Ce travail s'inscrit dans un questionnement sur les liens entre la littérature et la science au XXème siècle, appliqué à l’œuvre littéraire du poète américain E.E.Cummings (1884-1962). La première partie du travail consiste à voir comment Cummings répond dans son œuvre aux conceptions de la science et de la connaissance qui font partie de son arrière-plan culturel et littéraire, en particulier celles exprimées par les philosophes transcendantalistes et pragmatistes du XIXème et du début du XXème siècles. Il sera également question du caractère matérialiste et concret de l'écriture poétique de Cummings au début de sa carrière poétique, en réaction à ces courants de pensée. Les conceptions personnelles et les critiques de Cummings au sujet de la science et du langage scientifique seront ensuite dégagées : le poète s'attache à mettre en valeur les limites du langage savant et l'aspect déshumanisant des sciences et des techniques. Il montre la fracture qui s'instaure entre l'humanité et la nature, dont il souligne la spontanéité. La seconde partie étudie comment Cummings, en dépit de ses critiques, met en œuvre un véritable imaginaire scientifique dans ses poèmes et dans ses pièces de théâtre. Cet imaginaire lui permet de reconstruire sur le plan poétique la plénitude du cosmos et de l'humain mise à mal par les sciences. Le poète peut alors élaborer sa propre définition de l'intuition, proche de celle de Bergson, et esquisser le portrait du poète "homo faber", l'homme aux prises avec la matérialité du monde, dont l’œuvre et l'action répondent aux conséquences de celles de l'"homo sapiens", l'homme savant qui s'est détaché de la nature. / This dissertation questions the links between literature and science during the 20th century, as they can be observed in the literary works of American poet E.E.Cummings (1884-1962). The first part of this study is about how Cummings meets in his works to the conceptions of science and knowledge that are part of his cultural and literary background, especially those expressed by transcendantalist and pragmatist philosophers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It will also deal with the concrete and materialistic aspect of Cummings' poetical writings at the beginning of his literary career as a reaction to these schools of thought. Cummings' personal conceptions and criticism about science and scientific langage will then be revealed : the poet endeavours to highlight the limits of scholarly langage and the deshumanizing aspect of sciences and techniques. He shows the newly installed breach between mankind and nature, whose spontaneity he emphasizes in his works. The second part studies how Cummings, in spite of his criticisms of science, makes use of a truly scientific imagination in his poems and theatrical works. This enables him to reconstruct, on a poetical level, the wholeness of cosmos and mankind that was jeopardized by science. He can then develop his own definiton of intuition which is close to that of Bergson, and draw a portait of the "homo faber" poet, or the man struggling with the materiality of cosmos as opposed to the "homo sapiens", a learned man who set himself apart from nature.

As an alternative to print media, digital media make us newly aware of the materiality of experimental poetic texts and require us to account for their media-specific differences. Although already several theoretical models have been put forward to define these differences, so far few poems have been analyzed in terms of their media-specific textual materiality. This thesis seeks to fill this gap in the applied media-specific analysis of experimental poetry. It combines traditional close reading with a media-specific approach in order to investigate the relationship between the physical characteristics and signifying strategies of four experimental poetic texts in various digital and non-digital media. It critically interrogates the specific use of the given medium in each poem, and illustrates that their respective textual materiality cannot be specified in advance based on general assumptions concerning the medium in question. A digital poem is not inherently more innovative than a non-digital poem. Rather, a poem is perceived as innovative if it resists conventional reading strategies by establishing a particularly complex, dynamic, and effectively anomalous sense of textual materiality, which necessarily only emerges from the direct interplay among text, object, and reader.

[Typescript] Includes bibliography.

This thesis comprises a creative work, the manuscript of a book of poems, Goddess of Mercy, and an exegesis, A Further Existence, which explores the creative, aesthetic, philosophical and other ideas and inputs that went into writing the poems. Goddess is a collection of idylls of the electronic age, narratives, dramas, fictions and meditations. The poems are various in style and subject matter. The exegesis begins with the author's earliest remembered experiences of poetry, considers a wide range of poetries and goes some way to proposing an open poetic that allows a writer versatility in approach to subject matter and writing style. Poems can transcend their time and place to create a 'further existence' where temporality is irrelevant. A diverse range of poems are examined -- from ancient Babylonian to contemporary Australian -- to determine the aspects of a poem that take it beyond daily speech. The usefulness and limitations of theory are considered. The art's mystical dimensions are not easy to analyse but are still worth thinking about: the mysterious spark or talent for poetry, how and where a poem occurs, epiphanies, 'being in the zone' and when all the words come rushing at once. The persistence of poetry is noted: poetry still manifests itself in public life through newspapers, sport, pop music, radio commentary, television, and politics, as well as in everyday living. Poetry adapts to new environments like the internet. Conversely, events in the 'real world' influence poetic thought and writing as evidenced by the barrage of poems and publishing in response to the US invasion of Iraq. Some recent Australian poems are explored with regard to establishing contexts and areas of interest for the practice of poetry in the opening years of the twenty-first century, with a view to establishing the contexts in which the poems in Goddess exist and the world they address. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--School of Humanities, 2005.

This dissertation documents and interrogates the process of Storyweaving, which has been authored and developed by Spiderwoman Theater, the longest running Native theatre company in North America and the longest running feminist collective in the world. Storyweaving is a distinct process that governs the dramaturgical structure and performed transmission of this company’s play texts on the contemporary stage. However, Storyweaving predates written history. It has been (and remains) specific to tribal storytellers across this continent. The reclamation, then, of this aesthetic legacy by contemporary Native storytellers is a crucial act of recovery, which imagines and architects a functional framework for a Poetics of Decolonization that may be adopted and adapted by tribal artists from myriad nations to create works (on the page and stage) that will effect the healing, transformation and survivance of their communities. Chapter One examines the early personal and professional histories of the Miguel sisters who are Spiderwoman’s founders. Through an exploration of their socio-economic positioning, their difficult home life, the racialized narratives by which they were defined outside the home and their artistic development within these impossible conditions, this chapter unpacks instances of personal and familial resistance to the forces of colonization and reveals the seamless weave that so inextricably binds art and life. Chapter Two documents the early history of Spiderwoman Theater and offers a processual analysis of its transformation from a multi-racial, feminist collective to an American Indian theatre troupe, charting the personal decolonization of the Miguel sisters and the intersection of this very personal transformation with the politically (re)vital(izing) creation of a decolonizing aesthetic. Chapter Three engages with this aesthetic to clearly demonstrate how it works within and through the living bodies who utilize it in the rehearsal studio. Next, I examine Spiderwoman’s published texts to reveal the ways in which the Storyweaving process has shaped the affects of these works on the artists and their audiences. Finally, Chapter Five names and evaluates the benefits of Spiderwoman’s legacy and estimates its future benefits as Spiderwoman’s heirs take up its process and adapt it to meet the needs of their communities.

This dissertation attempts to trace the shifting relationship between the fields of Rhetoric and Poetry in Western culture by focusing on poetry contests and competitions during several different historical eras. In order to examine how the distinction between the two fields is contingent on a variety of local factors, this study makes use of research in contemporary cognitive neuroscience, particularly work in categorization and cognitive linguistics, to emphasize the provisional nature of conceptual thought; that is, on the type of mental activity that gives rise to conceptualizations such as “Rhetoric” and “Poetry.” The final portions of the research attempt to use some modeling techniques derived from cognitive linguistics as invention strategies for producing stylistically idiosyncratic academic knowledge, and for examining the relationship between the stylistic markers we associate with each of the two aforementioned fields.

This dissertation documents and interrogates the process of Storyweaving, which has been authored and developed by Spiderwoman Theater, the longest running Native theatre company in North America and the longest running feminist collective in the world. Storyweaving is a distinct process that governs the dramaturgical structure and performed transmission of this company’s play texts on the contemporary stage. However, Storyweaving predates written history. It has been (and remains) specific to tribal storytellers across this continent. The reclamation, then, of this aesthetic legacy by contemporary Native storytellers is a crucial act of recovery, which imagines and architects a functional framework for a Poetics of Decolonization that may be adopted and adapted by tribal artists from myriad nations to create works (on the page and stage) that will effect the healing, transformation and survivance of their communities. Chapter One examines the early personal and professional histories of the Miguel sisters who are Spiderwoman’s founders. Through an exploration of their socio-economic positioning, their difficult home life, the racialized narratives by which they were defined outside the home and their artistic development within these impossible conditions, this chapter unpacks instances of personal and familial resistance to the forces of colonization and reveals the seamless weave that so inextricably binds art and life. Chapter Two documents the early history of Spiderwoman Theater and offers a processual analysis of its transformation from a multi-racial, feminist collective to an American Indian theatre troupe, charting the personal decolonization of the Miguel sisters and the intersection of this very personal transformation with the politically (re)vital(izing) creation of a decolonizing aesthetic. Chapter Three engages with this aesthetic to clearly demonstrate how it works within and through the living bodies who utilize it in the rehearsal studio. Next, I examine Spiderwoman’s published texts to reveal the ways in which the Storyweaving process has shaped the affects of these works on the artists and their audiences. Finally, Chapter Five names and evaluates the benefits of Spiderwoman’s legacy and estimates its future benefits as Spiderwoman’s heirs take up its process and adapt it to meet the needs of their communities.

Many lexicographers found some words unsuitable for inclusion in their dictionaries, thus the examination of general purpose dictionaries alone will not give us a faithful history of changes of the language. Nevertheless, by taking into account cant and slang dictionaries, the origins and history of such marginalized language can be truly examined. Despite people's natural fascination with these works, the early slang dictionaries have received relatively little scholarly attention, the later ones even less. This dissertation is written to honor those lexicographers who succeeded in a truthful documentation of nonstandard language. One of these disreputable lexicographers who found joy in an unending search for new and better ways of treating abstruse vocabulary was John Camden Hotten. This study investigates the importance of Hotten's Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words in the evolution of dictionary making. I analyze how many editions exist, the popularity of the 1864 edition, and differences between this and preceding editions, suggesting the inexorable growth of Hotten as a compiler. A short history of British cant and slang lexicography is provided and questions concerning the inclusion and exclusion of obsolete words and who makes such decisions are answered. Key terms such as slang and cant are defined and discussed briefly within the context of recent, relevant scholarship. The conclusions drawn from this research are laid out in extensive annotations embedded in the lexical items of a critical edition demonstrating once again that Hotten's compilation was extremely important in the evolution of dictionary making. That Hotten's work was accepted as authoritative is evidenced by the number of allusions and borrowings from it as seen in the work of later lexicographers: Barrere and Leland draw extensively upon it in A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon, and Cant, 2 vols. (1889-90) as do Farmer and Henley in Slang and Its Analogues, 7 vols. (1890-1904), and Eric Partridge in A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1937). Hotten's work seems to have been very influential in the preservation of words as well. A vast number of slang words that are cited in Hotten's dictionaries were used for a long time among the common people; in fact, the popular literature of the nineteenth century, particularly historical fiction, draws upon this vocabulary, and may well prove to be specifically indebted to Hotten's work. Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Joyce's Ulysses are full of slang expressions; Conan Doyle shows himself familiar with the terminology of pugilism in Rodney Stone, as does George Bernard Shaw in Cashel Byron's Profession. This dissertation places John Camden Hotten as a writer/publisher/compiler and his work within contemporaneous scholarly argument, and, contrary to popular opinion, acknowledges the publisher's significant contributions to the development of Victorian literature and late nineteenth- and twentieth-century lexicography.

The process of reading a modernist poem is just as much a process of deconstructing it: the language is designed to make meaning through inefficient means, like the aforementioned fragmentation and assemblage. The reader must decode the text. This is what I want to extract as a point of entry to my videogame analysis. The process of reading is not unlike the process of playing. Instead of linguistic structures, a player must navigate a game‟s internal rule system. The pleasure for both the reader and player comes from decoding the poem and game, respectively. I am not making claims that relationships between modernist poetry and videogames are inherent or innate. Similarly, I am not providing a framework to apply one medium to the other. Instead I want to investigate how each medium uses its affordances to take advantage of its potential for creative expression. I do not consider poetry or literature to be superior to videogames, nor am I invoking the argument that videogames should imitate earlier media. My goal is to compare specific modernist poems and videogames to see how each medium makes meaning through its respective processes.

Thesis (M.V.A.)--University of Sydney, 2009. / Title from title screen (viewed November 26, 2009) Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Visual Arts to the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. Degree awarded 2009; thesis submitted 2008. Includes bibliographical references.