The thesis explores the literary reputation of Edgar Allan Poe by linking two separate moments of his reception: the one in mid-nineteenth-century French discourse and the other in early twentieth-century Anglophone criticism. These moments are illustrated, on the one hand, by the appropriation project of his translator, Charles Baudelaire, and, on the other, by the critical essays of William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, and Aldous Huxley. The thesis builds a system of relations between these selected contexts by making the Baudelairean project the fulcrum of the Anglophone writings; these are considered to be an oblique, spill-over effect of his montage-piece which ennobled Poe aesthetically in European modernist contexts. The findings of textual analysis are pitted against one another so as to identify discursive instances of accord and departure in each critical account of the aesthetic value of Poe's work. The juxtaposition is used in order to bring about the transatlantic negotiation that takes place therein, but also the overdetermination that characterises the two opposing national repertories. Poignantly aware of the reinvented, French Poe, the Anglophone modernist writers responded by foregrounding linguistic nativity as an index of literariness: his worth, in other words, can only be decided by same-language readers. This primacy of linguistic nativity as a literary arbiter of taste is confirmed by Eliot and Huxley and debunked by Williams. Their attempt, however, is destabilised at the very moment when they integrate the French inscriptions into their narrative structures. The comparative perspective of the thesis establishes that every enactment of transatlantic opposition is bound to generate novel, unwarranted meanings which subtly escape the insular presuppositions of the writers by producing hybridity effects. Despite its symmetrical tidiness, the discussion reveals asymmetries of manipulation as soon as each account becomes a reflection of the others. In this light, the thesis attempts to illustrate the strategic role of comparativism as a tool of investigation that can help to transcend nation-centred constraints. By its very design, it advertises a conflation of 'content' and 'method,' made evident in its central hypothesis: the transatlantic semiosis of the figure of Poe was made available for further cultural use through a series of competing concentric discourses which were already corrupted by reflective operations.

Much has been written about Cherríe Moraga’s vision of a ‘Queer Aztlán,’ a postcolonial space where the differences of race, gender and sexuality are recognised, and the hierarchies of oppression amongst subjugated peoples are set aside in order to forge a utopian project of unity. What has yet to be extensively analysed is the utility of contradiction within such a utopian project. This project argues that despite the unifying agenda of Moraga’s politics, Moraga’s oeuvre reinforces a problematic framework of Aristotelian noncontradiction that inscribes, rather than interrogates, difference. This delimiting framework is evident in Moraga’s writing through an exploration of the issues of language, internalised oppression, cross-racial feminist alliance and female indigeneity. In line with my position that Moraga’s politics are a work in progress, a politics of identity requiring constant self-questioning alongside an ever-changing Chicana/o community, an analysis of the political drawbacks of non-contradiction offers fresh avenues for reconfiguring Moraga’s ideas into a more efficacious practice. Addressing these issues requires the use of an interdisciplinary methodology that incorporates considerations of feminism(s); nationalism; critical race theory; colonialism and postcolonialism; as well as literary theory. This interdisciplinary methodology is necessary due to the multi-genred nature of Moraga’s work, involving essay, poetry, drama and fiction, and the far-reaching potential of her politics that requires an analysis of the simultaneity of various forms of oppression.

Concrete poetry has been posited as the only truly international poetic movement of the 20th Century, with Conceptual writing receiving the same cultural location for the 21st-Century. Both forms are dedicated to a materiality of textual production, a poetic investigation into how language occupies space. My dissertation, Text Without Text: Concrete Poetry and Conceptual Writing consists of three chapters: “Dirty”, “Clean” and Conceptual.” Chapter One outlines how degenerated text features in Canadian avant-garde poetics and how my own work builds upon traditions formulated by Canadian poets bpNichol, bill bissett and Steve McCaffery, and can be formulated as an “inarticulate mark,” embodying what American theorist Sianna Ngai refers to as a “poetics of disgust.” Chapter Two, “Clean,” situates my later work around the theories of Eugen Gomringer, the Noigandres Group and Mary Ellen Solt; the clean affectless use of the particles of language in a means which echoes modern advertising and graphic design to create universally understood poetry embracing logos, trademarks and way-finding signage. Chapter Three, “Conceptual,” bridges my concrete poetry with my work in Conceptual writing—especially my novels Local Colour and Flatland. Conceptual writing, as theorized by Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place and others, works to interrogate a poetics of “uncreativity,” plagiarism, digitally aleatory writing and procedurality. Text Without Text: Concrete Poetry and Conceptual Writing also includes three appendices that outline my poetic oeuvre to date.

This thesis considers Ralph Waldo Emerson’s compositional process of ‘double writing’ as a distinctly theorised and intellectually coherent practice that generated discrete bodies of text: his private journals and notebooks; and the public essays, lectures, and poems. Throughout Emerson scholarship, critics tend to quote the two bodies without differentiation, often either neglecting the issue of their coexistence or asserting the priority of one form over the other. I contend instead that principles of self-reading, accretive reinscription, and a perpetuated relation to his own text condition Emerson’s ideas of poetic agency and the role of literature in broader socio-cultural contexts, to the extent that they become the preeminent factor in shaping his philosophical and literary aspirations. Focusing on the period 1836-50, from the beginning of the coexistence of public and private corpuses to the point at which he finalises his theory of textual relation, I trace the way in which Emerson’s ongoing textual investment first echoes—and later disrupts—aspirations to realise a philosophy of the subject steeped in the romantic tradition. The first part of the thesis examines the two textual bodies insofar as they reflect upon each other and on theories of composition, finding that Emerson gradually loses faith in the function of his public works up to 1842. In the second section of the thesis, I illustrate the continual revision his relation to text undergoes in the major works of the 1840s, as his compositional theory adapts to first conceptualise and then fulfil certain ethical obligations of the scholar and poet. I end by examining the poetic apotheosis figured by Poems (1847) and Representative Men (1850), which has little in common with his youthful aspirations, but which explains the ‘sage’-like mantle he accepted in American life and letters from the 1850s until his death in 1882. As well as revising conceptions of Emerson’s literary agency and the structure of his canon, this thesis offers an original reading of the theory of an author’s socio-cultural role in the mid nineteenth-century through the example of one of the era’s major figures.

This thesis focuses on the creative work of Edgar Allan Poe, and pieces together how various references to music in his poems and tales function in ways that echo throughout his oeuvre. By taking into account the plots and themes that surround references to music in Poe’s works, this thesis explores how Poe uses and describes music as it inhabits real world settings, liminal spaces, and otherworldly sites. The literature this thesis draws from ranges from tales little-discussed in Poe criticism, such as “The Spectacles” and “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” to more complex and popular tales such as “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Masque of the Red Death”; the same is true of the poems, which range from “Fanny” to “Annabel Lee.” The exploration of the less critically popular texts in conjunction with the more critically popular ones brings to light a clear hierarchy of music’s function in the tales and poems of Edgar Poe in ways that converse with his treatment of madness and the divine. The work of music and literature scholars will serve as the basis for distinguishing and historically positioning Poe’s use of certain musical terms, as well as ultimately providing a means to express the mythical, philosophical, and theological implications of music’s place in Poe’s works.

This thesis examines the European influences on the works of Paul Bowles and William S. Burroughs, focusing on the themes, styles, techniques and preoccupations derived from Existentialism, Surrealism and Primitivism. Their texts, informed by their interest in the transatlantic intellectual currents of the time and non-American influences, represent a dissenting voice against the commonly and officially held values of the post-World War II United States and Western ideological power structures, and offer an insight into the development of a twentieth century American cultural identity. Examining Bowles and Burroughs in parallel gives a unique insight into their differences and striking similarities with regard to their experiences of expatriation and European sensibilities. Analysis of the historical context and material history of the publication, underlying influences, themes, techniques and preoccupations of their works reveals a deeper political engagement than has been previously shown. Bowles and Burroughs participated in a broad transatlantic dialogue of ideas, as reflected in the geopolitical and chronopolitical similarities of their works. The thesis focuses on their use of similar themes such as alienation, derived from Sartrean Existentialism, and their shared existential negativity toward life in the United States. It is argued that their style and method of indirect ideological expression, derived from Existentialism, enables a form of expression that can effectively and covertly interrogate American identity. Their use of experimental techniques drawn directly from the politically charged European based art movements of Dada and Surrealism, such as automatism, is shown to create a politically useful distance between the work and the author, while Surrealist preoccupations with shock, intoxication and violence evoke a closer relationship between the work and the reader. The notion of 'primitivism' and a persistent interest in 'primitive cultures' that intersects with representations of sexuality and a rejection of modernity in their works is examined as a reflection of their negative attitudes toward the modernism represented by the United States. Examining the parallels between their works and the development of film noir also reveals an engagement with a broad transatlantic exchange of ideas, styles and techniques across media. Their experimentation with the constructed nature of authorship, which developed through literary practice in their later works is shown to interrogate the concurrent poststructuralist theories of authorship. The historical contexts, influences of European intellectual cross-currents and range of connections between Bowles and Burroughs combine to make a compelling case that their works are politically charged, transatlantic in style and technique, and stridently significant in the history of English language literature and our understanding of contemporary American and European cultures.

This thesis endeavors to engage in contemporary Thoreauvian scholarship by providing an original reading of Thoreau’s works using a critical framework based on Wai Chee Dimock’s concept of “deep time.” As such, it argues that Thoreau’s infamous embrace of political and rhetorical dissent takes shape in his writings most strongly in his construction of time-frames that break with or stand against his contemporaries’ own use, sense, and measuring of time in antebellum New England. Focusing on two aspects of Henry David Thoreau’s work, the thesis argues firstly that Walden’s resistance to familiar, sequential understandings of time manifests in myth, wherein time and history are shaped holistically rather than sequentially. Secondly, it posits that Thoreau’s excursion narratives resist the dominant recordings of history of his time by forming alternative historiographies within their structures, accommodating otherwise silent or ignored historical elements, at the expense of otherwise smooth, uninterrupted narratives. Having thus established Thoreau’s temporal structures, the thesis goes on to look at Annie Dillard and Susan Howe in order to trace out Thoreau’s previously unacknowledged formation of temporal structures in his texts as a genealogy that emerges in late twentieth-century American literature. Consequently, the thesis provides an alternative reading of Thoreau that moves toward a rethinking of his location in nineteenth-century America and its twentieth-century literature.

This thesis examines literary and historical accounts of the Creole slave ship revolt (1841) by Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Lydia Maria Child and Pauline E. Hopkins. The introduction debates the generic status of government testimony and press reportage and identifies the fundamental theoretical issues of the dissertation which include those of intentionality, intertextuality and "signifyin(g)." Chapter I traces the traditions of black and white abolitionism which influenced Douglass's adaptations of the mutiny and researches his representations of the heroic slave figure, Madison Washington, in speeches which he gave in Britain and America during the 1840s. Chapter II analyses the major critical questions surrounding Douglass's. The Heroic Slave (1853) while exploring its previously neglected theatrical conventions. This chapter also compares this work with Douglass's recently discovered second version, The Heroic Slave: A Thrilling Narrative of the Adventures of Madison Washington in Pursuit of Liberty (1853/63? ). Chapter III contextualises Brown's (re)modelling of the black historical figure by examining the varying types of forum - including both periodical and historical volumes - within which he published "Madison Washington" (1861,1863) and "Slave Revolt at Sea" (1867). This chapter discusses Brown's experimentation with an antislavery panorama and interweaving of literary, biographical and historical techniques to revise existing formal conventions. The final chapter interprets Child's biography of "Madison Washington" published in The Freedmen's Book (1866), and Hopkins's short story, "A Dash for Liberty" (1901), in terms of their interventions into gendered representations of slave heroism. Child's text is considered alongside her earlier journalism on the Creole revolt and her short story on insurrection, "The Black Saxons" (1846), and contextualised by an analysis of its publication in an educational tract. This chapter also discusses Hopkins's "Famous Men and Women of the Negro Race" (1901-2), and her textual borrowings from Brown's "Slave Revolt at Sea" (1866) to demonstrate the political imperatives guiding her dramatisations of black history. Finally, the conclusion explores the mid-twentieth century version of this revolt, Madison (1956), a musical composed by the black playwright, Theodore Ward, to indicate the importance of this approach for re-evaluating intertextual relationships across black and white abolitionist authors, throughout the nineteenth century and after.

This thesis analyses representations of autism in twentieth and twenty-first century Anglo-American literature and film. It posits that, while many cultural portrayals of autism are more concerned with perpetuating the stereotypes surrounding the condition than with representing autistic experiences, there is evidence of a small but significant counter-current that is responding to and challenging more reductive representational modes. Each of my chapters examines prevailing narrative tropes that reinforce existing stereotypes of disability (narratives of overcoming, victimhood, dependency), which can be clearly evidenced in contemporary depictions of autism, from Barry Levinson’s Rain Man (1988) to Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003). In each case, a significant proportion of texts use the generic markers of autistic representation to question and subvert these more established literary and cinematic approaches. The twenty-first century authors discussed in this thesis repurpose and interrogate the prevailing stereotypes of autistic representations, and provide provocative considerations for the study of postmodernism, crime fiction, melodrama and autobiography. This critical crossover and the employment of genre tropes cross-examines the subversive potential of genre fiction and the significance of postmodernism as frameworks for examining depictions of autism. This thesis proposes that this crucial minority of texts embodies a writing forwards out of stereotypes of autistic representations, by both autistic and neurotypical authors, into new, twenty-first century representational patterns.

by Norman August Lehtomaki. / Bibliography: p. 161-163. / Originally presented as the author's thesis, (M.S.) in the M.I.T. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1978. / Prepared under Dept. of Energy, Division of Electric Energy Systems Grant ERDA-E(49-18)-2087.