English Department Dissertations Collection

The poems of Lady Hester Pulter (1605?--1678): An annotated edition

Christian, Stefan Graham — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 12:24:33 PST

This dissertation is an edition of the complete known surviving poems of Lady Hester Pulter (1605?–1678), found in a manuscript at the Brotherton Library at Leeds in Yorkshire, England, Ms Lt q 32. Hester Pulter, daughter of James Ley, first Earl of Marlborough (1552–1629), lived at the estate of Broadfields in Hertfordshire most of her life; her poems, including a series of emblem-poems, reflect her sympathy for King Charles I and her religious and personal concerns, as well as her curiosity about science, during the period of the English Commonwealth. This edition maintains the spelling and punctuation of the original manuscript, probably created by a scribe and Lady Hester Pulter herself, and has been extensively annotated to explain mythological, Biblical, literary, political, and historical references. A scholarly introduction describes Pulter’s life, reading, social setting, and place in literature. ^

Technologies of Racial Formation: Asian-American Online Identities

Dich, Linh — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 11:16:18 PST

My dissertation is an ethnographic study of Asian-American users on the social network site, Xanga. Based on my analysis of online texts, responses to texts, and participants' discussions of their writing motivations, my research strongly suggests that examining digital writing through participants' complex and overlapping constructions of their community and public(s) can help the field reconsider digital writing as a site of Asian-American rhetoric and as a process of constructing and transforming racial identities and relations. In particular, I examine how community and public, as interconnected and shifting writing imaginaries on Xanga, afford Asian-American users on this site the opportunity to write, explore, and circulate their racial and ethnic identities for multiple purposes and various audiences. Race and ethnicity, as many scholars argue, are shifting and unstable concepts and experiences. Therefore, writing about race and ethnicity may be done best in environments that can accommodate complex and multiple acts of racial and ethnic formations. While my research demonstrates how participants "want to be heard" on their own terms, whom they imagine (or want to imagine) as listening/reading significantly informs their writing. That is, participants' conceptions of their writing goals and their audiences are multiple and simultaneous--these racial and ethnic writing acts are often inflected by intersecting issues of gender, sexuality, class, culture, and intergenerational tensions--and, hence, traditional writing genres that limit such goals, audiences, and complexity do not always reflect how writers conceive of their own racial and ethnic experiences and their writing in the world. This study, then, examines Xanga as a flexible writingecologythat affords Asian-American users opportunities to compose their continuously transforming and complex racial and ethnic identities across multiple niches of representational sites and, specifically, in public and community spaces.

Elizabeth's fruitless crown: Ovidian poetry, the end of Tudor genealogy, and the incomplete past

Petersen, Kevin — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 11:01:01 PDT

This dissertation asks to what end were so many Ovidian poems written during the last fifteen years of Queen Elizabeth's reign. Arguing that the poems have a distinct political subtext, this study situates the poetry within the context of Elizabeth's unsettled succession. The fraught question of who would succeed the Virgin Queen was further complicated with Elizabeth's ban on any discussion of the subject. I argue Tudor historiography ironically helped construct a sense of an ending with its projection of genealogical stability, which linked the Tudor family to England's ancient roots, and its emphasis on paradigmatic structures. Sixteenth-century historians claimed that to know the past was to know the future. At the end of Elizabeth's reign, however, precedent predicted an unsettled succession would precipitate violence and ruin. ^ In the face of rupture, the poets used Ovidian resources to construct an alternative epistemology. They developed a poetic that truncated the exemplar's paradigmatic status to emphasize the constituent role of the material present. In doing so, the Ovidian poem emphasized the role of perspective, contingency, and revision; their response to the dead end Elizabeth came to represent insisted on the gap between the past and any recovery of that past to qualify the providential claims of Tudor genealogy. ^ Following a discussion of Tudor genealogy and historiography, which I organize around the appropriated biblical iconography of the Tree of Jesse, and evidence of English frustration and anxiety over the succession, I turn to case studies of Ovidian poems. Using the examples of Edmund Spenser's Muiopotmos, William Shakespeare's Lucrece, and George Chapman's Ovids Banquet of Sence, I demonstrate how late-century Ovidian poetry challenged recoveries of exemplars and paradigms to disperse sites of authority. The poems collectively underscored the instability of the past and how meaning manifests in collaboration rather than recovery. Reading from a generic rather than biographical point of view, I argue the Ovidian poems written during the 1590s provided a significant method to imagine alternatives beyond the grounds of political crisis.^

"The labor we delight in": Amateur dramatists in the London professional theaters, 1590--1642

Pangallo, Matteo A — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 11:01:00 PDT

In the commercial theaters of early modern London there worked a group of dramatists who, though they wrote for the playmaking industry, were not members of it. Rather than outliers in a unified, closed field of playwriting, they were amateur dramatists, a distinct class of writers who took advantage of the radically open nature of the field of playwriting for professional theaters to supply their own plays to the actors. Their plays require a different set of critical and historical questions than that traditionally used in examining plays by professionals. The reason for this distinction is that amateur dramatists came to their work with primary experience of the theater as cultural consumers rather than producers: they were playgoers who, though from a diverse range of economic and social backgrounds, shared a passion for the public stage—a passion that they translated into efforts to pen plays for that same stage. ^ As plays by playgoers, their texts provide evidence for better understanding how particular audience members saw and understood the professional stage. Their plays reveal directly what audience members wanted to see and how they thought actors might stage it. In their attempts to replicate specific practices, conventions, and techniques that they saw in professionals' plays, they reveal how certain playgoers understood, or thought they understood, the professional theater. In their deviations from what they saw in professionals' plays, they testify to a gap between what the profession produced and what the audience wanted—a gap unnoticed by studies of audience experience that rely on professionals' plays to recreate that experience. ^ Playgoers writing their own plays demonstrate that the early modern audience was a participatory, engaged, and even autonomously active force of dramatic creation. In the early modern professional theater, playgoers could create the texts and, in some cases, the performances that they desired. Reading amateurs' plays with an awareness that they were written not just for audiences but also by audiences thus opens a new window onto the early modern playhouse, the diversity of dramatists who wrote for it, and the creative experiences of the spectators who attended it.^

A 'Living Art': Working-Class, Transcultural, and Feminist Aesthetics in the United States, Mexico, and Algeria, 1930s

Morgan, Tabitha Adams — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 12:32:01 PDT

The cultural productions of Katherine Anne Porter, Anita Brenner, Tina Modotti, Maria Izquierdo, and Juanita Guccione represent a distinctive interweaving of gender and class consciousness, national identification and political resistance, as represented in their artistic work. These five women became transnational carriers of a radical realist and modernist thought, culture, and ideology that became transported through their art when their gendered and classed bodies were left otherwise silenced and boundaried. These women, their cultural productions, and the ways in which their art generates a counter discourse to the dominant and institutionalized conceptions of transculturalism, aesthetics, and re-production, are vital to understanding the co-construction of nationhood as well as the self-determined creation of the individual self. From this overarching framework, I will explore how these women negotiated political conceptions of nationhood, artistic genres such as realism and modernism, and then created their own feminist, transcultural and working-class aesthetics to counter otherwise limited conceptions of individual agency.

How Should I Act?: Shakespeare and the Theatrical Code of Conduct

Garner, Ann E. — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 12:16:35 PDT

This dissertation examines the intersection of English Renaissance drama and conduct literature. Current scholarship on this intersection usually interprets plays as illustrations of cultural behavioral norms who find their model and justification in courtly norms. In this dissertation, I argue that plays present behavioral norms that emerge from this nascent profession and that were thus influenced by this profession and the concerns of the people who worked in it, rather than by the court. To do so, I examine three behavioral norms that were important to courtiers, specifically Disguise, Moderation and Wit through the work of the English Renaissance theater’s most celebrated professional, William Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s plays evince a theatrical code of conduct that, rather than being an illustration of courtly norms, was sometimes in direct contrast to them and sometimes formed an alternate or lateral code. This code shows a distrust of disguise, a lack of interest in moderation and a belief in the need to eschew wit in favor of a happy ending. The modern theater has retained many of these essential behavioral norms, including the value of community above the self, the need for sympathy and compassion, and the willingness to risk.

"Transformed oft, and chaunged diuerslie": Shapeshifting and bodily change in Spenser, Milton, Donne, and seventeenth-century drama

Chung, Youngjin — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 14:13:20 PDT

This thesis addresses the volatile body as a historiographical and literary category in selected works of Renaissance English literature. Through readings of poems by Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and John Milton, and of plays by Ben Jonson, John Webster, Richard Brome, Philip Massinger, and Sir William Berkeley, I investigate how Renaissance writers trope the idea of transformation in different ways, in different moments, and in different genres. What meanings inhere in the shifting forms they represent, and how do these transformations interplay with both literary and non-literary modalities? Each chapter focuses on metamorphic changes that at times engage with psychological inwardness and at other times manifest social, political, or theological imperatives arising out of the Reformation. My inquiry is not, however, limited to instances of physical transformation: to these writers, shapeshifting is not simply a subject matter or theme but an aesthetic practice preoccupied with molding and remolding literary form itself. Recognizing the formal implications of textualized, topical, and literal transformation helps us understand the complexity of early modern ideas about transformation without losing sight of transformation.s material aspect.^ Chapter One focuses on Adicia, Spenser.s embodiment of injustice in The Faerie Queene, whose psychosomatic transformation complicates Spenser.s politically topical allegories of justice in Book 5 and opens up new ways to read his approach to Elizabethan historiography. Chapter Two examines Milton.s Satan, whose hardened and altered body manifests his fallen and polluted inner state. Satan's physical volatility and newfound capacity to feel pain is, physiologically and semantically, integral to Milton's phenomenology of evil. Chapter Three considers how Donne.s preoccupation with transformation shapes his sacramental poetics, focusing on Metempsychosis, the Holy Sonnets, and La Corona. This sequence of poems illuminates Donne's sacramental transformation not only conceptually but also formally, manifesting Donne.s turn to poetry as liturgical artifact. Chapter Four explores Stuart dramas that exploit the trope of Aethiopem lavare or "washing the Ethiope white," using washable blackface to enact man-made miracle. The staged transformation of a chaste woman from black to white is in these plays instrumentalized to conform (if not reform) libertine masculinity to patriarchal ideology, especially marriage. ^

Following Eshu-Eleggua's codes: A comparative approach to the literatures of the African diaspora

Dyer-Spiegel, Jacob A — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 14:12:31 PDT

My project explores the impact of the great Orishas (Yoruba: "deities") of the crossroads, Eshu-Elegguá, on the thriving literary and visual arts of the African diaspora. Eshu-Elegguá are multiple figures who work between physical and spiritual realms, open possibilities, and embody unpredictability and chance. In chapter one I explore the codes, spaces, and functions of these translating, intermediary deities through cultural anthropology, religious studies, and art history. Chapter two explores patterns in the artistic employment of Eshu-Elegguá by analyzing these figures' appearance in visual arts and then in four texts: Mumbo Jumbo (Ismael Reed, 1972), Sortilégio: Mistério Negro (Abdias do Nasicmento, 1951), Chago de Guisa (Gerardo Fulleda León, 1988), and Brown Girl in the Ring (Nalo Hopkinson, 1998). Chapter three explores how those patterns converge in Midnight Robber (Nalo Hopkinson, 2000) by looking closely at the novel's narrators and translators, Eshu and Elegguá. I argue that Midnight Robber, when read through the literary theories and poetry of Kamau Brathwaite, is a novel "possessed" by the Orishas and that they take on authorial roles. Chapter four analyzes the translation of Midnight Robber into Spanish ( Ladrona de medianoche, Isabel Merino Bode, 2002); presents a way of translating the novel's multiple languages; and puts contemporary translation theories in dialogue with Eshu-Elegguá's translative and interpretive functions. Chapter five argues for a way of reading Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys, 1966) through the figures of Eshu-Elegguá. ^ The objective is to explore the aesthetic codes and philosophies that the figures of Eshu-Elegguá carry into the texts; trace their voices across multiple forms of cultural expression; and navigate the dialogues that these intermediary figures open between a group of literary texts that have not yet been studied together. The dissertation extends the critical work on the selected literary texts; uses the arts to further understand the nature of these deities of communicability; and analyzes Afro-Atlantic texts through figures and interpretive systems from within the tradition. By surveying contemporary translation theories and based on my close reading of the translating capacities and metaphors that Eshu-Elegguá embody, I offer a new model for translation.^

The Guerilla Tongue": The Politics of Resistance in Puerto Rican Poetry

Azank, Natasha — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 10:03:05 PST

This dissertation examines how the work of four Puerto Rican poets – Julia de

Burgos, Clemente Soto Vélez, Martín Espada, and Naomi Ayala – demonstrates a poetics of resistance. While resistance takes a variety of forms in their poetic discourse, this project asserts that these poets have and continue to play an integral role in the cultural decolonization of Puerto Rico, which has been generally unacknowledged in both the critical scholarship on their work and the narrative of Puerto Rico’s anti-colonial struggle. Chapter One discuses the theoretical concepts used in defining a poetics of resistance, including Barbara Harlow’s definition of resistance literature, Edward Said’s concepts of cultural decolonization, and Jahan Ramazani’s theory of transnational poetics. Chapter Two provides an overview of Puerto Rico’s unique political status and highlights several pivotal events in the nation’s history, such as El Grito de Lares, the Ponce Massacre, and the Vieques Protest to demonstrate the continuity of the Puerto Rican people’s resistance to oppression and attempted subversion of their colonial status. Chapter Three examines Julia de Burgos’ understudied poems of resistance and argues that she employs a rhetoric of resistance through the use of repetition, personification, and war imagery in order to raise the consciousness of her fellow Puerto Ricans and to provoke her audience into action. By analyzing Clemente Soto Vélez’s use of personification, anaphora, and most importantly, juxtaposition, Chapter Four demonstrates that his poetry functions as a dialectical process and contends that the innovative form he develops throughout his poetic career reinforces his radical perspective for an egalitarian society. Chapter Five illustrates how Martín Espada utilizes rich metaphor, sensory details, and musical imagery to foreground issues of social class, racism, and economic exploitation across geographic, national, and cultural borders. Chapter six traces Naomi Ayala’s feminist discourse of resistance that denounces social injustice while simultaneously expressing a female identity that seeks liberation through her understanding of history, her reverence for memory, and her relationship with the earth. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that Burgos, Soto Vélez, Espada, and Ayala not only advocate for but also enact resistance and social justice through their art.

To have and to hold: Courting property in law and literature, 1837--1917

Dallmann, Abigail Armstrong — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:11:23 PST

Beginning in the early nineteenth century, American jurisprudence grappled with the issue of marital property. States under the Anglo-American legal tradition of common law revised marital property allocations to allow wives to hold certain categories of property separate from their husbands. These changes were enacted, in part, to insulate a wife’s property from the vagaries of the market but the judicial response reveals a larger narrative of ambivalence and anxiety about women, property, and the suggested mobility of separately held possessions. Marital property reform begins in an historical moment when the question of what a woman could own in marriage morphed into larger cultural anxieties such as the very meaning of ownership and “things” themselves in the face of new intangible properties.^ Writers of fiction also captured these anxieties, and created imagined scenarios of marriage and property to expose constructions of ownership, property, womanhood, and marriage. Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening attempts her withdrawal from her marriage by dismantling the Pontellier home and removing what she believes she owns to a separate physical space. The tragedy of her story can be understood for its legal impossibility under common law, as well as the restricted meanings of marriage and separate property under Louisiana’s civil law jurisdiction. At the end of Edith Wharton’s Summer, Charity Royall chooses to secretly reclaim a brooch that was a gift from her lover. Her action suggests a desire for privacy and could be viewed as fraudulent to her marriage vows. Pauline Hopkins’s character Hagar in Hagar’s Daughter repossesses material spaces which she was forbidden to own and control because of her race and gender, and uses the American justice system to support her claims to ownership and contractual rights. In contrast to Hopkins’s tenuous but nonetheless optimistic portrayal of contract, Marìa Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s novel Who Would Have Thought It? describes contract and the American legal system overall as empty promises. Marriage and property in Ruiz de Burton’s novel work as tropes through which to critique nineteenth-century American society and the destructive force of capitalism within its most intimate spaces.^