Part 1 of the thesis, ‘The Balance of Where We Are: A Theory of Composition in Relation to Cognitive Poetics’, considers a compositional theory of poetry, with particular attention to the creative process, the poetic line, and trope. Drawing on from the disciplines of creative writing and cognitive poetics, this thesis asserts basic and important considerations for writing poetry. Chapter One seeks a model for the creative process that will aid in sustaining poetic composition but without dictating a specific method of writing. In presenting several theories of creativity it discusses ways of understanding these mental processes in preparation for the actual poem. It suggests an approach to poetry that will keep the writer focussed and aware of his or her limitations. Chapter Two establishes what it means to be writing poetry in an ‘age of cognitive science’ where some literary scholars have made a ‘cognitive turn’, by explaining the field of cognitive poetics. It considers specifically the cognitive poetics of Reuven Tsur as an important theory to enhance poetic composition. It connects some of Tsur’s discussions on poetic elements to enhance the craft-oriented approach to poetry. Chapter Three examines the poetic line as the basic unit of a poem which any compositional theory must consider. It reiterates the neural theory of the line as a ‘carrier wave’ of conceptual information that is both pleasing to the ear and the mind. It then re- evaluates specific poetic experiments concerning the line, and suggests a method of scanning to help the contemporary reader’s awareness of poetic rhythms. Chapter Four examines trope, specifically poetic metaphor in relation to the assumption of conceptual metaphor theory that poetic metaphors are extensions of everyday metaphors. It welcomes an alternative cognitive-literary explanation by re-iterating metaphor theories from Reuven Tsur and Don Paterson. Finally, it argues that the practitioner is always writing the variation of the ‘one’ poem that he or she has discovered. Part 2 of the thesis, ‘The Secret Uncles: Poems’, consists of my own poems.

L’étude du thème de la nourriture conduit à analyser trois fonctions de l’alimentation dans l’œuvre de Cohen. La première, indissociable du cadre de la diégèse, concerne le cérémonial inhérent à la mise en scène des repas. Selon qu’ils se déroulent dans le milieu occidental ou au sein du groupe des Valeureux, ces moments de consommation débouchent rapidement sur une caractérisation des personnages et sur une mise à jour des liens socio-culturels qui les unissent ou les séparent. Partager un déjeuner ne constitue donc pas un simple geste de convivialité. C’est une action qui peut tendre vers la spiritualité d’une communion ou consacrer la rupture irrémédiable avec autrui. Mais c’est lorsque l’on quitte la table pour s’intéresser aux faits alimentaires ponctuels, multiples dans l’œuvre, que la nourriture de Cohen devient riche de significations. Constituant un réseau de signes symboliques qui affleurent dans les textes, l’alimentation correspond à une nouvelle forme de langage qui exprime les obsessions les plus intimes. Mère, religion, amour, réflexion sur le temps et sur l’absurdité de la vie, tous les domaines s’évaluent à l’aune de la nourriture : celle du passé et des souvenirs — tour à tour regrettée ou indésirable — celle du présent qui oscille entre le plaisir de l’instant et une lassitude existentielle, celle d’un futur incertain, qui ne garantit qu’une promesse de désillusions. De cet univers aux sombres perspectives émerge pourtant une figure de « vainqueur éternel », celle de Mangeclous. Le personnage burlesque est, en effet, celui qui a le dernier mot. Capable de sublimer l’art de la cuisine, il élabore une poétique aux accents parodiques qui se joue de la farce de l’existence. C’est en passant par la création de cet ogre mythique que l’auteur confère au champ alimentaire son unique et véritable richesse. / Focusing on the theme of food in Albert Cohen’s works allows us to identify three basic functions for food. The first function, which cannot be dissociated from the diegesis, has to do with the ceremony inherent in the staging of meals. Whether they take place in a Western setting or within the group of the Valeureux, these episodes of consumption often lead to a characterization of the protagonists and a presentation of the sociocultural links that both unite and separate them. Sharing a meal is much more than just enjoying a moment of conviviality. It can as easily result in a spiritual communion as in an irreversible break with someone else. Yet, food takes on a deeper meaning when studied in its multiple punctual manifestations rather than within the context of meals. Coalescing into a network of symbolic signs, food offers a new form of language through which the most intimate obsessions can be expressed.Motherhood, religion, love, time or the absurdity of life are so many themes that can be analyzed through the motif of food – be it the food of the past (either desired or scorned), the food of the present, which both provides a brief moment of pleasure and occasions an existential ennui, or the food of an uncertain future, mostly synonymous with a feeling of disillusionment. Out of this universe of somber prospects,however, emerges the figure of Mangeclous, the “eternal victor.” Indeed the last word belongs to this burlesque character. In his ability to transcend the art of cooking, Mangeclous conjures up a poetics with parodic overtones that mocks the masquerade of existence. It is only in creating this mythical ogre that Cohen manages to imbue the motif of food with its true richness.

In reference to Moleleki (1988:122), African poetry as a result of contrast rather than individual, is the representation of a community. This representation contains a scale of values based on the community, and it gives symbolic expression to the community: manifesting a community of tradition from the past through the present to the future. Going by the above notion, the poet assumes the responsibility of being the spokes-person of the community in which he/she finds and identifies himself/herself. He/she feels the pain felt by his/her people, and shares the joy shared by them. His/her representation therefore is both genuine and representatively expressive in nature. In the chosen poems of S. E. K. Mqhayi the above mentioned aspects of poetic writing are well expressed. This representation being a symbolic expression on behalf of the community holds a magnificent semiotic significance. Such semiotic significance, which boarders around the several highs and lows of the community’s lifestyle. The community poet in this context blends the past and the present in his verses attempting to both preserve and express the sorrows, the joys, the pains as well as the fears of his community and its people. These are captured in chapters three and four of this study. The community poet under the worst form of systematized inhuman, racist subjection called apartheid employed careful and skilful means of reciting as well as penning his verses. In the last four chapters one discovers a skilful means of masking in order to avoid being penalised. S.E.K Mqhayi’s element of symbolic expression is by far the most significant aspect of his poems. A man who lived in the days of abject institutionalised racism and being one of those discriminated against, had no choice but to be loyal to his oppressors and at the same time, expressing himself in the most creatively careful manner. His works are rich with encodings and embellishments. These encodings and embellishments require some careful skills to decode and unveil. This research work will centre mainly on the unravelling of all that was either encoded or embellished within each selected work.

This thesis examines the Castilian work of Fray Luis de Leon from the perspective of phenomenological hermeneutics as a literary approach. I discuss the lack of serious studies on 16th Century Spanish poetic theory, and propose that Fray Luis de Leon’s work offers a model of literary theory and creation that can be considered a philosophical poetics, in contrast to the rhetorical approach of Renaissance humanistic poetics. I examine the formation of Fray Luis de Leon’s literary work as a process that follows four stages of both hermeneutic understanding and literary creation. I examine the first stage in his translations of Horace and Virgil, his rendering of Tuscan lyric love poetry, and his interpretation of the Psalms. In the literary structuring of his work, I identify images and poetic devices he later expands into all his work. Simultaneously, I suggest that throughout his work, Fray Luis understood the role of language in its literary function as a way to describe reality. In stage two, I analyze Fray Luis de Leon’s biblical expositions, confirming the first stage findings. Fray Luis develops the meaning of poetic configuration, relating it to the literary function of Scripture. The interplay between the biblical text and his reflection on his own reality, forms a sub-text representing a true literary theory. First he attempts a practical literary work in La perfecta casada, a biblical commentary with clear literary pretensions. I extensively analyze Fray Luis de Leon’s main prose work, De los nombres de Cristo as a literary structure resulting from his reflection on literature’s role in understanding reality. Therefore, I approach this important work as literature, not simply as a philosophical treatise or as piece of superb writing. I use Aristotle’s categories, interpreted by Northrop Frye and Paul Ricoeur. Following Frye, literature is a symbolic, verbal structure with different levels of meaning; a structure which in the process of its configuration, gives understanding to the poet and reveals reality. Ricoeur suggests, following Augustine and Aristotle, that the configurating process attempts to redescribe reality to understand it. De los nombres thus expresses the poet’s understanding and insight into the configurative process of the Scriptures, offering it as a way to produce in the reader a poetic experience that is the true experience of reality’s structure. Fray Luis organizes the verbal structures of his work, the “nombres” (names), so the characters of his dialogue, as they discuss the meaning of the names, themselves go through different stages of understanding while literally moving through a physical setting configured by language symbolic of mythical ascent and descent. a practical literary work in La perfecta casada, a biblical commentary with clear literary pretensions. I extensively analyze Fray Luis de Leon’s main prose work, De los nombres de Cristo as a literary structure resulting from his reflection on literature’s role in understanding reality. Therefore, I approach this important work as literature, not simply as a philosophical treatise or as piece of superb writing. I use Aristotle’s categories, interpreted by Northrop Frye and Paul Ricoeur. Following Frye, literature is a symbolic, verbal structure with different levels of meaning; a structure which in the process of its configuration, gives understanding to the poet and reveals reality. Ricoeur suggests, following Augustine and Aristotle, that the configurating process attempts to redescribe reality to understand it. De los nombres thus expresses the poet’s understanding and insight into the configurative process of the Scriptures, offering it as a way to produce in the reader a poetic experience that is the true experience of reality’s structure. Fray Luis organizes the verbal structures of his work, the “nombres” (names), so the characters of his dialogue, as they discuss the meaning of the names, themselves go through different stages of understanding while literally moving through a physical setting configured by language symbolic of mythical ascent and descent. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate

M.A. / Please refer to full text to view abstract

L’objet de cette thèse est de montrer comment, en prenant invariablement appui sur la médiation des choses, Willa Cather confère à ses représentations d’espaces, à ses portraits de personnages et à la substance de son discours une densité et un relief qui rapprochent son écriture de l’art de la sculpture. Explorant pleinement le lien entre fictum et fingere, et forgeant des affinités nouvelles entre les mots et les choses, Cather inaugure une poétique des « trois dimensions ». Au sein de ses premiers romans et de ses nouvelles, Cather envisage les choses naturellement présentes au monde et celles que créent les personnages comme des intermédiaires concrets, permettant d’articuler un contact fructueux, mais respectueux, entre les êtres et l’espace et entre le discours et le monde sensible. Des vestiges Anasazi aux objets confectionnés par les pionniers et les artistes catheriens, dans l’Amérique du tournant du siècle, les choses constituent la base mais aussi l’horizon d’une approche véritablement poétique du concret. Au contact des outils et sous l’influence des mots, les terres de la Frontière, les paysages rocheux du sud-ouest et les grandes villes d’Amérique acquièrent une précision et une épaisseur sculpturales. En retour, les choses tangibles ou éthérées, ponctuant la trame du visible, influencent considérablement la forme et la teneur de la prose catherienne. Ecrivant en sculpteur, en orfèvre et en alchimiste, Cather élabore de surprenantes compositions langagières, qui non seulement renouvellent « les séductions qui nous viennent des choses » (Bachelard), mais qui confèrent aussi aux mots la densité et l’éclat de choses finement sculptées. / The aim of the thesis is to show how Cather constantly resorts to the mediating power of things in order to endow the representations of space, the portraits of her characters and the substance of her discourse with a sculptural density and relief. Exploring the link between fictum and fingere and inventing new forms of kinship between words and things, Cather creates an essential homology between her writing and the art of sculpture. According to her own words: “When a writer has a strong or revelatory experience”, he “gets a depth of picture and writes, as it were, in three dimensions instead of two”. Indeed, in Cather’s early novels and short-stories, natural and artificial things act as concrete intermediaries which pave the way for a fruitful yet respectful contact between her characters and space and between her discourse and the tangible world. From the Cliff-Dwellers’ relics to the artefacts crafted by the pioneers and artists in turn-of-the-century America, material things give rise to a genuinely poetic encounter with the real. Men’s tools and Cather’s words join to bring sculptural precision and depth to the Frontier territories, the canyons and mesas, as well as the outlines of cityscapes. At the same time, the tangible or ethereal things delineating the contours of the concrete world also shape Cather’s writing. Genuinely inspired by the sculptor’s, the goldsmith’s and the alchemist’s skills, Cather’s crafted prose not only renews “the seductive power of things” (Bachelard) or “the capacity for wonder” (Tanner), but also turns words into finely sculpted things.

Orientador: Marta Luiza Strambi / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Artes / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-26T12:07:29Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Oliveira_LiaFernandaRamosde_M.pdf: 7604188 bytes, checksum: 1669d97c1309019ac9df7ac4270be032 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014 / Resumo: Esta dissertação, "Parábolas e Fabulações: uma Investigação em arte", estabelece uma relação entre obras de minha autoria - o que inclui desenhos, pinturas e grafites - e as análises desta mesma produção feitas através de uma pesquisa que contempla os referenciais teóricos aos quais ela se relaciona, implicando ainda num diálogo circunstanciado com a história da arte. O trabalho processa-se por meio de textos que abordam aspectos correlatos à Arte Lowbrow, numa hibridização desse movimento. Trata-se de uma estética atual, proveniente da arte urbana underground, que problematiza poéticas advindas do campo da arte contemporânea, como a cultura dos remakes e a Pattern Painting, com distintas modalidades; assim como pode absorver movimentos anteriores, estabelecendo relações com a contracultura e a cultura popular / Abstract: This thesis: "Parables and fabulations: An Investigation into art" is a relationship between my art production - which includes drawings, paintings and graffiti - and the analysis of this works, through a survey which includes its theoretical frameworks, implying in a dialog based on the history of art. This work goes through texts that connects themselves to aspects correlated to the Lowbrow Art, in an hybridization of this movement. It is a current aesthetic, from the underground urban art, which discusses poetics coming from the field of contemporary art, as the remake and Pattern Painting culture, with different modes; and can also absorb previous movements, establishing relationships with the counterculture and popular culture / Mestrado / Artes Visuais / Mestra em Artes Visuais

The materiality of poetic language, its sensuous dimension, has generally been understood as aural or visual—patterns of sound unfolding in time, or words arranged on the page in a certain way. But a poem also has a sensuous reality in the mouth due to the movements and sensations of uttering the sequences of speech-sounds that constitute the poem. This is the articulatory dimension of the poem—the patterns of shapes, movements, sensations, and gestures that a poem orchestrates in the mouth. How is our experience of a poem informed or conditioned by the activity of enunciating the speech-sounds that constitute it? As the first full-length study of this fundamental material aspect of poetic language, this dissertation argues that the articulatory dimension of a poem, i.e. the oral-tactile-kinesthetic sensations of its utterance, can be made to signify. My first chapter traces a history of articulatory thinking drawn from disciplines ranging from anthropology to linguistics to cognitive poetics and literary studies, and develops a conceptual framework for describing and analyzing the articulatory dimension. The framework I propose relies on articulatory phonetics to describe and appreciate the aesthetics of speech-sound in a precise and rigorous way. The second chapter comprises of a series of ‘case studies’ of specific speech-sounds, showing how the affective and symbolic potential of these phonemes grow naturally out of the phenomenological experience of their utterance, and then illustrating how these potentials are evoked in actual lines of verse from poets as historically and stylistically diverse as Shakespeare, Pope, Tennyson, Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Hughes, Stevens, and Plath. The case studies are interspersed with ‘interludes’ that fill in the developmental, anthropological, literary, and cultural history of speech-sounds that undergird the articulatory dimension. Finally, the third chapter examines how the oral physicality of speech-sounds has been imagined, mythologized, and valorized in the poetic imagination. Specifically, I show how the mouth in its activity of enunciating speech-sounds becomes a ground for figuration, a source of overarching metaphors for poetic inspiration, poetic utterance, and the poetic imagination in poets ranging from Shelley and Whitman to Frost, Stevens, Pinsky, and Seamus Heaney. / 2026-11-30T00:00:00Z

The following is a collection of original poetry written over a span of two years while attending the University of South Florida. The poetry is divided into three numbered sections, marking the major thematic divisions. Preceding the poetry is a critical introduction to the work which outlines the author's developing thematic ideology.

This dissertation examines key texts from the intermediate and mature periods of Vasily Grossman’s career in order to determine the relationship between his evolving philosophy and the poetics that characterize his writing. While significant critique has been applied to the nature of Grossman’s philosophy, comparatively less has looked at the aesthetic and technical aspects of his writing itself; still less to the connection between Grossman’s abstract concepts and his accomplished texts. My effort has been to bridge the gap between these two areas of inquiry and to ascertain the quality of their tightly intertwined and complex relationship. I analyze four of Grossman’s key texts in depth, with reference to several other writings. Of the primary texts considered in my study, two are essays from the writer’s intermediate period: “The Hell of Treblinka” («Треблинский ад») and “The Sistine Madonna” («Сикстинская мадонна»);” of the two longer works, one is Grossman’s multi-volume masterpiece novel Life and Fate (Жизнь и судьба) and the other is his novella (повесть) and final fictional work Everything Flows (Все течет). These texts were chosen for their aptness at demonstrating key features of Grossman’s prosody and philosophical thinking, both those that remained constant and those that evolved over time. The following study establishes that Grossman’s writing itself, by means of the formal structures he employs throughout his works, constitutes the embodiment and realization of his ethics. Specifically, the following work considers modes of movement and generation in Grossman’s writing that speak to the value he places on the individual human experience.