Reconstructions is a nine-movement composition for solo soprano, chorus, and wind ensemble using texts from several of Emily Dickinson's poems. The soloist represents the main character in this dramatic work, and the narrative structure portrays abstract moments in this character's life. While the narrative structure of the reconstructed fragments is important to the form of the composition, other elements are also significant. Pitch structures generated from set theoretical systems, in addition to cyclic and palindromic structures are utilized throughout. Timbre also delineates the form, as various combinations of instruments and chorus create an evolving environment in which the soloist resides.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This essay explores a broad range of literary works that treat long-term grief as a natural response to the death of a child. Literary examples show gaps in the medical and social sciences’ considerations of grief, since these disciplines judge bereaved mothers’ grief as excessive or label it bereavement disorder. By contrast, authors who employ the ancient storyline of child death illuminate maternal grieving practices, which are commonly marked with a vigilance that expresses itself in wildness. Many of these authors treat grief as a forced pilgrimage, but question the possibility of returning to a previous state of psychological balance. Instead, the mothers in their stories and poems resist external pressure for closure and silence and favor lasting memory. Harriet Beecher Stowe, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Emily Dickinson, in letters to bereaved mother Susan Gilbert Dickinson and in the poetry included in these letters, represent maternal child loss as compelling a movement into a new state and emphasize the lasting pain and disruption of this loss.

A poetry thesis exploring subjects of gender identity, sexuality, socialization, writing, and craft, and including a preface that credits Emily Dickinson and Adrienne Rich as primary influences. One-third of the manuscript features epistolary prose poems in conversation with Dickinson, while the remaining portion contains poetry written in either free verse, traditional poetic form, or field composition.

‘Relevance theory’ is a linguistic theory offering an alternative to the conventional ‘code model’ of communication, by suggesting that inference, rather than coding and decoding, is the primary driving force motivating interpretation. In this thesis, I consider the implications for literary criticism of the relevance theory account of communication, particularly in relation to metaphor, as an enduring concern of both linguistics and literary studies. The thesis focuses on three temporally disparate authors – Shakespeare, Dickinson and Heaney – whose work, analyzed by linguists as well as literary critics, is abundant in metaphor, but might prompt us to think about literary communication in different ways. The Introduction considers the coincidence of the central terms of relevance theory (context, interpretation, inference, intention) with many of the fundamental concerns of literary criticism. Chapter One examines various accounts of metaphor, historical and recent, by literary critics, philosophers and linguists, before offering a brief introduction to relevance theory’s ‘deflationary’ account of metaphor and its implications for literary critical analysis. Chapter Two looks at plays by Shakespeare that are as much concerned with communication as they are representations of it, and considers how relevance theory’s account of the cognitive process of developing new interpretations on the spot, in context, based on expectations of relevance, challenges any straightforward sense of what textual metaphors ‘mean’. Chapter Three explores the striking prominence of the term ‘inference’, fundamental to the relevance theory account of communication, in Dickinson’s poetry. Whilst Dickinson’s ‘definitional’, ‘X is Y’ metaphors appear to facilitate a bridging of the gap between abstractions and the concrete world linguistically, her dependence on inference exposes the bleak uncertainty of that which can only be inferred, whilst nonetheless forging a communicative bond between the poet writing and her multiple audiences. Chapter Four analyzes different figurative forms in Heaney’s poetry, and looks particularly at the relationship between metaphor and simile in light of the relevance theory account. Critical analyses of Heaney’s work often attribute political significance to what are assumed to be metaphors within his poetry, without considering the role played by (perhaps unconscious) interpretative expectations of the kind relevance theory would predict; taking local linguistic context more thoroughly into account might offer a very different perspective on what Heaney is ‘saying’. In conclusion, I review Lakoff and Johnson’s profoundly influential ‘conceptual metaphor theory’ (CMT), and propose that relevance theory’s linguistically-driven account of metaphor in communication needs elements of ‘conceptual’ accounts such as CMT which describe metaphor as a matter of thought as well as language. Metaphor is a tremendously powerful communicative tool, but one to which literary critical analysis cannot do justice without a functioning theory of communication such as that offered by relevance theory.

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Traditional feminist readings have valued women's writing that voices silenced experiences. In contrast, other twentieth-century theoretical formulations regard absences, refusals, and silences as constitutive of aesthetic practice rather than as imposed upon it. This dissertation attends carefully to how U.S. women writers approach the nonlinguistic, accounting for how they have been silenced as well as for the kinds of silencing that women poets themselves perform. It argues that U.S. women's experimental poetry is driven by contradictory relationships to language and silence: in one strain, gendered cultural repression spurs American women poets to push language into new territory, often figured as speaking out. But in another mode, female identification with the nonrational or nonlinguistic, whether externally enforced or strategically inhabited, impels women to develop poetic silences in order to resist the impositions of language on a feminized other. Meeting these simultaneous and opposed goals--creating poetic forms capable of greater expressive range while signaling the inadequacy of linguistic expression--necessitates formal experimentation. My primary claim that an unresolved ambivalence toward the nonlinguistic drives innovation dictates an emphasis on formal technique, including syntax, rhyme and meter, sentence and stanza structure, and figuration. This attention to poetic particulars grounds my contextualization of the work of each poet I consider--Emily Dickinson, Lorine Niedecker, and Gwendolyn Brooks--in relation to her own life, to broader literary and cultural histories, and to poststructuralist theories of language. The first chapter of my dissertation explores the role that early American, particularly Puritan and Transcendental, attitudes toward wilderness shape poetic motivations both to extend and limit the reach of language throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In subsequent chapters, I evaluate how those motivations change in the context of Dickinson's nineteenth-century spirituality, Niedecker's modernist and postmodernist anxieties about the role of the poet, and Brooks's engagement with the politics and aesthetics of black nationalism. Reading U.S. women's poetic innovation as simultaneously breaking and cultivating silences opens a dialogue among historically feminist understandings of silence as oppressive, theories that put silence at the heart of poetic impulse, and avant-garde theoretical conceptions of linguistic experimentation as a feminist project.

This thesis highlights the fact that the way Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost understood nature informed their work as writers. The underlying theme through each chapter is how epistemology about the natural world is created. It compares two seemingly opposed approaches to knowledge construction about nature, answering the question: Is knowledge and value about nature socially constructed or inherently existent and discovered. The second chapter emphasizes that Dickinson considered knowledge based in nature to be socially constructed, making the subjugation of the nineteenth-century woman one of her central subjects. The third chapter shows how Frost agreed with social constructivism in that knowledge is the product of imaginative involvement; he used a constructive stance to emphasize humanity's important role in compelling nature to reveal spiritual truths, which made the reciprocal relationship between people and their environments central to his work. The concluding chapter synthesizes these two approaches and suggests that both are necessary in our modern day understanding of nature.

I identify three significant components of Heaven’s spatiality that determine the boundaries of and conditions for “legitimate” spiritual experience, all of which are embodied in what Dickinson calls “the apparatus” of prayer (Fr 632). First, the locations of Heaven and Earth are determinable, absolute, and inflexible, thus marking the distance that separates human from God as static and constant; second, in order to engage God, the supplicant must turn towards Heaven (and away from Earth); and third, specific spatial and emotional protocol are established by assigning God socially constructed roles such as King or Father. Dickinson dismantles the spatiality of Heaven in her poems and letters by undoing these three components; yet even in the act of disassembling, she embraces and recycles their respective ideologies as a way of claiming sole ownership of her religiosity.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University, 1992. / Includes tables. Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: Philip A. Fey. Dissertation Committee: Elizabeth Kasl. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 441-449).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1988. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 509-526).