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Full text release has been delayed at the author's request until September 01, 2026

ETD Abstract Container

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Pavlov's Dog

Williams, Derek JG
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1618987375859709

Abstract Details

2021, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, English (Arts and Sciences).
“The self…” states Louise Gluck, “was the nineteenth century’s discovery, an object for a time, of rich curiosity, its structure, its responses, endlessly absorbing. And as long as it was watched in this spirit of curiosity and openness, it functioned as an other; the art arising from such openness is an art of inquiry, not conclusion, dynamic rather than static.” In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, poetry’s obsession with the “watched” self has only grown more acute. That it has remained “dynamic” should be attributed to the distance cultivated between the self, the speaker, and the beholder. The critical introduction to this dissertation contextualizes poetry with popular American culture, specifically in film, and the occupations of the poet and actor, focusing on tensions between the fictional and autobiographical selves. It argues that intertextuality, and approaches such as ekphrasis and persona, reinforce the notion of the self as an “other” in order to renew our absorption in contemporary American poetry in parallel to popular culture. The creative portion of the dissertation is a collection of poems that wrestles to gain knowledge of the self who is other, and therefore ineffable. It addresses Dean Young’s crucial question: “Who doesn’t sense an unbridgeable alienation between ourselves and the world…That our poems speak to no one, not even fully to ourselves?”
Mark Halliday (Committee Chair)
Eric Lemay (Committee Member)
Jill Allyn Rosser (Committee Member)
Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf (Committee Member)
108 p.
Literature
American Poetry; Literature; Film; Acting; Poetry; Persona; Popular Culture

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Williams, D. J. (2021). Pavlov's Dog [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1618987375859709

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Williams, Derek. Pavlov's Dog. 2021. Ohio University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1618987375859709.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Williams, Derek. "Pavlov's Dog." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio University, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1618987375859709

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ohiou1618987375859709
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This open access ETD is published by Ohio University and OhioLINK.