This dissertation is informed by lived experience of disability, artistic practice, and medical practice. My dissertation is also intended to be a model of how to bring to bear professional expertise, personal history, and personal obligations on scholarship. An inter-field survey of critical lenses within the humanities is developed, making for a heterogeneous model of engagement for scholars interested in studying medicine and medical representations in literature and other artistic genres and forms. A fusion of fields is created, demonstrating that many different approaches can be brought to bear – a deliberate choice because medicine is in need of critique from the humanities. Settler/bioscientific epistemologies are unpacked alongside Indigenous epistemologies. Metaphor, intersubjectivity, Indigenous place-thought, and disability studies are also deployed. I develop a way to link all of these pieces when they use the representation of pain as a common cause. I respectfully consider Indigenous knowledge without defining same or clinicalizing their knowledges. Ultimately, I develop a pain poetics. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This bachelor thesis in history consists of a case study of Per Olov Enquist’s documentary novel Legionärerna, which examines the Swedish extradition of Baltic soldiers after the Second World War. The intent of the study is to survey the novel’s use of history from a literary dimension. It does so by applying the typology of Hayden White, his poetics of history. This conceptual framework historicizes the historical writing by clarifying how the historical dictum is constructed in similar manner as fiction, and therefore dependent of its’ author. The result shows that Enquist uses the history – is constructing it – to object how one earlier has talked about the extradition by satire previous accounts and by reasoning contextual how one, instead, should understand the same historical phenomenon. These two aspects are linked to a third, viz, Enquist’s Maoist political stance.

Thesis advisor: Andrew Prevot / This dissertation seeks to contribute to the discipline of theological anthropology by engaging the histories, writings, and aesthetic contributions of women within the African diaspora. In particular, the dissertation crafts an approach to analyzing the concept of the imago dei in relation to the experiences of flesh, bones, land, and sea that have shaped Black women’s poetics, theory, and praxis in the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States. Womanist approaches to theology often center Black women’s lived experiences and literature as resources for religious inquiry. Decolonial scholarship tends to critique the remnants of colonialism in the present, imagining futures beyond hegemonic categories. As a methodological contribution, this dissertation combines insights from womanist theology and decolonial thought, identifying M. Shawn Copeland and Sylvia Wynter as major interlocutors with each respective discipline. This dissertation questions what it might mean for humanity to image God, especially after the dual crises of colonialism and slavery. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2024. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

My thesis proposes a theory of relational identity development in Chicana literature. Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera offers an interpretation of Chicana identity that is largely based on historical models and mythology, which many scholars have found useful in interpreting Chicana literature. However, I contend that another text, Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street, not only illustrates the need for an alternative paradigm for considering identity development, but in fact offers such an alternative. I argue that Cisneros shows a model for relational identity development, wherein the individual develops in the context of her community and is not determined solely by elements of myth or genealogy. In questioning the historical paradigm of identity development, I examine three key aspects associated with Chicana identity development: gender, home, and language. Employing the theories of Édouard Glissant, I discuss how individual identity development is better understood in terms of relationships and experience rather than historical models. For Chicanas, the roles of women have largely been interpreted as predetermined, set by the mythic figures La Malinche and La Virgen de Guadalupe. However, Cisneros's work shows that this historical tradition is less fruitful in understanding identity than recognizing individuals' experience in context of their relationships. With this communal understanding established, I question the common associations of home and Chicana identity. I argue that Cisneros challenges our very concept of home as she engages and counters the notions of theorist Gaston Bachelard. The idea of a house is metaphorical, becoming a space of communal belonging rather than a physical structure to separate individuals. Finally, I consider how both spoken and written language contribute to relational identity development. I argue that Cisneros's use of language demonstrates that not only does language provide the means for development within a community, but also the means for creation within that society. The theoretical implications of such a relational identity construct are not only an expansion of what is entailed in Chicana identity, but an invitation for broadening the community of theoretical discussion surrounding Chicana literature.

This thesis sets off from an a priori hypothetical position that the universality of certain language features, particularly poetic expression, provides an opportunity for syncretism in the reading, analysis, explication, and interpretation of African literature, specifically oral poetry, our teleological point being the formulation of a syncretic approach. In the first chapter we undertake an overview of the debate which has been ensuing among 'African' critics in the search of an 'African' poetics. We proceed, in the second and third chapters, to undertake a study of two 'Western' schools of thought, namely Formalist-Structuralism and New Criticism, with a view to setting the critical theories and practice of some major protagonists of these schools of thought against sample readings of African oral poetry. In the fourth and fifth chapters we proceed to select and analyse some of the most prominent critics of African oral poetry, and undertake detailed case studies of their critical assumptions and practice, in retrospective comparison with the theoretical paradigms and practical readings dealt with in chapters two and three. In the sixth and final chapter we assess the syncretic approach suggested, together with its implications for the future research and teaching of African oral poetry. Our findings suggest that the case studies of critiques of African oral poetry reveal certain shortcomings which might have been strengthened by a perspicacious awareness of Formalist-Structuralist and New Critical methodology. From this postpriori perspective we suggest a syncretic approach which, in its sensitivity to the idiosyncratic features of African languages, will at the same time acknowledge, adopt and adapt sophisticated poetical analyses which have been developed by Western poetics. Our findings also suggest specific ways in which Western standards could be evaluated with a considerable degree of exactitude. We conclude by, inter alia, opening directions of research which could advance the debate towards an African poetics beyond doctrinaire wrangle, so that progress can be made through further close studies of other schools of thought and theories in order to assess their applicability and/or adaptability to African poetry and other genres. / Afrikaans and Theory of Literature / D. Litt et Phil (Theory of Literature)

This thesis examines Frost’s conception of poetry as the labor of human value. It investigates how Frost consciously shaped his notions of “sound of sense” and metaphor, which he deemed fundamental elements of poetic labor, in contradistinction to the Modernist poetics of Eliot and Pound. The author closely examines a representative sample of Frost’s poetry and prose as critiques of Modernist poetic theory and its implications for what Frost deemed the essential human function of poetry. The thesis will interest scholars studying strains of English poetic thought that developed concurrently with and against Modernist poetic thought. More broadly, it will interest those who seek a serious and thoughtful challenge to Modernist literary trends that prevail even today.

This thesis aims to provide the first complete study of the poetics of Pierre Reverdy, who, although famous and influential during his lifetime, has not been widely published or researched. This thesis hopes to change this, as his complete works are just now being republished. The first chapter lays the basis for his conception of reality as something in which man is trapped, and which calls for a distance that, in Reverdy's eyes, only poetry can offer. His association of the image and lyricism, is presented and analysed. The second chapter aims to provide a linguistic understanding of the poetic image called for and devises the new concept of “illumination”, to give an account of the phenomenon at work in his verse. The third chapter focuses on lyricism, as Reverdy tries to reinvent it for the twentieth century: independent of the self, dealing only with expressing the affective tonalities of the poet and acting as a catalyst for the image. The last chapter defines the visual qualities of Reverdy's poetry by first re-examining the title of cubist poet that had been attached to him, before focussing on the many forms that the image takes in his work (imagery, but also typography, mental imagery), and finally providing the first analysis of the relationship between paintings and poems in the famous Livres d'artistes that the poet created, in collaboration with Picasso, Matisse, Juan Gris and others. It establishes that while the poems can indeed be read without the illustrations with which they were conceived, these editions deprive the reader of the opportunity to remind himself that poetry is an experience rather than a quest for meaning and also of an introduction to the unique visual qualities of Reverdy's poetry.

《簡愛》如同吳爾芙所說的「強烈的自我中心性格」、借力於詩意的雄渾寫景、狹窄的力度，這些特質標誌著《簡愛》或夏綠蒂勃朗蒂獨樹一幟的文體風格。此外據吳爾芙的剖析，十九世紀英國女作家所寫小說必然受到狹窄的生活經驗所影響，作者性格總通過某種個人的因素而被清楚的意識。本文一方面通過現象學式的稠密閱╱寫對《簡愛》這部小說的上述特質加以印證、詮釋；同時也在性別政治脈絡的還原過程中將寫作活動的理論引曵回歷史情境，為文化情境中所謂「局部壓抑」的迷思做預先的鋪陳。在方法上，本文首先根據《簡愛》的「空間」與「物」的呈現╱陳列特質，演繹出該作品內建「狹窄的自我中心性」，這個中心是以童年的場景作為整部小說的詩意原型，同時整部小說也以摧毀童年夢靨原型為逆轉點。在詳細的分析後我們將發現，勃朗蒂竟是十分勉強地安排性別政治的標準價值，愛情與婚姻的價值、情感的脆弱、家庭事物的價值…這一切在《簡愛》這部小說裡，在通過帶著現象學傾向的分析後，我們將一一發現作者曾試圖想消除、重寫那些標準價值的痕跡，同時也發現那些不穩定的、不一致的事件串連事實上是通過「視覺物」被讀者的預設所任意完整化的。一當經過仔細的分析後我們發現這部故事並未以因果的方式開展出結果，反而我們發現一個又一個的空間為不存在的主體進行補充試圖刻畫出一個新的女性標準。綜觀《簡愛》整部作品可演繹出以下敘事模式與原則：fiction(構作)—simulation（擬仿）—supplement/ reverse (補充/逆轉)。本文認為這個敘事原則在過去採取精神分析假設與後殖民論述立場的分析裡被嚴重忽略，甚至扭曲女性書寫活動裡的情緒張力成為帝國慾望的再現；本文以顛倒順 序的閱讀方式重行分析出上述勃朗蒂的敘事模式，也提出非線共時平 面觀點的閱╱寫分析。 / Virginia Woolf points out that the circumstances which affected an author’s character may have left their traces on their work; therefore, the writings of nineteenth-century female writers are arguably affected by their limited life experience. In an effort to analyse the self-enclosure in Jane Eyre, this thesis first examines the theme of narrowness by employing a method of phenomenological thick reading/writing. I will argue that Jane Eyre constructs Jane’s childhood as a poetic prototype and centres on the end of Jane’s childhood nightmare as a turning point. Moreover, after close analysis of the text, it will be found that Brontë manages to arrange the standard of sexual politics, the value of family, love, and marriage with difficulty. By applying a phenomenological reading, we will find traces that the author tries to erase or rewrite these values. The reading of materiality, silence, space, and conflict within texts will open up extremely productive ways of studying the politics of language. The inconsistency, rupture, and disjunction of incidents are freely associated as a unity, a consistent novel by readers through the appearance of objects, and the plot of Jane Eyre is not based upon cause-and-effect. The narrative mode of Jane Eyre can be interpreted as fiction-simulation-supplement/reverse. The centrality of this narrative technique to Brontë’s work has received little attention in psychoanalytic or postcolonial criticism, both of which often interpret the intensity of feeling of the novel as the embodiment of imperial desire. By employing a non-linear reading of Jane Eyre, I will examine the narrative in reverse order, trying to establish a new platform for the infinite interplay between author, reader, and characters.

This thesis investigates Emily Dickinson's spatial imagination. It examines how her poetic landscape responds to the conditions of modernity in an age of modernization, expansionism, colonialism and science. In particular, I look at how the social and cultural representations of nature and heaven are revised and appropriated in her poems to challenge the hierarchical structure of visual dominance embedded in the public discourses of her time. Although she seldom travelled, her writing oscillates between experiential empiricism, sensationalistic reportage, and ecological imagination to account for the social and geographical transition of a rapidly industrialized and commercialized society. The notion of transcendence, progress and ascension in Enlightenment and Transcendentalist writings, based upon technological advancement and geographical expansion, characterized the social and cultural imagination of her time. Alternatively, an increasingly cosmopolitan New England registers a poetic contact zones as well as a Bakhtinian carnivalesque space, in which colonial relations can be subverted, western constructions of orientalism challenged, and capitalist modernity inflected. Dickinson voiced in her poems her critical reception of such a phantasmagoric site of a modern world. I explore how her cartographic projection registers the conflicting nature of modernity, while resists the process of empowerment pursued by her contemporary writers, presenting a more dynamic poetic vision of the world. In the first chapter, I explore her use of empirical mapping as a poetic approach to challenge the Enlightenment notion of progress and modernity. I look at her poems of social transitions, especially her poems of the Bible, the train, the pastoral, and the graveyard, to show how she addresses the issue of modernization. Her visit to Mount Auburn and the rural landscape movement are explored to show her complex poetic response toward modernity. In the second chapter, I focus on her poems of emigration and exploration to see how she appropriates frontier metaphors and exploratory narratives that dominated the discourses of national and cultural projects of her time. The colonial expeditions and national expansionism of her time are examined to show her revision and deconstruction of quest narratives. In the third chapter, I examine her commercial metaphors in relation to cosmopolitanism. I discuss her metaphors of tourism to see how her poems are based upon the notion of consumption as a poetic mode that is closely related to the violence of global displacement and imperial contestation. Her tourist experiences and reading of travel writings will be examined to show her critical response towards the dominant visual representations of her time. In the last chapter, I explore her poems of visitation and reception to show her elastic spatial imagination through her notion of neighbouring and compound vision. In particular, I discuss her poetic reception and appropriation of the theories of Edward Hitchcock and Thomas De Quincey. I conclude suggesting that her spatial imagination reveals her poetic attempt to account for the conditions of modernity.

This thesis examines the role of spatial representation in Old English poetry. Focusing on the presentation of setting and spatial relationships in narrative poetry, it argues that sensibility towards the creative potential of spatial representation within a conventional tradition constitutes a significant element of Old English poetic technique. It emphasizes the importance of intertextual reading practices which recognize the dialectics of text and tradition underlying spatial representation in individual examples. Chapter one introduces the subject, outlining the relevant critical contexts in which the thesis stands and describing the methodology that is followed in the subsequent chapters. It also describes the connection between the representation of space and critical assumptions regarding vernacular poetic composition. Chapter two focuses on poetic accounts of the angelic rebellion. The presentation of this event as a territorial and spatial conflict establishes a contrast between vertical and horizontal spatial relationships which relates to concerns prevalent throughout the Anglo-Saxon period over conflicting models for power relationships. The prominence of vertical spatial relationships in these accounts serves to legitimize hierarchical power structures. Chapter three considers territorial conflict in Old English battle poetry. Similarities in the use of setting and the construction of a sense of place in these texts suggest the influence of established poetic conventions. However, poetic artistry is evident in the ways in which spatial representation contributes to the wider thematic and artistic concerns of these texts. Chapter four examines poetic representations of the prison. Whilst such representations do partially reflect conceptualizations of the prison current in Anglo-Saxon England, they also demonstrate a deeper interest in the valence of enclosed space. The chapter extends the intertextual approach of the thesis to consider the possibility of direct borrowing between poems. Chapter five clarifies the argument of the thesis regarding the relationship between spatial representation and poetic technique and identifies some directions for further work.