This thesis examines the trope of anthropology in the Canadian poet Anne Carson's work. This trope functions as an extended metaphor to describe the study of cultures, texts, and the "alien countries" of other human souls. Anne Carson rejects anthropological practices that aim at the "invasion" of the other, and associates such practices with the actions of seeing, projecting and even "devouring." Instead she favours anthropological approaches that foster mutual "encounters", such approaches being typically charged with the actions of listening, absorbing and breathing. This distinction becomes crucial when we consider its implications for reading and writing about Anne Carson's work. Can a reader encounter rather than invade a poem? What meaning can the reader find in such an encounter if, unlike the practice of anthropology, it is undertaken in written form and in isolation? Might we conclude that all responses to poetry emerge not from the fullness and immediacy of an encounter, but precisely from the impossibility of ever undergoing the experience of such an encounter?

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Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2016 / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie tesis is ’n studie van Anne Carson se boek Nox wat die vorm, voorkoms, prosesse en samestelling van die teks ondersoek en analiseer. Dit probeer tot ’n begrip kom van presies hoe Carson “a brilliantly curated heap of scraps” verwerk tot ’n outonome kunswerk, “a thing that carries itself.” In die eerste gedeelte van die tesis word Nox as voorbeeld van ’n kunsboek (“artists’ book”) beskou. Nox se inhoud en voorkoms word gemeet aan die definisie en kenmerke van kunsboeke en binne die konteks van die geskiedenis van boekkuns as praktyk geplaas. Daar word veral gefokus op die visuele aard van Nox, die maniere waarop die boek verskil van meer konvensionele tekste, die selfbewustheid en selfrefleksie wat in die teks manifesteer en die eenheid van vorm en inhoud wat die outeur/kunstenaar bewerkstellig. Die tweede gedeelte ondersoek hoe vertaling op verskillende vlakke as proses in die skep van Nox funksioneer. Die fragmente en brokstukke waaruit die teks bestaan word deur middel van vertaling tot ’n eenheid gebind. Die proses van lewensbeskrywing word op metaforiese vlak as ’n soort vertaling gesien, wat parallel staan teenoor die letterlike vertaling van Catullus se “Gedig 101” wat op die bladsye van Nox plaasvind. Terselfdertyd verteenwoordig die wyse waarop ’n private objek (Carson se notaboek waarin sy die oorspronklike brokke byeengebring het) verwerk word tot ’n publieke kunswerk (die kunsboek Nox) ’n volgende vlak van vertaling wat die ander twee vlakke omarm en bevat. Deur middel van ’n proses van intersemiotiese vertaling skep Carson in die kunsboek Nox ’n weergawe van “Gedig 101”. Die manier waarop die gedig betekenis skep word in ander tekensisteme in die kunsboek nageboots. In die laaste afdeling word semiotiek aangewend as teoretiese raamwerk waarbinne ’n teks wat uit verskillende media saamgestel is, ondersoek kan word. In dié gedeelte word ’n stiplees van Nox onderneem om te demonstreer presies hoe Carson die fragmente en brokstukke verwerk om ’n samehangende eenheid te skep. Daar word aangedui dat die teks gelees kan word as ’n vertraagde, verskerpte en ontplofte vertaalhandeling wat uitdrukking en vorm gee aan menslike smart. Die bundel Afskrif bestaan uit gedigte wat die moontlikheid van oorspronklikheid ondersoek en op verskillende maniere kyk na replikas, afskrifte, kopieë en herskrywings. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis is a study of Anne Carson’s book Nox. It investigates the form, aesthetic, process and composition of the text, and attempts to come to an understanding of the way in which Carson transforms a “brilliantly curated heap of scraps” into an autonomous artwork, “a thing that carries itself.” The first section of the thesis discusses Nox as an example of an artist’s book. The content and appearance of the book are measured against the definition and characteristics of artist’s books, before it is placed within the context of the history of bookwork as an artistic practice. The visual nature of the book, the ways in which it challenges conventions of bookmaking, its self-consciousness and self-reflexivity, as well as the author/artist’s means of creating unity between form and content are emphasised. The second section of the thesis investigates how translation is used at different levels in the process of creating the work. Translation is used as a way of drawing together the fragments and scraps from which Nox is essentially made. At a metaphoric level, the process of life writing is seen as a form of translation, which also runs parallel to the literal translation of Catullus’ “Poem 101” contained in the pages of Nox. At the same time, the transformation of a private object (Carson’s personal notebook in which she collected the original scraps) into an artwork for public consumption (the artist’s book Nox) represents a third level of translation, which embraces and contains the other two. Through a process of intersemiotic translation, Carson creates a version of “Poem 101” in her artists’ book that mimics the way in which the poem creates meaning. In the last section of the thesis, semiotics is applied as a theoretical framework to facilitate the reading of a text in which various media is present. A close reading of Nox is undertaken to demonstrate exactly how Carson goes about processing the fragments and scraps into a coherent unity. The close reading reveals that Nox can be read as a slow, intensified and exploded exercise in translation that gives expression to grief. The collection of poems entitled Afskrif consists of poems which question the possibility of originality and investigates replicas, photocopies, copies and rewritings in different ways.

This paper examines the way in which two contemporary Canadian women writers, Anne Carson and Gail Scott, integrate subjective theory into two of their respective texts (Carson's Men In the Off Hours, and Scott's Main Brides). This study rejects the presentation of a single protagonist and instead focuses heavy emphasis upon the presentation of subjective experiments. In this paper the subjects in Men In the Off Hours and Main Brides are examined through the desires they exhibit for the absent other---that which the subject perceives he/she does not have---as central to his/her own conception of him/her self. The paper first acknowledges that subjective theory, the quest for the self, has maintained a central position in scholarly studies. It then proceeds to disseminate and critique Lacanian subjective theory thereby setting the stage for close readings of Carson's Men In the Off Hours through theorist Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection, and of Scott's Main Brides through Jacques Derrida's theory of the borderline. The paper closes by questioning the possibility of a fully realized subject.

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ix, 267 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / In English literary studies, classical epic poetry is typically regarded as a masculinist genre that imparts and reinforces the values of dominant culture. The Iliad , Odyssey , and Aeneid , after all, were written by men, feature male heroes, and recount the violent events that gave rise to the misogynistic societies of ancient Greece and Rome. Yet, in the twentieth century, women poets have found inspiration for their feminist projects in these ostensibly masculinist poems. The four poets in this study, for example, have drawn from the work of Homer and Virgil to criticize the ways that conventional conceptions of gender identity have impaired both men and women. One might expect, and indeed, most critics argue, that women like H.D., Gwendolyn Brooks, Louise Glück, and Anne Carson invoke their classical predecessors only to reject them and the repressive values that they represent. Close readings of these poets' work, however, demonstrate that, far from dismissing the ancient poems, Helen in Egypt , Annie Allen , Meadowlands , and Autobiography of Red are deeply invested in them, finding in them models for their own social critiques. The work of these four poets emphasizes that the classical epics are not one-dimensional celebrations of violence and traditional masculinity. Indeed, the work of Homer and Virgil expresses anxiety about the misogynistic values of the heroic code to which its warriors adhere, and it urges that war and violence are antithetical to civilized society. In examining the ways that modern women poets have drawn from these facets of the ancient works to condemn the sexism, racism, and heterocentrism of contemporary culture, my dissertation seeks to challenge the characterization of classical epic that prevails in English literary studies and to assert the necessity of understanding the complexity of the ancient texts that inspire modern poets. Taking an intertextual approach, I hope to show that close readings of the classical epics facilitate our understanding of how and why modern women have engaged the work of their ancient predecessors and that this knowledge, in turn, emphasizes that the epic genre is more complex than we have recognized and that its tradition still flourishes. / Committee in charge: Karen Ford, Chairperson, English; Paul Peppis, Member, English; Steven Shankman, Member, English; P. Lowell Bowditch, Outside Member, Classics

This dissertation claims contributions on two fronts. First, it aims to contribute to the theory of reception with a practical model of reading postclassical texts that substantially engage ancient ones. In the second place, it contributes three individual readings of three important works of literature on which nothing has been written by anglophone classicists working on classical reception: José Watanabe’s Antígona, Christine Brooke-Rose’s Amalgamemnon, and Anne Carson’s Economy of the Unlost. This dissertation’s contribution to the theory of reception is the proposition of a practical schema of reading, which is a figure upon which the imagination can operate. Simply put, it posits a schema as the place where meaning is construed. The schema calls attention to the constructedness of meaning and to the act of construction and organizes different moments of “reception”: that of the postclassical text receiving the ancient one (which the schema imagines as a vertical line) and that of the scholar receiving that particular instance of reception, the “I” of interpretation, which is theorized as one of two axes of transcendence of the schema (the other one being the world of/to which the schema speaks and means). Furthermore, the schema puts the “where” of meaning in the relation of (at least) two texts, but the “of” of meaning belongs to the postclassical texts. The postclassical text receiving ancient text(s) is proposed as a complex work, simultaneously in relationship with texts from the past as well as other texts from other periods. The relations of the postclassical text with each of these texts are different and need to be differently traced or theorized. The relation with the ancient texts is properly textual and thus the primary way of tracing it in the schema is a vertical line that first and foremost pays attention to form, with the tools of structural analysis and philology. Then, the theorization of the vertical line is made thicker with the operation of concepts upon it. As each of these texts (the classical and the postclassical) mean in relation to webs of texts that are relevant to the vertical relation, the schema imagines an additional dimension to the vertical one: the horizontal. Each of the horizontal lines traced for both the classical and the postclassical texts are in one way or another “historicist” readings, they trace contexts for the texts, but the way that context is understood in the theorization of the horizontal dimension of the schema is plural and never saturated. While this horizontal aspect of meaning is understood as textual, the schema also imagines for it an axis of transcendence, the world on which writers write and in which the reader is situated. The first chapter’s primary goal is to provide a reading of José Watanabe’s Antígona using the schema to illuminate the ways in which this text makes meaning in relation to Sophocles’ Antigone and part of the body of texts that have come to form part of that name. This reading counters the predominant approach to this work (and to many a work in classical reception), which reads it allegorically, as a commentary on a particular moment in the history of Peru. That predominant way of reading not only ignores the vertical orientation of the text in relation to its avowed ancient source, it also limits itself to one way of tracing the horizontality of the postclassical text, construing “context” in the most immediate and literal sense. The chapter contributes a reading that opens up Antígona to much more than allegory, highlighting its powerful affective and aesthetic dimension, as well as its intersection with recent feminist readings of the Greek tragedy that turn towards the figure of Ismene and the politics of sisterhood. The second chapter sets itself to the analysis of the complex role that ancient texts play in Christine Brooke-Rose’s radically experimental novel Amalgamemnon. This novel has not been the focus of attention of any work by a classical scholar, and those scholars who have written about it in other fields have failed to analyze the importance that Herodotus’ Histories and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon play at both the structural and the thematic levels. Tracing the vertical line, the chapter shows how these two texts are essential to the novel’s writing and themes. In the horizontal dimension, the schema situates the novel’s engagement with those ancient sources in the context of contemporary feminist discourse, especially as it concerns the question of the possibility of a feminine discourse and an outside of the phallocentric system of signs. That intersection illuminates both how Brooke-Rose is reading the ancient sources as well as what are arguably some of the limitations of her writing in contrast to the ethical commitments of feminisms. Finally, the third chapter is a reading of Anne Carson’s Economy of the Unlost, a text that is perhaps better known than the texts treated in the previous two chapters, at least in the Anglophone world, but which has nonetheless been fairly disregarded in the scholarship. The chapter provides a rigorous analysis of the “work” of this text, of what it does and how it does it, as the scholarship on Carson’s work has failed to posit or satisfactorily respond to the important questions regarding what constitutes the undeniable originality of her writing. In this particular book, which combines academic and poetic discourses into a new form that partakes of both, Carson proposes a comparative mode of making meaning that cannot be captured with a structural analysis of inter- or -trans- textuality, as the previous two chapters construed the vertical dimension of the schema. Instead, the theory of metaphor developed by Paul Ricoeur provides the appropriate tool to imagine the vertical dimension of the schema and analyze Carson’s exercise in bringing an ancient and a modern author together. This particular construction of the schema brings into the terrain of classical reception the possibility of interpretating comparative works that do not fit nicely within the theoretical margins of this subfield of classical studies. Finally, the chapter provides the occasion to trace another aspect of the schema, its other axis of transcendence, which is the “I” of interpretation.