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This dissertation delineates a range of literary endeavors engaging the gothic contours of child life in early to mid-twentieth century America. Drawing fresh attention to fictional representations of the child in modernist narratives, I show how writers such as William Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, Jean Toomer, Eudora Welty, and Katherine Anne Porter turned to childhood as a potent site for negotiating cultural anxieties about physical and cultural reproduction. I reveal the implications of modernist technique for the historical formation of American childhood, demonstrating how these texts intervened in national debates about sexuality, race, and futurity. Each dissertation chapter adopts a comparative approach, indicating a shared investment in a specific formulation of the gothic child. Barnes and Faulkner, in creating the child-woman, appraise how the particular influence of psychoanalysis on childhood innocence irrevocably alters the cultural landscape. Faulkner and Toomer, through the spectral child, evaluate the exclusionary racial politics surrounding interracial intimacy which impact kinship structures in the U.S. South. Welty and Porter, in spotlighting the orphan girl-child, assess the South’s gendered social matrix through the child’s consciousness. Finally, Faulkner, in addressing children as a readership in his little-known gothic fable, The Wishing Tree, produces a compelling site to examine the relationship between literature written for the child and modernist artistic practice.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Kent State University, 2007. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Mar. 19, 2009). Advisor: Robert W. Trogdon. Keywords: midwestern literature, midwest, regionalism, modernism. Includes bibliographical references (p. 189-197).

Le but de ce travail est de présenter comment la traduction est devenue une poétique pour le poète américain Ezra Pound et le poète brésilien Haroldo de Campos. Les deux poètes ont utilisé la traduction pour élargir leur compréhension de la poésie mais, en même temps, créer une nouvelle approche du phénomène littéraire en rassemblant des œuvres d'auteurs de différentes régions, époques et langues différentes. Pound a commencé à écrire de la poésie au rythme de l'anglo-saxon, puis il a pris une direction différente en produisant des livres avec des commentaires sur ses traductions comme les troubadours provençaux et la poésie chinoise. Il a passé presque 25 ans à traduire l'ensemble du travail de Confucius et, après cette période, il a publié ses dernières traductions de poèmes grecs et égyptiens. Haroldo était un admirateur de Pound et il a partagé sa passion de traduction. Il a fondé le mouvement avant-gardiste de la poésie concrète au Brésil et il a fait des traductions collectives avec les membres du mouvement. Sa spécialisation dans les langues l'a amené à traduire la poésie d'avant-garde de plusieurs langues différentes, puis il s'est déplacé vers les classiques comme Dante, Goethe, Homer et la Bible. De Campos a bénéficié de son poste universitaire pour obtenir des conseils spécialisés pour ses traductions. En outre, il a élaboré une théorie sur la traduction après des textes philosophiques, qu'il appelait «la transcreation». Il était convaincu que la meilleure poésie en tout temps était essentiellement d'avant-garde. / The aim of this work is to present how translation became a poetics for the American poet Ezra Pound and the Brazilian Poet Haroldo de Campos. Both poets employed translation to expand their understandings about poetry but, at the same time, to create a new approach to the literary phenomenon by bringing together works of authors from many different geographies, epochs and languages. Pound started to write poetry following the rhythm of the Anglo-Saxon and then he took a different direction producing books with comments on his translations like Provençal troubadours and Chinese poetry. He spent almost 25 years translating the entire work of Confucius and after that period he published his last translations of Greek and Egyptian poems. Haroldo was an admirer of Pound and he shared his translation passion. He founded the Avant-garde movement of Concrete Poetry in Brazil and he did collective translations with the members of the movement. His specialization in languages prompted him to translate Avant-garde poetry from many different languages and then he moved to the classics like Dante, Goethe, Homer and the Bible. De Campos benefited from his academic position to obtain specialized advising for his translations. Furthermore, he elaborated a theory on translation following philosophical texts, that he called “transcreation.” He was convinced that the best poetry in all times is essentially Avant-garde.

This thesis examines the semiotic experiences in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury from a reader perspective by analyzing in what ways sensorial gesamtkunstwerk is used to convey or evoke sensations that appeal to the reader on a cognitive level. Drawing from Marco Caracciolo’s theories on experientiality which operate under the assumption that an evoked feeling from a text is dependent on the reader’s familiarity with their emotions and senses, this thesis claims that the bridge between narratological (textual) experiences and the reader’s experiences in the novel is made possible through sensorial aesthetics that appeal to our sensory modalities and that operate in a gestalt fashion to form a sensorial gesamtkunstwerk. Upon closer analysis, the experientiality in The Sound and the Fury is not only evoked by sensory modalities operating as a sensorial gesamtkunstwerk that draws on the reader’s cognitive and sensorial familiarity as is suggested by Caracciolo, but the analysis also exposes a narratological gesamtkunstwerk that operates at an intratextual level and which is only manifested when the novel is examined holistically. Containing differently perceived semiotic experiences, collectively, the differently narrated sections complement one another in such a way that they, too, synthesize into a gesamtkunstwerk that is dependent upon each section to fully operate.

This thesis explores the origin and expression of dialectical thought in the life and writings of the American modernist Laura Riding. Within a biographical framework, I trace the steps by which it became the defining characteristic of her poetic, literary and critical works. A few have noted Riding's dialectical manner; none have appreciated its centrality. This is the first detailed study. An introductory outline of the origin and definition of dialectic provides a working theoretical context for the study that follows. Riding was born Laura Reichenthal in New York City, 1901. Her father, a Jewish émigré, was a committed activist for the left and included Riding in his campaigning at a very young age, immersing and educating her in the political and philosophical radicalism thriving in New York's Jewish communities of the era. There she internalised the revolutionary dialectics that would inform her aesthetic practice. Breaking with her father in her teens, she abandoned politics for literature. As Laura Riding - the name she adopted in 1927 and with which her literary writings continue to be associated - she moved to London and began collaborating with Robert Graves, relocating with him to Majorca in 1929. Producing poetry, fiction, criticism and experimental philosophico-literary works, she became a formidable presence within European literary modernism. Many aspects of her work are dialectical. Paradox, inversion and negation are perennial textual features. Key events in her life were also experienced as dialectical. Her insistence upon 'death' as an inverted sigil of unmediated vitality points toward a negatively dialectical mode of thought. In this regard, the theories of Theodor W. Adorno prove invaluable. Adorno provides a unique lexicon of terms - 'constitutive subjectivity', 'administered world', 'true object' - with which to draw out Riding's dialectical subtleties. Reading them alongside Adorno's negatively dialectical theory of modernist art and aesthetic praxis, certain aspects of Riding's writings are illuminated and, in some respects, they correspond. After a suicide attempt in 1929, Riding's perspective changed. Before it, her point of view was positioned within institutionally determined 'reality', and 'truth' beyond it was adumbrated by dialectical means. Afterwards, she believed herself transfigured: the embodiment of immediate, consciously apprehended noumenal objectivity. But the written word remained recalcitrant toward her attempts to inscribe this newfound positive 'truth'. This frustration contributed to her abandonment of poetry at the end of the 1930s. Re-emerging in the 1960s as Laura (Riding) Jackson, her disavowal of poetry and exploration of 'truth-potential' in language utilised dialectical approaches derived from her earlier experiences and writings.

Atenta a categorias poéticas em uso no fim do século XIX, esta dissertação de mestrado estuda algumas das escolhas efetuadas pelo poeta nicaragüense Rubén Darío (1867-1916) na busca de satisfazer e, ao mesmo tempo, alargar as exigências diversas de seus leitores contemporâneos. Identificam-se o artifício e a versatilidade como elementos fundamentais pelos quais o poeta obteve o apreço de seu público. O capítulo I expõe brevemente o estado atual da recepção à poesia de Darío para, então, investigar as origens do processo de constituição histórica de sua autoridade poética, ocupando-se sobretudo de algumas questões que nortearam a sua primeira recepção tanto na América como na Europa. No capítulo II, estudam-se duas categorias relevantes para uma compreensão histórica dessa poesia: elegância (preceito representativo adequado à inserção da poesia nas práticas cultas e ultracivilizadas do fim do século XIX) e harmonia (elemento de estilo que operava não só no nível fônico, na beleza sonora, como também na sintaxe, na metáfora, na métrica, na versificação, na escolha dos temas e assuntos etc.). No capítulo III, a análise de poemas selecionados procura demonstrar a pertinência do recorte proposto pela identificação de usos da elegância e da harmonia em três gêneros diversos praticados por Darío: o elogio, a epístola em verso e as \"visões\", relacionadas mais intimamente com a poética chamada simbolista. O capítulo IV aborda criticamente a noção de musicalidade, buscando ampliá-la para explicar uma série de procedimentos e técnicas pelas quais se poderão diferenciar com mais clareza as escolhas autorais e os elementos comuns às poéticas vigentes em seu tempo. / Taking into account the poetical categories in use at the end of the 19th century, this dissertation examines some of the options chosen and worked by the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (1867-1916) in order to satisfy and, at the same time, expand the diverse demands of his contemporary readers. We have centered upon artifice and versatility as key elements by which the poet managed to receive his public\'s applause. Chapter I begins with the current state of the reception of Darío\'s poetry in order to investigate the origins of the process of a historical constitution of his poetical authority, focusing mainly on certain issues which lay on the base of his first reception in America as well as in Europe. In chapter II, we have studied two relevant categories for a historical comprehension of this poetry: elegance (a representative precept appropriate to the insertion of poetry into the refined and ultra-civilized practices of the late 1800s) and harmony (an element of style which operated not only for the phonic level of poetry, for the sonorous beauty, but also for syntax, for metaphor, metrics, versification, choice of themes and subjects, etc.). In chapter III, the analysis of selected poems aims at unveiling the relevance of our methodology through identifying the uses of elegance and harmony in three diverse genres practiced by Darío: the laudatory, the epistles in verse, and the \"visions\", related more closely to the poetics called by the name of \"symbolist\". Chapter IV deals critically with the notion of musicality, expanding it in order to explain a series of procedures and techniques through which we are able to differentiate more clearly between personal choices and the elements which were common to the poetical practices of the poet\'s time.

This MA thesis seeks to apply Henri Bergson’s theory of time to a reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” and David Fincher’s film adaptation of the text, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. By applying Bergson’s notions of durée and simultaneity, timeless moments will be seen to emerge in the text and the film. I place Fitzgerald’s text in context with other seminal modernist works in order to provide a study of the importance of the story within its time period. Through Deleuze’s application of Bergson to cinema, I analyze the evolution of the time-image within Fincher’s film, and place it within the context of a cinema of time. Ultimately, this thesis begins a discussion of the importance of how F. Scott Fitzgerald and Fincher’s works contribute meditations on time in their respective time periods and media.

Atenta a categorias poéticas em uso no fim do século XIX, esta dissertação de mestrado estuda algumas das escolhas efetuadas pelo poeta nicaragüense Rubén Darío (1867-1916) na busca de satisfazer e, ao mesmo tempo, alargar as exigências diversas de seus leitores contemporâneos. Identificam-se o artifício e a versatilidade como elementos fundamentais pelos quais o poeta obteve o apreço de seu público. O capítulo I expõe brevemente o estado atual da recepção à poesia de Darío para, então, investigar as origens do processo de constituição histórica de sua autoridade poética, ocupando-se sobretudo de algumas questões que nortearam a sua primeira recepção tanto na América como na Europa. No capítulo II, estudam-se duas categorias relevantes para uma compreensão histórica dessa poesia: elegância (preceito representativo adequado à inserção da poesia nas práticas cultas e ultracivilizadas do fim do século XIX) e harmonia (elemento de estilo que operava não só no nível fônico, na beleza sonora, como também na sintaxe, na metáfora, na métrica, na versificação, na escolha dos temas e assuntos etc.). No capítulo III, a análise de poemas selecionados procura demonstrar a pertinência do recorte proposto pela identificação de usos da elegância e da harmonia em três gêneros diversos praticados por Darío: o elogio, a epístola em verso e as \"visões\", relacionadas mais intimamente com a poética chamada simbolista. O capítulo IV aborda criticamente a noção de musicalidade, buscando ampliá-la para explicar uma série de procedimentos e técnicas pelas quais se poderão diferenciar com mais clareza as escolhas autorais e os elementos comuns às poéticas vigentes em seu tempo. / Taking into account the poetical categories in use at the end of the 19th century, this dissertation examines some of the options chosen and worked by the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (1867-1916) in order to satisfy and, at the same time, expand the diverse demands of his contemporary readers. We have centered upon artifice and versatility as key elements by which the poet managed to receive his public\'s applause. Chapter I begins with the current state of the reception of Darío\'s poetry in order to investigate the origins of the process of a historical constitution of his poetical authority, focusing mainly on certain issues which lay on the base of his first reception in America as well as in Europe. In chapter II, we have studied two relevant categories for a historical comprehension of this poetry: elegance (a representative precept appropriate to the insertion of poetry into the refined and ultra-civilized practices of the late 1800s) and harmony (an element of style which operated not only for the phonic level of poetry, for the sonorous beauty, but also for syntax, for metaphor, metrics, versification, choice of themes and subjects, etc.). In chapter III, the analysis of selected poems aims at unveiling the relevance of our methodology through identifying the uses of elegance and harmony in three diverse genres practiced by Darío: the laudatory, the epistles in verse, and the \"visions\", related more closely to the poetics called by the name of \"symbolist\". Chapter IV deals critically with the notion of musicality, expanding it in order to explain a series of procedures and techniques through which we are able to differentiate more clearly between personal choices and the elements which were common to the poetical practices of the poet\'s time.

(in English): The diploma's thesis deals with the natural theme in the work of Argentine poet Alfonsina Storni. The first part briefly outlines her biography. Following theoretical chapter presents several literary movements of which the writer is considered to be part of: modernism, postmodernism and avant-garde. Among others the work refers to the distinctive position of the author in the Hispano-american poetry. The main part consists of the analyses of several poems of Alfonsina Storni, chosen from her work according to the selected topics. Primarily, the element of the sea, the earth and the sky are being analyzed, after that the elements of fauna and flora are interpreted. The analyses are oriented not only on the content and meaning of the poems but also on the formal part in which the shift of author's style is noticeable. The final part of the thesis briefly introduces other topics which are related with the author's writing. The whole work is based primarily on the author's works, followed by theoretical studies related to the era and also on two biographies and several interpretations of the particular works. Since there has not been yet published any translation of Alfonsina's Storni work, an attachment of this thesis consists of translations of several selected poems.