontally aligned, the project has developed into a new publishing format containing the researcher's analysis of works by Bach, Mozart and Schoenberg. It is the author's hypothesis that this new perspective will impact the ways we learn and teach musical form and structure. The goal is to present music notation in a format similar to that of poetic verse rather than that of continuous prose, where one measure follows another in no relevant way. Phrase lengths, melodic relationships, harmonic structure, and the number of measures in a system will play a significant role in the visual layout of the work. In addition, diagrams and color-coding illustrate how mathematics and music are combined to explain the concept of balance in musical form, thereby revealing the inherent beauty of a composer's cohesive thought process. The author points out mathematical concepts of numerical sequences, like Mersenne Primes and other patterns in Bach, and the Fibonacci sequence and Golden Proportion in sonata form movements of Mozart. The current stage of this research is that of a (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Steven Glaser (Advisor); Charles Atkinson (Committee Member); David Clampitt (Committee Member) Subjects: Education; Music; Music Education

Bachelor of Arts, University of Toledo, 2015, English

This essay argues a relatively new reading of Emily Dickinson's marriage poems. The poems I have chosen to represent this category of her poetry are analyzed by combining the traditional technique of analysis with a more modern approach. In the past it was customary for critics to take the “I” in Dickinson's poems literally by attributing each of the poems' contents entirely to her biography. This approach assumes that Dickinson was not fit to write poetry outside of her own experience because she lived an isolated life. On the contrary, her withdrawal is one of the key elements that made Dickinson's brilliant poetry possible. She did not need to go out into society to write about topics beyond the domestic sphere of her time period. Dickinson was intelligent enough to tackle and question different issues with the use of different personae. I find the marriage poems the most interesting because Dickinson uses the persona of a wife without having married. Some would call these marriage poems “mystical” or claim that these particular poems are Dickinson's imagined marriage with some lover. Though I do not agree with these explanations, I believe that the marriage poems must be analyzed formally with biography in mind. Dickinson must be put into social context by understanding the role of women in society during her time period and analyzing the reason why she chose to isolate herself. In doing so, I argue that, just as Dickinson redefines domesticity by using it as a sphere for creativity rather than timidity, she also transforms the role of wife to one that suits her through the marriage poems.

Committee: Sara Lundquist Ph.D (Advisor); Melissa Gregory Ph.D (Advisor); Skaidrite Stelzer (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

BA, Oberlin College, 1980, English

In this emphatically skeptical poem, Emily Dickinson squarely connects with one of the central issues of romantic and modern literature: the individual's alienation from the world in which he lives. This ontological separation had its origins in modern thought in the philosophy of Descartes and Hobbes, and was invested with scientific certainty by the revelation of Newtonian physics. Materialism gave way to mechanism, and the universe was reduced to substance and motion; it was emptied of purpose and value, and was thus seen as separate from the vital world of private experience. Inheritors of this world-view, the Romantics turned to the unifying force of the imagination. Through the power of imaginative vision, they sought to heal the breach between subject and object, and find a meaningful connection between man and the universe.

Committee: David Walker (Advisor) Subjects: American Literature; Literature

Master of Arts in English, Youngstown State University, 2008, Department of Languages

Emily Dickinson, in her lifetime, wrote approximately 1,800 poems and over a thousand letters. According to R.W. Franklin, a Dickinson biographer, Dickinson's productivity climaxed in the first half of the 1860s. Between 1861 and 1862 Franklin estimated Dickinson wrote 365 poems that she eventually self-published in Fascicles. My argument is that Dickinson used her Fascicles (specifically 12 and part of 13) and letters to justify turning her back on organized religion. It was not a coincidence that with 365 poems to choose from Dickinson selected 29 poems for Fascicle 12 and 19 for Fascicle 13. Dickinson places these poems in a precise order as to make her argument for turning her back on organized religion. She also uses her poetry to construct a religious dialogue that explores her crises of faith, self doubt and how she will obtain salvation. Faith and religion were important to Dickinson, but not the religion of her family (Congregational Calvinism). Dickinson also wrote over a thousand letters to family, friends and people she didn't know. These letters contained hints as to Dickinson's impending religious conflict. In letter 220 written in 1860 and repeated in poem F202, Dickinson refers to faith as a "fine invention." This is an important clue to how Dickinson was beginning to examine her crises of faith. This repeating of words is an important pattern that Dickinson uses in her letters and poems to explore then challenge her family's religion. In order to reach my conclusion, it was important to do an explication of her letters and poems to look for patterns and word usage. Webster's 1845 and 1865 Dictionaries, as well as the Emily Dickinson Lexicon, were important tools. The dictionaries yielded religious definitions of words (definitions which have been lost over the years) that Dickinson uses to dramatize and explore her crises of faith.

Committee: Stephanie Tingley PhD (Committee Chair); James Schramer PhD (Committee Member); Steven Reese PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature; Religion

Bachelor of Arts, University of Toledo, 2010, English

Decades of scholarly research have portrayed Emily Dickinson as living a strikingly reserved personal and social life, distributing her poetry not through publication but through handwritten correspondence. In this paper, however, I examine recent critical scholarship on Emily Dickinson's letters to few close friends that reveal her to be a politically aware citizen. I pair this with a reading of the three poems: “Blazing in Gold, and quenching in purple” (02/29/1864), “Flowers – Well – if anybody” (03/02/1864), and “These are the days when Birds come back” (03/11/1864), published anonymously in a Union-driven newspaper entitled the Drum Beat alongside other contemporary poetry in February and March 1864. This Drum Beat publication shows that, at the crucial historical moment of the Civil War, the notoriously private and unpublished poet's work did, in fact, appear in a public venue, and begs readers to examine the significance of the three specific poems within their original context. While scholars have published legitimate and commonly-accepted readings of these works that emphasize their poetic form and their themes of nature, religion and death, these readings have, for the most part, been consistently non war-related. This paper adds to the recent and exciting scholarship of Dickinson's political awareness. Through close attention to the poems and their context, I argue that these poems serve as Emily Dickinson's public response to the Civil War.

Committee: Dr. Sara Lundquist PhD (Advisor); Dr. Melissa Valiska Gregory PhD (Advisor); Dr. Thomas E. Barden PhD (Other) Subjects: American Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2005, History of Art

The United States sculptor Roni Horn has produced four bodies of work that present lines from Emily Dickinson as aluminum columns and cubes: How Dickinson Stayed Home (1992-3); When Dickinson Shut Her Eyes (1993); Keys and Cues (1994); and Untitled (Gun) (1994). This dissertation examines Horn's Dickinson-objects within the context of twentieth century sculpture as well as within the context of debates surrounding the material and conceptual circumference of the Dickinson poem. It is argued that Horn's work harness the syntactical demands of the Dickinson lyric in the service of the artist's preoccupation with temporal experience and the demands of sculpture. Each of the dissertation's four chapters discusses one work in terms of both Dickinson studies and the history of sculpture. Chapter One considers How Dickinson Stayed Home and examines circumference as theme and artistic strategy in Dickinson's work followed by a discussion of the dialectical relationship between center and circumference enacted by the work of Robert Smithson and Richard Serra. Chapter Two investigates the relationship between part and whole that characterizes the Dickinson poem followed by a discussion of Keys and Cues within the context of minimalism. Chapter Three argues that When Dickinson Shut Her Eyes is not only a reading of Dickinson but a doubling of Dickinson. A comparison of When Dickinson Shut Her Eyes to Dickinson-inspired works by Joseph Cornell and Lesley Dill explores the difference between reading and doubling. Chapter Four considers Horn's 1994 untitled work (Gun) and discusses the significance of the poem “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun” within the Dickinson corpus and within feminist literary criticism in order to highlight a tension at the heart of Horn's series—that between the experience of the Dickinson poem as “work” and the experience of Dickinson's words as “text.” A comparison of Horn's use of Dickinson's words with the use of text by Lawrence Weiner, Mary Kelly, a (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Stephen Melville (Advisor) Subjects: Art History

BA, Oberlin College, 2009, English

This paper examines the uncanny object in Emily Dickinson's poems and letters through the lens of critic Susan Stewart's writing on souvenirs.

Committee: David Walker (Advisor) Subjects: American Literature

MA, Kent State University, 2010, College of the Arts / School of Music, Hugh A. Glauser

Emily is a setting of thirteen poems of Emily Dickinson for soprano with flute, oboe, viola, cello, and piano. It is approximately thirty minutes in duration. Each song has a base instrumentation of soprano and piano. The cycle starts and ends with songs featuring the entire group, while the center song is for only soprano and piano. Each of the other songs has its own instrumentation that adds one or two instruments to the soprano and piano. Each possible instrument combination is used only once, and the combinations have been arranged to achieve an even distribution throughout the cycle. Between the clearly defined songs are solo or duo passages that link them together.

Committee: Frank Wiley DMA (Advisor); Thomas Janson (Committee Member); Ralph Lorenz (Committee Member) Subjects: Music

Master of Arts, University of Akron, 2012, English-Literature

Reading Emily Dickinson's use of pearls, diamonds, and gold and silver alongside periodicals available during her day helps to build a stronger sense of what the popular American cultural conceptions were regarding those materials and the entities they influenced. After looking at pearls in “The Malay – took the Pearl –” (Fr451) in Chapter II, we discover how Dickinson's invocation of a specific kind of racial other, the Malay, and the story she constructs around them provides a very detailed view of the level of racial bias reserved for the Malay race, especially in relation to their role in the pearl industry. Most criticism regarding her gemstone use centers upon the various layers of interpretation fleshed out from her work rather than also looking to her poems as a source of musings on actual geo-political occurrences. Chapter III weighs Dickinson use of diamond in “Reverse cannot befall” (Fr565) against her established diamond strategy to uncover a historical power exchange between Bolivia and Peru. Through an examination of the context of war surrounding “A Plated Life – diversified” (Fr864) and “Luck is not chance –” (Fr1360) and what she does with gold and silver in Chapter IV, it is evident that these poems are heavily influenced by Dickinson's reaction to the American Civil War. Through this examination of her use of gemstones and other precious materials, it becomes clear that Dickinson's work is as much a source of history as it is a contribution to it.

Committee: Jon Miller Dr. (Advisor); Mary Biddinger Dr. (Committee Member); Patrick Chura Dr. (Committee Member); Hillary Nunn Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature

DMA, University of Cincinnati, 2013, College-Conservatory of Music: Voice

This document explores "Four Dickinson Songs","Between the Bliss and Me", and "One Bee and Revery", by American song composer Lori Laitman. These song cycles are all settings of Emily Dickinson poetry, Laitman's most frequently set poet. This document examines themes found within Dickinson's poetry according to a biographical and historical context and evaluates their presence within the poetry chosen for Ms. Laitman's cycles. Most specifically, it provides a study for these cycles through the exploration of Dickinson's poetry, interviews with Lori Laitman, and attention to musical elements specific to each song. Furthermore, it provides a compilation of all Lori Laitman's settings of Emily Dickinson poetry. This document gives valuable information for performing these song cycles, guiding performers to a deeper interpretation.

Committee: Barbara Paver D.M.A. (Committee Chair); Gwendolyn Detwiler D.M.A. (Committee Member); Karen Lykes M.M. (Committee Member) Subjects: Music