This research investigates the ‘performativity’ of the ‘author function’ through collaging the audio recordings of American poet Sylvia Plath. The ‘author function’ is a term by Michel Foucault to describe how readers attribute certain characteristics that they believe belong to the author and ascribe them to the writing. ‘Performativity’ is a term used by Judith Butler to describe a set of actions that ascribe and predetermine a set of attributes to a subject through his or her gender, age, timeframe, nationality and race. The ‘performativity’ of the ‘author function’ appropriates these characteristics and attributes them to the author. How the determination of an authorial identity translates to the interaction of the practice component of the project, which includes several components of digital collage, is through attributions that readers make in the creation of an author. The practice component of the project consists of the collage of audio and video recordings, the programming of video with Max/MSP/Jitter, ‘performative’ elements and collage poetry on Twitter. The audio component was collaged from two poems entitled ‘Lady Lazarus’ and ‘The Applicant’ that Plath read to the British Council in 1962 to form a new poem entitled Lady/Applicant: The Lazarus. The video component consists of collaging recorded video clips of storefront and street signs in Camden, London, where she is associated with living and committing suicide at. A second video collage entitled Shadows/Shadows/Tomb takes place at a cemetery close to my residence in 2011 and documents symbols of death that reference my own authorial identity. The second set of videos run on a Max/MSP/Jitter patch that display four screens of filmed texts inscribed on tombstones that play four streaming poems through a systematic structure of boxes. The screens are displayed in each box and sourced from separate folders to display and play the film clips. The practice of collage and constraint-based poetry complicates the constitution of being the author when the collagist of Plath’s poetry is a different gender than hers. This research then expands on how identity radically shifts in the text when the subject and the collagist have very different identities. The radical shift in a collage takes place within a predefined and generalized concept of the reader as determined by Stanley Fish, a prominent writer on the subject of ‘reader-response criticism’, who believes that one way a reader could be approached is through his or her relationship with the writing.

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This study examines the presence of poetic form in First and Second Generation New York School Poetry. Because New York School writing—where its existence is conceded—seems formless, it has yet to be viewed under a formal lens. Therefore, this study is the first of its kind. In what follows, works by Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley and Ron Padgett are contextualized and closely read for form, with an attention to the shaping propensity of inhabited spaces. While it is agreed that the external environment has the potential to influence shapes and forms of writing, domestic spaces also offer parameters which are traceable onto the page. New York School poets lived in and wrote from alternative domestic spaces—untidy, disordered, congested apartments in downtown New York City. The forms of their poems are accordingly untraditional. New York School stanzas often take on the contours of these spaces, becoming linguistic rooms riddled with the tensions of indoor urban life. After outlining New York School poetry and addressing contemporaneous urban theories, this study asks: what role does the space of writing have on the shape of writing? More specifically, are New York City apartments reflected in the forms of New York School poems? Through close-reading and formal analysis, it becomes possible to affirm that New York School Poetry is formal, and that its form is distinctive in that in its variances, it makes it possible for the tensions and dynamics of living within the constraints of inner urban spaces to be fully pronounced and inflected. This is a study of the formal representations of those inflections.

Reading David Jones’s The Anathemata, William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, and Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems as epics, this doctoral dissertation challenges the old but persistent notion that epic poetry ceased being written at a particular point in the past and instead examines the particular formal, philosophical and political difficulties writers of this genre had to confront in the second half of the twentieth century. Twentieth-century epic poetry will primarily be defined in terms of its purpose or function, which is the representation of the identity of a ‘community’, while the literary period beginning with the end of the Second World War will be defined as late modernism. Chiefly inspired by Anthony Mellors’s Late Modernist Poetics: From Pound to Prynne, late modernism will be discussed as an aesthetico-political challenge with which writers had to come to terms in the wake of twentieth-century European totalitarianism. Georges Bataille’s philosophy of community, it will be argued, paradigmatically illustrates these aesthetico-political difficulties in philosophical terms, and the discussions of the three epic poems are therefore preceded by an analysis of Bataille’s Summa Atheologica, which constitutes the core of his philosophy of community.

This thesis consists of a poetry manuscript and a critical component that considers the poetics and history that inform the writing of that manuscript. Critical Component: Charting the Sea in Caribbean Poetry This thesis focuses on the influence of the sea in constructing identity in the writing of Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, and Dionne Brand. It is particularly interested in examining how these poets trace identity primarily in The Arrivants, Omeros, and No Language is Neutral through their various employments of the sea and liquidity in those works. I then read selections from two of my poetic forbearers from the British Virgin Islands - Alphaeus Norman and Verna Penn Moll - in order to examine the construction of the sea in their poetry against the canonised work of Brathwaite, Walcott, and Brand. I argue through close contextual readings of the selected works that through engagement of various approaches each poet arrives at a portrait of Caribbean identity that is constructed integrally through the fluid, mutable natures of the sea. The five poets are scrutinised in four chapters, in relation to their personal philosophies regarding national or regional identity through essay writings and interviews but more prominently in close readings of their poetry and in particular their representations of the sea. I begin by arguing that in Brathwaite's The Arrivants (1980), the importance of the sea in the various formations of West Indian identity is represented through the exercising of his tidalectic process in his reconstructions of the archetypes of Legba and Ananse, and his ritualising of cricket and calypso. In Walcott's Omeros (1990), the sea is presented as the embodiment of history itself through which all of Saint Lucia's contemporary inhabitants must access their ancestral memories. Walcott utilises the Atlantic as a creolising force in his reimagining of the Homeric archetypes of Philoctetes, Achilles, Hector, and Helen. Brand however, departs from this metaphorical interpretation of the sea and turns inward, redefining the boundaries of land, sea, and sexual desire in Trinidad through a remapping of that island that is focused on the ocean, waterways, and the bodies of women. Lastly, British Virgin Islander poets Alphaeus Osario Norman and Verna Penn Moll embrace different mythic versions of the sea. Norman's work creates a distinct sailor aesthetic that resonates with classic European naval and militaristic poetry as a way to invoke a national pride, while Penn Moll focuses on performances of cultural and communal waterside rituals to frame narratives of local history and village culture. Ultimately, I argue that the sea is presented variously as a portal through which history and tribal memory can be accessed, and as a supernaturally transformative force for the poet. Creative Component: Make Us All Islands Make Us All Islands is a poetry manuscript based in the British Virgin Islands that explores historical and personal relationships with the sea. The first section revolves around the various arrivals of liberated Africans rescued from slave ships wrecked or captured by the British Navy in the early 1800s. The liberated Africans were not enslaved, but rather forced into indentureship before ultimately being segregated from society and then disappearing from history. The second section is built around the departure of a generation of Tortolan men to work in the sugar plantations of the Dominican Republic at the turn of the following century, alongside other Anglophone Afro-Caribbean migrants. A large portion of these poems are built around accounts of the greatest boating disaster in the islands' history, the loss of a schooner christened Fancy Me which wrecked in a hurricane in 1926 off the coast of the Dominican island Saona. The final movement personalises this exercise and focuses on the poet's interactions with the sea and memory.

This thesis examines works by the British interwar writers W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice in the context of their relationship with the contemporary style of visual art known as Art Deco or the Moderne. It is my contention that, having absorbed many of the Art Deco idioms as an accepted part of the world they experience, these are reflected in the writers' works, firmly relating the work to a unique historical moment, place and social and cultural environment. In my reading of their work I identify sources of inspiration in their themes, idioms and imagery common to the artistic style, and investigate the extent to which their work has been informed in content and composition by visual art. Using diaries, travelogues, letters, essays, prose and poetry, I will argue that if Art Deco characterised the interwar period, it follows that it will also characterise the work of Auden and MacNeice. As such, I seek to reframe their work in an entirely new context, one seemingly unnoticed by earlier critics. My project also considers the ways in which a worldview is formed and environments are learned from childhood, with reference to early twentieth-century psychologists Erich Fromm, Lev Vygotsky and Maria Montessori, in order to posit the notion that growing up in the heyday of Art Deco, Auden and MacNeice may have subceived a great many of its motifs. I also identify the ways in which the writers engage visual art with intent, and establish a relationship between the writers and Art Deco's politics, imagery and composition through discussion of individual poems and their co-authored book Letters From Iceland (1937). In particular, the thesis examines the presence and impact of Art Deco elements in their work, such as Cubism (using both visual and literary examples), Futurism, the cinema, the Ballets Russes, and interwar attempts at producing what Wagner termed gesamtkunstwerk, the 'total work of art'.

This thesis comprises three main components: firstly, close readings and critical analyses of four major poetical works by W.H. Auden—“The Watershed”, The Sea and the Mirror, “New Year Letter”, and “In Time of War”; secondly, ten semi-informal letters addressed to W.H. Auden; and thirdly, a serial poem consisting of short and long poems based on the speeches of the public figure, Barack Obama. The thesis proposes a creative writing discipline founded on the productive and intensive exchange between reading and writing poetry, and reflection through letter writing. The chapters of critical analysis argue the following: firstly, that through his idiosyncratic handling of syntax and voice in poems like “The Watershed”, Auden introduced a new element of the uncanny into English poetry; secondly, that in The Sea and the Mirror, Auden re-evaluated his poetics and altered his poetic voice in response to a new reading public; thirdly, that in the “New Year Letter,” Auden uses tone to expand the range of his poetic voice; and fourthly, that in the sonnet sequence “In Time of War”, Auden uses parable to combine lyric and narrative elements in order to universalise the Sino-Japanese War. Some of the issues raised in the chapters of critical analysis, such as poetic truth, poetic voice, the lyric subject, and parabolic writing, are elaborated on in the letters to W.H. Auden. Finally, the Serial Poem presents 74 short and long poems produced using appropriative writing procedures. The idea that runs through all parts of this thesis is that speech, voice, and parable are crucial elements in the poetic practice of W.H. Auden, and that close attention to these three elements through all stages of this project— critical reading and writing, letter writing, and creative writing—has contributed to the development of a rich and productive poetic writing practice.

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Sammanfattning på svenska: I nutiden, forskning och innovationer båda från akademi och industri försätter för att minska effekterna från klimatförändring. Ett av många viktiga område där utvecklingen fortsätter är litiumjonbatterier (LIB). På grund av den ökade energiförbrukningen i många områden (främst transporter) har ökat fossila bränsleförbrukningar och orsakat behovet av energi att lagras mer. Samhället kan inte bara fokusera på global miljövänlig batteriproduktion för att lösa detta problem. Samtidigt är det nödvändigt att koncentrera på hur man utvärderas begagnade batterierna som vi redan har. Återvinning av litiumjonbatterier har därför börjat få en ökad betydelse. Utmaningar för batteri återvinning är energi kravet för steg på processen och andra processer kan orsaka att skadliga ämnen släpps ut i naturen. Därför är det mycket viktigt att veta hur ett batteri påverkas av interna och externa förändringar från första till sista steget i återvinning och hur detta kommer att påverka de andra stegen. Detta examensarbete fokuserar på lösningsbaserade urladdningssteget i LIB-återvinning och syftar till att hitta den optimal temperatur genom att utforska möjliga förändringar som observerats på katodmaterialet. Inom ramen för projektet planerades temperaturoptimeringsstudien att göras genom att kombinera kemiska förändringar både inom och utanför batteriet i lösningsurladdningen. Detta är med en diskussion om särskilt fokus på att uppnå en hållbar återhämtning och kvaliteten på katodmaterialet. / In today's world, where global warming is felt in every sense, Research & Development (R&D) studies are continuing rapidly both in companies and in research networks to minimize its effects. One of the most important areas where developments continue is on lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). The increased energy consumption in many areas (mainly transportation), has increased fossil fuel consumption and caused the need for energy to be stored more. In this sense, focusing on only global-environmentally friendly battery production is insufficient to solve this problem. At the same time, it is necessary to concentrate on how to evaluate the used batteries that we already have. Therefore, lithium-ion battery recycling has begun to gain importance. Challenges for battery recycling are that some of the processes require energy inputs and others can generate harmful substances that require containment. Therefore, it is very important to know how a battery is affected by internal and external changes from the first to the last stage of recycling and how this will affect the other stages. This master thesis focuses on the solution discharge step in LIB recycling and aims to find the optimum temperature range for the discharge step of LIB recycling by exploration of the possible changes observed on the cathode material. In the scope of the project, the temperature optimization study was done by combining the chemical changes both inside and outside of the battery in the solution discharge. This is with a discussion of a particular focus on achieving a sustainable recovery and the quality of cathode material.