Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, French and Italian

In the last thirty years, Italy has experienced an unprecedented demographic revolution. Today, about 10% of the Italian population, five million, are of foreign origins. Migrants living in Italy come from more than one hundred countries. Nevertheless, Italian mass media and political discourses have increasingly depicted the arrival of these persons as a crisis menacing Italy's political stability, an emergency threatening Italian society, identity, and future. In contrast, contemporary Italian documentary has produced a significant body of work that can be defined as "of migration”: documentaries that narrate contemporary migrations moving to, across, and within Italy, which engage with the complexity of human mobility. This dissertation investigates non-fiction films' audiovisual language, production, and distribution practices in Italy by showing how Italian emigration and colonial pasts influence contemporary perceptions of migration phenomena and the Italian national identity. Exploring documentaries produced between 2006 and 2019, I analyze their nuanced representations and narratives. Within the corpus of non-fiction films I discuss, a strain of non-fiction films embraces a poetics of emergency that focuses on the dramatic spectacle of the endangered bodies of the migrants and promotes a humanitarian approach to the migration ‘problem' but, in so doing, reinforces the obsession for the space of the border and the primacy of images in sense-making. The privileged space to investigate the reality of human mobility is the Central Mediterranean Route that connects sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, East African, and North Africa to Europe. Thousands of migrants cross the Mediterranean to reach the Italian (and European) shores whenever possible. Every year, thousands die during the attempt. These documentaries show you the unfolding of the humanitarian crises at sea. A second strain of documentaries embraces what I call poetics of urgency: a filmmaking approach t (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Dana Renga (Advisor); Jonhatan Mullins (Committee Member); Alan O'Leary (Committee Member); John Davidson (Committee Member) Subjects: Cinematography; European Studies; Film Studies; International Relations; Mass Media; Modern History; Motion Pictures; Multimedia Communications; Performing Arts; Political Science; Public Policy; Rhetoric

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 Fine Arts, University of Akron, 2023, Creative Writing

A collection of poems submitted in partial fulfillment of the NEOMFA Master of Fine Arts Degree in creative writing (Poetry). The poems touch upon themes of mental health, gender and body dismorphia, and searching for a definition of trans joy.

Committee: Mary Biddinger (Advisor); Caryl Pagel (Committee Member); Cathrine Wing (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Master of Fine Arts, University of Akron, 2023, Creative Writing

The poetry presented herein is more than half of a collection-in-progress that grapples with the cross-cultural condemnation of the unfeminine aspects of womanhood into the monstrous. The succubus, the guiding voice of the central narrative, is a female demon that is said to seduce men and eat their souls. As her story unfolds, she is accompanied by the voices of other female monsters and non-monstrous women as they navigate the inherent violence of love. This collection aims to explore and refute what is and is not monstrous, how monstrosity is created, and the ways in which what some see as monstrous is only responsive to the cultural rhetoric and surrounding displays of outright femininity and female power.

Committee: Mary Biddinger (Advisor); Caryl Pagel (Committee Member); Christopher Barzak (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

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

Reading a ghostly company of lyric and epic poetry, treatises on aesthetics and poetics, manuals of technical prosody, and works of occult speculation across one and a half centuries, "The Phantoms of a Thousand Hours" argues that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets and poetic theorists seize on the ghost as the inchoate form of poetry itself. Beginning in the pious meditations of the eighteenth-century "Graveyard School," these writers spectralize the operations of the poem and fashion poetic structures into chambers of vigil where the ghost might be awaited and encountered. Alive to the recursive directions of contemporary historical poetics, this study challenges the emerging scholarly consensus on the ghost in the long nineteenth century as either a creature of fiction, born almost coeval with the novel in the work of Defoe, or a residual form, a remainder from folklore and oral balladry that glides uncertainly into Gothic's set dressing. Rather, just as poets envisioned their craft as instinct with ghostly measures, rhythms, and pauses, occult writers from antiquaries to Spiritualists substantialized and realized the ghost through the opaque lyricism and manifest technique of poetry. Accepting neoformalism's sound insistence on the historicity of form itself, my work nonetheless eschews New Formalism's frequent dismissal of the specter from the spectral: even the most evanescent, technical traces of the ghost in the poetry of the long nineteenth century recall and reflect living structures of preternatural belief and occult vision. Like Shelley in his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," these poets "sought for ghosts," and, if they were "not heard" and "saw them not," they could yet take solace in "the phantoms of a thousand hours," of the myriad ideal visions of poetry's ghosts across a long Graveyard Century. Across the Graveyard Century spanning from Thomas Gray to Thomas Hardy, this study argues that the ghost haunts poetry's sense of its own form precisely (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jill Galvan (Committee Co-Chair); Sandra Macpherson (Committee Member); Hannibal Hamlin (Committee Member); Jacob Risinger (Committee Co-Chair) Subjects: Literature

BA, Oberlin College, 2022, Comparative Literature

Why do we make analogies? The standard definition suggests “[a] comparison between two things, typically for the purpose of explanation or clarification” (Oxford Languages); an analogy is when something borrows another vocabulary, another set of terms, or another paradigm, to facilitate a deeper understanding. But here, I argue that analogy is more than a didactic tool for making explanations more convenient: rather, analogy is the essential way that we understand ourselves in relation to others—for my purposes, how artists understand their own medium in relation to other mediums. Specifically, I use the concept of analogy to explore the encounter between music and language; I take as my starting point the French Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme, one of the major poets in France at the time of his death in 1898, with a legacy which resonates today in poststructuralism and experimental poetry. Mallarme interests me because he exemplifies an analogical approach to understanding poetry: in order to articulate his poetics, Mallarme found inspiration in a diverse array of mediums from dance to mime to acting, and most importantly, in music. This project adopts a three-part approach, investigating the encounter between music and language first from the perspective of language, then from the perspective of music, and finally examining art which reconciles music and language in a more liminal status. Chapter 1 discusses how Mallarme's ideal language parasites music: he uses music to articulate the terms of his ideal language, but in doing so silences music, removing its status as actual sound. Chapter 2 explores how composer Pierre Boulez turns this parasitism around, using music as a parasite on language: Boulez sets Mallarme's poetry, but in doing so, he renders it into sound, deprivileging its linguistic qualities while embedding them into the musical structure. Chapter 3 explores contemporary manifestations of music/language art with composer Georges Aperghis and Or (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Patrick O'Connor (Advisor); Matthew Senior (Committee Member); Brian Alegant (Committee Member) Subjects: Comparative Literature; Music

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

For much of the past seventy years, discussion of authorial intention has often been seen as taboo in historical literary analysis. Monumental scholars such Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault wrote crucial essays that helped steer critical focus away from questions of intention, encouraging interpretation of the text itself as the ideal. While these contributions to the field were both valuable and necessary, paving the way for the reader-response approach that is now predominant in literary analysis, they had the unfortunate consequence of taking the role of intention out of the realm of interpretation entirely. The difficulty this consequence has presented is that to many literary analysts, “intention” is still viewed as a bad word, or at least one tainted by the idea that considering intentions precludes other readerly or critical interpretations. The field of book history has largely steered clear of the negative imputations of intention, as understanding what an author (or other agents involved in publication) intended by choices made in a primary text is essential for how that publication can be parsed from a material standpoint. The divide between book history and literary analysis has gradually been narrowing, but the reluctance to fully embrace intention as one of many tools to explore the interpretational possibilities of historical literary texts is a problem that I seek to address. This dissertation focuses on four editions of poetry from the mid-seventeenth century to demonstrate how the intentions of authors and other agents in the production of literary works have a direct impact on how those works can be interpreted. My methodology is rooted in book history, but my key objective throughout is to apply that approach to literary analysis by using what we can both definitively know and reasonably establish about intentions to guide close-readings of the works themselves. Doing so reveals that, far from precluding interpretation, considering the orig (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Hannibal Hamlin (Committee Chair); Erin McCarthy (Committee Member); Luke Wilson (Committee Member); Karen Winstead (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Literature

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2020, Popular Culture

The 1990s were a time of resistance and change for women in the Western world. During this time popular culture offered consumers a few women of strength and power, including Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's Major Kira Nerys, a character encompassing a complex personality of non-traditional feminine identities. As the first continuing character in the Star Trek franchise to serve as a female second-in-command, Major Kira spoke to women of the 90s through her anger, passion, independence, and willingness to show compassion and love when merited. In this thesis I look at the building blocks of Major Kira to discover how it was possible to create a character in whom viewers could see the future as well as the current and relatable decade of the 90s. By laying out feminisms which surround 90s television and using original interviews with Nana Visitor, who played Major Kira, and Marvin Rush, the Director of Photography on DS9, I examine the creation of Major Kira from her conception to her realization. I finish by using historical and cognitive poetics to analyze both the pilot episode "Emissary" and the season one episode "Duet," which introduce Major Kira and display character growth. Through the creation of a fully-realized, relatable, futuristic woman who embodied intelligence, individualism, and adaptability, Star Trek:Deep Space Nine showed viewers the possibilities of becoming a person with such admirable traits during their own time.

Committee: Becca Cragin Ph.D. (Advisor); Jeffrey Brown Ph.D. (Committee Member); Kristen Rudisill Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies; Film Studies; Gender Studies; Mass Media; Performing Arts

Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2020, Theological Studies

The Poetics of Loss: A Theological Reading of Selected Works of Matthew Arnold is one Catholic theologian's attempt to make sense of the mysterious, and possibly troubling, claim that Arnold is “a serious theological thinker.” If the author finds this claim mysterious, it is not least because Arnold's poetry engages and relies on a `poetics of loss,' which the author defines as Arnold's felt sense of isolation, disintegration, and hopelessness as he observes the Sea of Faith retreating. Despite what must be to the Catholic theologian Arnold's troubling and troubled existential, religious, and socio-historical commitments, however, the author argues that Arnold's poetry is precisely where Arnold is most theologically significant, relevant, and compelling. This is in contradistinction to those critics who locate Arnold's theological significance in his religious prose writings. The author's theo-poetic retrieval of Arnold is aided by a close reading of Karl Rahner's “Poetry and the Christian” and “Priest and Poet,” which he then applies to Matthew Arnold's “The Buried Life.”

Committee: William Portier PhD (Committee Chair); Dennis Doyle PhD (Committee Member); Mark Ryan PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature; Religion; Theology

Master of Arts, University of Akron, 2019, English-Literature

The purpose of this thesis was to tackle questions and begin conversations in academia about the poetry of transgender and gender non-conforming writers. Although there have been numerous projects to anthologize these works, there are few academic articles that address them. This thesis begins the work of compiling a collection of poetics essays on three contemporary trans and gender non-conforming poets: (1) J. Jennifer Espinoza, (2)Stacey Waite, and (3)Oliver Baez Bendorf. In compiling these essays, the thesis hopes to tackle questions about body narratives and gender expression, while also examining the question of whether or not there is such a thing as “trans lit” or a distinct “trans poetics.” Furthermore, the thesis examines the importance of poetry to the survival of trans and gender non-conforming people and their experiences.

Committee: Mary Biddinger (Advisor); Hilary Nunn (Committee Member); David Giffels (Committee Member) Subjects: Gender

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, Greek and Latin

This dissertation is about Greek choral poetry, which is notoriously difficult to interpret, in large part because of deficiencies in the material evidence. Even when a physical text exists, we lack data about the performance contexts of the poetry as well as the written text's changing relation to the sung words in original and subsequent performances. Evidence from contemporary sources – Homeric epic and visual arts in particular – and from later reception and scholarship often contradicts as much as it enriches the interpretive project. To clarify the picture, I approach these poems from a new direction, pinpointing a resource of lyric that I have termed chorality by hybridizing traditional philological methods with tools from contemporary critical theory. I locate the chorus at the intersection of the “performative turn” and the “narrative turn” in the humanities and social sciences, approaches that have begun in recent years to illuminate entrenched difficulties in Classics as well. I argue, first, that chorality emerges from a dialogic relationship between the material aspects of choral spectacle and the subjective voice that presents its choral self through choral song-dance. In the first chapter, then, I juxtapose close readings of hexameter examples with choral fragments of dithyramb and parthenaic song, showing that each illuminates the other. Together with evidence from non-choral lyric, material culture, ancient philosophy, and contemporary literary theory, these readings introduce qualities that are indicative of chorality: namely, self-referential objectification paired with a complex layering of collective voice across time and space. In the chapters that follow, I recognize that these qualities constitute a unique narrative situation that fuses description, characterization, and voice, and that they are highly performative. I illuminate this choral performativity with three close readings that span the historical and generic range of “Greek choral (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Benjamin Acosta-Hughes (Advisor); Sarah Iles Johnston (Committee Member); Thomas Hawkins (Committee Member) Subjects: Classical Studies; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2019, English

The English Renaissance was literary, ecclesiastical, and charged with references to afflictions, both physical and spiritual. Yet while it is often central to religious doxology and instruction, affliction is not an art that can be monopolized by a single religious doctrine or denomination. It was possible, in other words, for early modern English poets to turn to both Catholic and Protestant predecessors for an understanding of spiritual affliction, despite the dramatic religious, political, and social upheavals that came before. In the psalm translations of Sir Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; the Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum of Aemilia Lanyer, the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions of John Donne, and The Temple of George Herbert, these poets attended to a nexus of suffering and artistic expression in order to lead their readers toward theological instruction. They do so through what I call an “afflictive poetics,” a rhetorical mode in which the poet offers this theological instruction through a series of poetic forms, figures, and perspectives that depend upon a demonstration of spiritual and physical or physiological suffering. These works were all written or published in roughly the period between 1580 and 1633, beginning with the writing of Sidney's Defence of Poesy and ending with the posthumous publication of Donne's Poems and Herbert's Temple. Despite all being nominally Protestant, the poets examined in this dissertation represent a broad spectrum of religious beliefs and practices. In arguing for the importance of afflictive poetics, I join the continuing “religious turn” in early modern literary studies, particularly in the branch that recognizes the ambiguity of confessional categories and attends to the experience of the individual believer. In doing so, I tend to eschew debates focused on denominational, doctrinal, and doxological disputes, which often robs us of the richness of the poetry and the relationship that develops bet (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Christopher Flint Dr. (Committee Chair); Maggie Vinter Dr. (Committee Member); Erika Olbricht Dr. (Committee Member); Timothy Wutrich Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, English

Drawing examples from over 100 English- and Spanish-language popular dailies and weeklies between January 1855 and December 1866, my dissertation, “Poems in the U.S. Popular Press, 1855-1866,” argues that mid-nineteenth-century newspaper poems constitute a vital but still understudied form of public discourse. I define public discourse as political conversations, debates, and representations for reasoning that take place in the public sphere. I make this case in archival detail in four chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on celebrity poets as part of the media culture created by editor Robert Bonner in his blockbuster story paper the New York Ledger. Chapter 2 shifts from the East to the West coast, recovering the hemispheric Spanish-language poems in the first Spanish-language newspaper in California after the Mexican-American War, El Clamor Publico (the Public Outcry). Chapters 3 and 4 excavate the robust but largely unknown archives of newspaper poems circulating across the U.S. concerning the Panic of 1857 and the New York City cholera epidemic of 1866. This project is significant to the field of U.S. literary history, including the growing scholarship on the Latinx nineteenth century, for two primary reasons. First, the archive of periodical poems has not been completely recovered, categorized, or situated with respect to the larger currents of nineteenth-century public and print cultures. Second, scholars of the Latinx nineteenth century, including Rodrigo Lazo, Jesse Aleman, and Kirsten Silva Gruesz, have begun piecing together histories of the cultural productions of Latinx people using valuable but still incomplete archives. My dissertation contributes to the necessary work of reading Spanish- and English-language newspaper poems as related acts of public discourse reflecting a diverse U.S. media culture.

Committee: Elizabeth Renker (Advisor); Elizabeth Hewitt (Committee Member); Jared Gardner (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; American Studies; Hispanic American Studies; Latin American Literature; Latin American Studies; Literature

Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2018, English

The act of becoming promises a linear temporality it cannot deliver. Through poetics and pedagogy, It's not over once you figure it out explores the unstable vectors of growth. Themes of identificatory change – racial and political – are threaded throughout. Following its pedagogy, the poetics aim to elicit an emerging collectivity through the act of genre flailing. While the poems have a narrative bent, the text's propensity to double (back) honors its prescribed commitment to rejected achievement. As such, this document is necessarily unfinished.

Committee: cris cheek (Committee Chair); Cathy Wagner (Committee Member); Keith Tuma (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Pedagogy

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2018, English

“Romanticism and the Poetics of Orientation” is a literary study of British Romantic poetry. Looking beyond literary nationalism, I describe a Romantic poetics of orientation, a new mode of poetic writing that linked self-formation to cultural difference through representations of the literary “Orient.” This Orientalist trend was in tension with the Romantic ideal of universal experience. In tracing this shifting orientation in British Romantic literature, I bring together an unlikely transatlantic archive in chapters on Phillis Wheatley, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Felicia Hemans alongside lesser-known Orientalists like Sir William Jones. By rerouting their poetics through representations of the literary “Orient,” these authors positioned themselves aesthetically and geopolitically in the changing terrain of Anglophone culture. This complex orientation adjusted the global frame of reference in many of their imaginative works of self-expression, including Shelley's The Revolt of Islam and Byron's Eastern tales. Through the postcolonial genealogy of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak, I explain the various deployments of Orientalism in these British Romantic texts. I argue that Romantic poetry about the “Orient” bridged radical particularity and universal connectivity, anticipating postcolonial discourses that resonate in today's globalized world.

Committee: Clare Simmons (Advisor); Riede David (Committee Member); Risinger Jacob (Committee Member) Subjects: Aesthetics; Art Criticism; Comparative Literature; Literature; Philosophy; Romance Literature

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2017, Antioch New England: Environmental Studies

This research explores intentional food practices and journeys of consciousness in a network of people in The Bahamas. Intentional food practices are defined as interactions with food chosen for particular purposes, while journeys of consciousness are cumulative successions of events that people associate with healing, restoration, and decolonization personally and collectively. This research examines (1) experiences and moments that influenced people's intentional food practices; (2) food practices that people enact daily; and (3) how people's intentional food practices connect to broader spiritual, philosophical, and ideological perspectives guiding their lives. The theoretical framework emerges from a specific lineage of theories and philosophies of hybridity, diaspora, creolization, poetics, critique, and aesthetics from the Caribbean. The research explores how intentional food practices reflect expressions of emerging foodways and identities in the Caribbean and joins them with the history of consciousness and intentional food practices in African and Caribbean diasporas. Ethnographic research methods, poetic analysis, and constant comparative analysis provided a foundation for an exploratory approach grounded in the realities of everyday lives. A purposeful snowball sample of twenty-seven (27) in-depth semi-structured interviews provided a primary method of data collection, supported by personal journals, field notes, and document review. No food security research has been published that explores intentional food practices in The Bahamas generally or on the island of New Providence specifically. Key findings suggest a broad variation in people's intentional practices. The intentions underlying these practices reflect desires for individual and collective healing, restoration, and decolonization in their daily lives. By exploring their food practices, interviewees express how they find restoration and healing through visceral experiences with their bodies.

Committee: Elizabeth McCann Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Jean Kayira Ph.D. (Committee Member); Selima Hauber Ph.D. (Committee Member); Jean Amaral (Committee Member) Subjects: Caribbean Studies; Environmental Studies; Ethnic Studies; Philosophy; Sustainability

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, English

In Books with Bodies: Experientiality in post-1980s Multimodal Print Literature , I examine contemporary British and North American authors' use of books as platforms for multimodal narration. “Multimodality” refers to the concurrent use of several semiotic systems (such as writing, maps, charts) for communication. The pointed juxtaposition of different semiotic systems in a literary text requires a combination of perception processes on the reader's part. My dissertation charts the ways in which multimodal literary books published in response to the proliferation of electronic reading and writing interfaces from the 1980s onward prompt metacognitive awareness about "reading" as an experience that is grounded in bodily interactions and sensory contact with the modes and the platforms that mediate literature. I term this metacognitive awareness about the readers' embodied engagement with the text's material form "presence," by revising Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's notion of "presence-effect." The theoretical framework for this dissertation comes from three fields: I combine approaches to multimodality that originated in the study of social semiotics, insights from the cognitive sciences--the “second-generation” models of cognition--and twentieth century philosophies of experience, particularly those of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Serres, and Gumbrecht. By analyzing multimodal fictions, poetry, and lyrical essays such as Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper (2005), Anne Carson's Nox (2010), Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes (2010), and Doug Dorst and J.J. Abrams's S. (2013), among other texts, Books with Bodies subverts the distinction between higher-order mental abilities (such as language processing) and lower-order perceptions (like touch) which underlies prior scholarship on the cognitive impact of literature. Indeed, I argue that the tendency to unpack the literary exp (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Brian McHale (Advisor); Frederick Luis Aldama (Committee Member); Jared Gardner (Committee Member); Jesse Schotter (Committee Member); Danuta Fjellestad (Committee Member) Subjects: Aesthetics; American Literature; British and Irish Literature; Canadian Literature; Comparative; Literature; Mass Media; Modern Language; Philosophy of Science

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, English

Modes of the Flesh considers the ways that literary form—mode, in particular—shapes the representation of the human body in British literature from approximately 1660-1800. Focusing on the allegorical, satirical, pornographic, and gothic modes, this project aims to expand our conception of literary embodiment, establish the represented body as a formal element, and make embodiment central to our understanding of the textual representation of human beings. Because modally-inflected literary bodies engage the same kinds of ontological and epistemological questions entertained by this period's empiricist philosophy, I argue that mode offers its own kind of philosophy of the body. But, because modal bodies engage these questions with a very different set of tools, the results are often provocatively at odds with mainstream philosophical discourse. Existing scholarship on the literary body tends either to analyze the way a body is represented in order to better understand the work's themes or meanings, or to argue that the way a body is represented reflects historical or theoretical models of embodiment. This dissertation differs from the first tendency by offering a theory of the represented body, and therefore taking the body as an object, not an instrument, of study. It diverges from the second tendency by arguing that the way bodies are presented in literature has as much to do with the kind of text they appear in as with scientific, theological, social, or other extra-literary understandings of the body. In each chapter, I focus on a significant mode of Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, and a particular aspect of literary embodiment. The first chapter, on the allegorical mode and bodily matter, thinks about the function of materiality in a mode commonly associated with abstraction and interpretation. The second chapter, which considers the satirical mode and bodily form, explores the role of abstract form in satirical conceptions of personhood an (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Sandra Macpherson (Advisor); David Brewer (Committee Member); Robyn Warhol (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2016, English

Over the course of his published poetic career, W. S. Merwin develops a model of mobial corporeality that offers humanity an opportunity to redress human ignorance, neglect, and even willful cruelty towards nature. With the goal of healthy coexistence, Merwin's career-long development of non-hierarchical conceptions of the nature-human relationship puts bodies in relation to each other through mobial thresholds, rather than binaries. This model makes clear that nature and humanity are materially, rather than metaphorically, incorporated in each other. Like a mobius strip, each side of the relationship appears independent and, yet, closer inspection reveals that the two are one. Chapter 1, “Body Matters in Ecocriticism,” lays out this model and contextualizes it in the field of ecocriticism. Chapter 2, “Merwin's Mobial Corporeality” close reads Merwin's poetic enactment of this model, giving particular focus to Merwin's use of thresholds and liminal spaces as central to mobiality. Chapter 3: “Doing Thinking: Intersections of Ars Poetica and Ethics,” uses the formal changes that occur over Merwin's career to demonstrate a mobial relationship between Merwin's thinking and his poetic praxis, making it clear through his ars poetica poems that an ethics-aesthetics mobius is indispensable to ecopoetry. Chapter 4: “Unfolding Forms in The Folding Cliffs” revisions the traditional epic, in which the reader passively consumes the poet's master narrative, allowing Merwin to use his own dangerous position of colonial power to explore, through a combination of history and legend, active reader engagement as the crux of ethical ecopoetry. Finally, chapter 5: “Nature-Human Relations in the Time of the Anthropocene” situates Merwin's poetic praxis in the geologic reality of the Anthropocene through an exploration human cruelty, the urban, and human perceptions of time, reinforcing corporeal experience as the heart of humanity's potential for healthy coexistence with nature.

Committee: Gary Lee Stonum (Committee Chair); Sarah Gridley (Committee Member); Michael Clune (Committee Member); Marie Lathers (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Animals; Ecology; Geological; Language; Literature

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2015, English

thumbelina sleepwalk is a collection of poems concerning the performance of femininity, “girliness”, and the vulnerable female body, deriving their content and structure from dream and nightmare material. The poems travel the unconscious cinematically, clashing the grotesque with the traditionally female or “girly”.

Committee: Catherine Wagner (Advisor) Subjects: Gender; Language Arts; Literature