The present thesis is a study of Robert Browning¡¦s male narrators in his dramatic monologues that deal with problematic man-woman relationships. Being a renovator of the poetic genre of dramatic monologue, Browning employs it to present men¡¦s innermost struggle and obscure emotions in love. While the Victorian gender stereotype emphasizes men¡¦s preoccupation with the business world, he demonstrates men¡¦s intense relation with love. In his poems depicting man-woman relationships, men¡¦s struggles are mainly caused by their eagerness to retain their masculinity, namely, the patriarchal order. This thesis is to explore the concept of masculinity in Browning¡¦s poems. It examines Browning¡¦s typical egoistic men and men¡¦s fantasy about women¡¦s passion. Browning¡¦s female narrators are also discussed to underscore the male-dominated viewpoint on man-woman relationships. Meanwhile it explores Browning¡¦s artist characters, including artists as narrators and not as narrators. Close textual analysis will be made of a selection of poems from Dramatic Lyrics (1842), Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845), Men and Women (1855), and Dramatis Personæ (1864) to see the poet¡¦s pondering upon men¡¦s twisted emotions.

My honors senior thesis, a creative project entitled Anything Else, is a collection of fourteen poems that reflects on trauma, loss, interpersonal relationships, and nature. Many of the poems are dramatic monologues, allowing me to portray a range of extreme voices, including a survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima, a U.S. veteran of the Iraq War, and murderer Perry Smith. Although I consider myself a free verse writer, preferring to work without regular meter or rhyme, one of the poems is written in iambic pentameter. In addition, I took material from the Yahoo! Answers website and composed it as a found poem, adding to the diversity of the manuscript. A number of questions are explored across the variety of speakers, themes, and forms of poems included here, often coming back to the question of whether or not there is anything else.

A poetry thesis exploring issues of loss, death, creation, imagination, family, interpersonal relationships, nature, sexuality, and writing. The manuscript includes a preface that discusses literary influences such as Ai, H.D., and Sharon Olds, as well as writing in forms such as the dramatic monologue, imagistic poem, and confessional poem. Three main sections organize the manuscript's poems.

This study seeks to redress the continued exclusion of women poets from the theorization of the dramatic monologue. I argue that an unacknowledged consensus on the definition of the dramatic monologue exists, in spite of the oft-proclaimed absence of one, and that it is the failure to recognize this consensus which has in part debarred women poets from the theorization of the form. In particular, the failure to acknowledge this consensus has led recent feminist critics attempting to “rethink” the dramatic monologue, such as Cynthia Scheinberg and Glennis Byron, to reinscribe the very model they are attempting to rewrite by admitting into their analysis only those poems which already conform to the existing model. In consequence, these critics inadvertently repeat the exclusion they are attempting to redress by reinscribing a model which is predicated—as both Scheinberg and Byron acknowledge—on the exclusion of women poets. In order to end this cycle of exclusion, my project begins from a different beginning, with Hemans instead of Browning, and traces her innovations and influence across the dramatic monologues of two key dramatic monologists of the 19th-century, Augusta Webster and Amy Levy. In the hands of all three women poets, the dramatic monologue develops into a form which calls into question not only the nature of the self, as is characteristic of Browning’s model, but more crucially, the possibility of the subject. Their poems persistently dramatize what Judith Butler calls “impossible speech”—speech that is not recognized as the speech of a subject—and thereby challenges the model of authoritative speaking which underpins both men’s dramatic monologues and the prevailing theory of women’s as a clutch for linguistic freedom, power and authority. This project therefore has dual aims: to complicate our current conception of the dramatic monologue by placing the women’s dramatic monologues in conversation with the larger tradition of the form; and to complicate our understanding of 19th-century women poets’ conception and constructions of female subjectivity by re-theorizing their poetic strategies in the development of the dramatic monologue. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2008-06-26 14:13:29.982

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The "dramatic monologue" is curiously named, given that poems of this genre often feature characters not only listening to the speakers but responding to them. While "silent auditors," as such inscribed characters are imperfectly called, are not a universal feature of the genre, their appearance is crucial when it occurs, as it turns monologue into dialogue. The scholarly attention given to such figures has focused almost exclusively upon dramatic monologues by Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and other male poets and has consequently never illustrated how gender influences the attitudes toward and outcomes of communication as they play out in dramatic monologues. My dissertation thus explores how Victorian and modernist female poets of the dramatic monologue like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Augusta Webster, Amy Levy, and Charlotte Mew stage the relationships between the female speakers they animate and the silent auditors who listen to their desperate utterances. Given the historical tensions that surrounded any woman's speech, let alone marginalized women, the poets perform a remarkably empathetic act in embodying primarily female characters on the fringes of their social worlds--a runaway slave, a prostitute, and a modern-day Mary Magdalene, to name a few--but the dramatic monologues themselves end, overwhelmingly, in failures of communication that question the ability of dialogue to generate empathetic connections between individuals with radically different backgrounds. Silent auditors often bear the scholarly blame for such breakdowns, but I argue that the speakers reject their auditors at pivotal moments, ultimately participating in their own marginalization. The distrust these poems exhibit toward the efficacy of speaking to others, however, need not extend to the reader. Rather, the genre of the dramatic monologue offers the poets a way to sidestep dialogue altogether: by inducing the reader to inhabit the female speaker's first-person voice--the "mobile I," in Èmile Benveniste's terms--these dramatic monologues convey experience through role-play rather than speech, as speaker and reader momentarily collapse into one body and one voice. Such a move foregrounds sympathetic identification as a more powerful means of conveying experience than empathetic identification and the distance between bodies and voices it necessitates.

No description available.

In the Apartheid South Africa, repression and the heightening of the Blacks' struggle for political emancipation, prompted artists to challenge the system through their music, oral poetry and writing. Most produced works of protest in English to reach a wider audience. This led to the general misconception that literatures in the indigenous languages of South Africa were insensitive to the issues of those times. This study seeks firstly to put to rest such misconception by proving that there is Commitment in these literatures as exemplified in the poetry of S.F. Motlhake. Motlhake not only expresses protest against the political system of the time, but also questions some religious and socio-cultural practices and institutions among his people. The study also examines his selected works as genuine poetry, which does not sacrifice art on the altar of propaganda. / African Languages / M.A. (African Languages)

Cette étude, intitulée « Représentations de l’Occupation et le parcours de l’identité féminine dans Η μητέρα του σκύλου de Pavlos Matessis », examine la collaboration sexuelle de la femme avec l’ennemi au cours de l’Occupation italo-allemande, son châtiment à la Libération et sa protestation envers la punition infligée. L’analyse des techniques narratives combinée à celle du contexte historique permettent d’approfondir les représentations de l’Occupation élaborées par ce roman et cernent la question centrale qui concerne la position tenue par ce dernier face à un événement que l’Histoire officielle a considéré comme secondaire après l’avoir frappé d’une condamnation allant de soi. Il s’ensuit de l’analyse que cette fiction au caractère éminemment dramatique combine de façon unique l’histoire à ses modes d’énonciation narrative. Sa particularité est aussi qu’elle s’éloigne sensiblement de la version officielle des événements et articule un discours différent sur un sujet tabou, celui de la collaboration sexuelle des femmes avec l’ennemi qui a été reliée à la prostitution et à la trahison de la patrie. Il fait de cette collaboration l’occasion de l’éveil de la conscience sociale du sujet et de la composition d’une identité sur la base de la libre disposition de soi et de l’auto-détermination, et considère le châtiment public comme un mécanisme de déstructuration du sujet auquel répond le silence comme forme de protestation. Il s’agit d’une œuvre « à l’écoute » de la révolte contre l’injustice de l’Histoire, qui répond dans le présent à la demande insatisfaite de la réhabilitation du sujet et défend des idéaux humanistes qu’elle place au dessus des idéaux nationaux. / The title of the present doctoral research is “Representations of the Occupation and the evolution of female identity in Η μητέρα του σκύλου [The Mother of the dog] by Pavlos Matesis”. This novel revolves around the “erotic” collaboration of a woman with the enemy during the years of the Italian-German Occupation, the public disgrace that she suffered at the wake of Liberation and her protest for the punishment that was inflicted on her. Through a methodology consisting of a narrative analysis in combination with the historical context, I examine the representations of the Occupation that the novel offers in a period that was crucial for Greek history and society, and also the historical fact of the sexual collaboration, which was judged to be of “secondary” significance by official History which filed it as self-evidently condemnable. The conclusion stemming from this research is that the novel, through a fictional narrative with strong dramatic characteristics, combines the story with its narrative ways of expression in a unique way. Its peculiarity, however, lies in its distinctive differentiation from the given facts of the dominant version and in its articulation of a discourse on a taboo subject, for literature as for Historiography, this of the erotic collaboration of women with the enemy, the official evaluation of which connects them with prostitution and national treason. Through this collaboration, which stands as a pretext for the awakening of the subject’s social conscience and the constitution of an identity on the basis of self-determination and self-designation, it sees punishment as a deconstruction mechanism of the subject but also silence as a reaction to the former. Η Μητέρα του σκύλου is a book that “listens” to the protest for the historical injustice, brings forward to the present the unfulfilled request for the subject’s moral restoration and supports the humanistic ideals, putting them above the national ones.

In the Apartheid South Africa, repression and the heightening of the Blacks' struggle for political emancipation, prompted artists to challenge the system through their music, oral poetry and writing. Most produced works of protest in English to reach a wider audience. This led to the general misconception that literatures in the indigenous languages of South Africa were insensitive to the issues of those times. This study seeks firstly to put to rest such misconception by proving that there is Commitment in these literatures as exemplified in the poetry of S.F. Motlhake. Motlhake not only expresses protest against the political system of the time, but also questions some religious and socio-cultural practices and institutions among his people. The study also examines his selected works as genuine poetry, which does not sacrifice art on the altar of propaganda. / African Languages / M.A. (African Languages)