PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2008, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

Lunulae, by Claudia Skutar, is a creative dissertation containing original poems, a nonfiction essay, and a critical paper on the writings of contemporary American poet Mary Oliver titled “Mary Oliver's Quest for the Sublime.” The creative portion of the work comprises five sections, four of poetry and one with the creative nonfiction essay, “Getting to Water.” The lyric and narrative poems use relationships and nature as settings to describe themes of love, loss, aging, and death, essentially much of the emotional stuff of the human life cycle. The personae of these pieces often center on the narrative “I” but do move at times to the voice of a third-person narrator. The shift creates a tonal range in the work which allows transverse between the intimate and the universal in human experience. While the narrative “I” is not intended to be autobiographical, it is a deliberate locus of the pieces because it is through the “I” that human experience occurs. In contrast to the poems, the nonfiction essay, “Getting to Water,” is based in autobiography and is included here as a complement to the poems to illuminate the importance of landscape as a setting in the work as a whole. The critical paper, “Mary Oliver's Quest for the Sublime,” is included here for the same reason. The central focus of this examination of Oliver's work is the key role that nature plays in her aesthetic. Lunulae as dissertation is thus knit together at its core by its references to the natural world, in which all life is rooted.

Committee: Donald Bogen Dr. (Committee Chair); John Drury Prof. (Committee Member); Joanie Mackowski Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: English literature