Any creative thesis of poetry is an attempt to distill ones aesthetic sensibilities into a single masterwork. This particular venture is not unique in that respect. What separates this lyrical endeavour from more flaccid mainstream poetry, however, is its visionary temper, for this is a poetics of revolt for truly revolting times. This poetics of subversion embodies a reactionary aesthetic that traverses both the beauty and the horror of our world, and as the poems expose social injustice, they venture sporadically into the sublime delicacy of disgust. In the Temple of Off-Ramps is ultimately a search for meaning in the sterile world of popular culture a rummage for social justice and human rights in a disinterested and apathetic globalized world a quest for grace in a domestic sphere where dysfunctionality reigns supremely impassionate.

This thesis is an analysis of the two surviving typescripts of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds. After a brief overview of both typescripts, the thesis focuses on the earlier of the two, especially its use of pink paper, and suggests (based on subject matter, pagination, and stylistic patterns) that the pink pages were written before the typescript's white pages, and therefore that they represent O'Brien's earliest conception of the novel.

This dissertation explores the relationship between a literary work and its printed edition in the production of reputation--the editor as gatekeeper of the reputation of a minor poet. That relationship is demonstrated through a case study on the effects of the nineteenth-century edition of the works of the fifteenth-century poet Thomas Hoccleve and an analysis of the lingering effects of the Foucauldian editor-function. The number of surviving manuscripts indicates that Hoccleves work was well-regarded during the early fifteenth century, but his reputation fell with that of other non-Chaucerian medieval poets as later critics lost linguistic familiarity with Middle English. The Victorian-era work of the Early English Text Society was intended to reclaim the positive reception for medieval works; however, the EETS offerings achieved just the opposite result for Hoccleves poetry and perpetuated the negative reputation the poet had acquired. Frederick J. Furnivalls EETS standard Hoccleve editions, still in print, are largely unfavorable in the crucial prefatory matter, even though it is rife with transparent Victorian prejudices. Furnivalls text itself is haphazardly irregular, frequently producing--not reproducing--the same flaws the forewords criticize. As these blemished editions have remained the standard for over a century, Furnivalls editorial irresponsibility undoubtedly slowed the critical re-evaluation of Hoccleve, which began at the end of the twentieth century.

In this dissertation, I focus on the work of five contemporary experimental poets - Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Hannah Weiner, and Leslie Scalapino - in order to demonstrate various aspects of a philosophical dynamic at work in their poetry. The critical debates surrounding experimental poetry often tend to be structured as a dualistic opposition with, for example, the forces of coherence, narrative linearity, and transparent referentiality on one side, and the forces of semantic disruption, narrative discontinuity, and linguistic materiality on the other. On each side, critics attempt to bolster the essential value of one term or set of terms over the other, in a binary polarity. However, such a critique only leads to the formation of another hierarchy. I believe that it is important to understand the dialectical motion at work in much experimental poetry in order to avoid lapsing into reductive theories that reinstate hierarchical structures and dualistic thinking. By describing a "radical dialectics," I am proposing a strategy of reading experimental work that recognizes its philosophical significance and its attempts to complicate dualistic conceptual constructions such as public and private realms of experience, subject and object relations, and narrative and non-narrative forces. This strategy emphasizes the mutually informing and critiquing dialogue and the nonresolving aspect of the dynamic interplay between conceptually opposed terms. I demonstrate this interdependent dialogue in several different yet related realms, including subject and object perceptual experience, the construction of individual subjectivity, temporality and narrativity, and intersubjectivity. To support my argument for the dialectical motion that I describe in the poetry, I draw upon a diverse range of thinkers, some of whom have influenced the poets whose work I analyze. These theorists span a wide range of fields, including ancient Indian Buddhist philosophy, cognitive science, feminist psychoanalysis, and phenomenology. In their various ways, these thinkers share, along with the poets with whom I place them side by side, the common project of transforming a dualistic view of the world and engaging in a profoundly dialectical philosophical project.

Keeping in mind the complicated nature of race relations in the South during the segregation era, as well as the economic volatility of the time, and recognizing Faulkner's position as a white southern writer, this dissertation poses and attempts to answer a few specific questions regarding Faulkner's work. First, beginning with New Orleans Sketches and ending with Go Down, Moses, what texts seem most devoted to examining issues of race difference? Second, where in these texts does Faulkner most strikingly incorporate and then challenge racial stereotypes and cliches about the South? Third, working chronologically, how did Faulkner reconcile his position as a son of the South, with his position as a writer who felt it necessary to develop all types of characters realistically--from Jason Compson to Rider, from Thomas Sutpen to Mollie Beauchamp? And finally, as readers, what insights can Faulkner reveal to us about the interpersonal relationships of his characters, characters drawn heavily from the segregation era of the South? What did he want readers to see? Because most of his novels are set in the same Oxford-inspired Yoknapatawpha county, it is not surprising that certain characters appear again and again in his work. Likewise, Faulkner also revisits similar themes and repeats certain narrative patterns. Juxtaposing a character "type" with other characters or "community," Faulkner is able to create real possibilities for exploring human nature. Repeating broad narrative patterns allows Faulkner to reveal particular intricacies of social hierarchies and to expose the origins of oppressive actions by individuals and masses. The repetition allows Faulkner to emphasize the existence of unspoken cultural norms that empower some while oppressing others. One such repeated theme shows a white middle-class moderate choosing to turn away from injustice, choosing complicity with other white characters rather than action on behalf of a black or mixed-race character who suffers and sometimes dies unfairly. If Faulkner had portrayed only one such character, the importance might be lost to readers. Because Faulkner creates several characters choosing to turn away from injustice, avid readers of Faulkner must pause to consider the significance of this repeated behavior.

This study addresses the proliferation of cinematic violence since the demise of the MPAAs Production Code in 1966. Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch were films that projected violence to comment on the civil fervent caused by the Vietnam War. Yet the floodgates these films opened allowed for virtually unlimited and graphic displays of bloodshed to redden big screens for the next three decades. Using the theories of René Girard, namely the scapegoating motif, this study proposes readings of film that, through cinematic ambiguity, contain humanitarian statements against violence by examining the consequences of using force to cause pain. The Godfather serves as a virtual contemplation of the cruelty inherent in causing bloodshed. Coppola uses both unedited long takes and fast, contrapuntal editing to expose and underscore his protagonists hypocrisy. Toward the end of the seventies, Taxi Driver is the next major film to enact compassion in bloodshed, as it both joins and deconstructs the cynical line of films it belongs to. Scorsese manifests an exceptional ability to take the viewer inside the brutality so that he vicariously lives through the event. The chapters that deal with the films above demonstrate that expertly rendered camerawork creates a scapegoating process for the audience to consider. In the eighties with Fatal Attraction, however, the audience has to rely on future criticism inspired by the film to initiate vindication of the immolated scapegoat, because of the enormous resistance she offers the dominant culture. And in the nineties, the surrogate victim at the end of American History X dies, symbolically lamenting the mimetic rivalry contained in both the troubled inner city and the film industry itself. Together these films constitute positive, artistic, and edifying contributions of cinematic violence that resist the ordinary depiction of bloodshed for the sake of exploitative entertainment.

This dissertation presents Margaret Macnamaras career as a playwright and dramaturg while exploring the cultural and political context of her works. It explores the influences of the Fabian Society on Macnamaras work and places her among such leading independent theatre artists as George Bernard Shaw, Harley Granville Barker, and Nugent Monck. The political context of her work is examined as her play, Mrs. Hodges (1920 is compared with Shaws Widowers Houses and the theatrical context of her work is established as productions of The Gates of the Morning (1908) and Our Little Fancies (1911) are analyzed. Her plays are grouped by thematic concerns but also presented in chronological order. First, two plays that feature pacifist themes, The Baby in the Ring (1918) and In Safety (1924), from the interwar period, are analyzed for their allegorical interpretation of controversial subject matter. As Macnamara highlights womens struggles in a patriarchal system in her play, Light-Gray or Dark? (1920), The Witch (1920) and Love-Fibs (1920), she espouses womens rights for independence at a time when there was pressure to revert to traditional gender roles. Discussion of her adaptations of three nineteenth-century novels reveals her desire to examine the influences that impacted her Victorian childhood. Finally, her play, Florence Nightingale (1936) is examined for the manner in which it encompasses the social, pacifist, and feminist themes of her earlier works. This dissertation attempts to resurrect Macnamaras work and place it back into circulation in order that it might provide important information and insight for scholars of theatre and womens studies.

Subversive Bodies: Embodiment as Discursive Strategy in Womens Popular Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century examines literary representations of the body as strategies of resistance. This study demonstrates that Manley's Secret Memoirs from the New Atalantis, Haywood's Female Spectator, and Burney's Journal and Letters, as well as unpublished receipt books for medicinal and cosmetic preparations, challenge the prevailing masculinist notion of a passive, distinct topography of womanhood and lay the groundwork for a feminist tradition of recognizing the body as an explicit part of experience. Tracing the origins of today's critical perspectives, my study draws on the insights of recent feminist theories of the body but remains historically contextualized through its focus on medical science and law. It demonstrates that the bodies in Manley, Haywood, Burney, and unpublished receipt books challenge the bodily constructions and associated gender meanings that the disciplines of medical science and law have traditionally reinforced. My analysis deepens our contemporary understanding of the complex relations between gender, bodies, and discourse in general.

This project shows how central representations of women in science were to the B science fiction films of the 1950s and uses these films as valuable indicators for cultural analysis. I argue that the emergence of the modern American science fiction film in 1950 combined with the situation of post-W.W.II women in science to create a genre explicitly amenable to exploring the tension between a womans place in the home and her place in the work force, particularly in the fields of science. Out of a context of 114 B science fiction films produced between 1950 and 1966, I offer substantial readings of seven films that feature women in science. Using changing gender roles after W.W.II as an analytical focus, each chapter explores relationality within films, among films, and between films and the culture in which they were produced, distributed, and consumed in order to make visible overall gender patterns, kinship systems, and possibilities for imagining change. The conclusion to the project uses the conceptual framework that has been established to suggest possibilities for a more thorough analysis of the American science fiction film genre, in particular as that genre resonates with concerns relevant to feminist theory.

"Above the Noise and the Glory:" Tiers of Propaganda in Great War Literature illuminates the literary responses of Rupert Brooke, Mary Borden, Alice-Dunbar Nelson and Willa Cather to the manner in which the threat to one's cultural community, as well as personal and physical landscape, transforms a nation's, and even a world's, people from a state of complacency or purposelessness to one of jingoistic fervor. Prompted and inspired by personal, political and cultural forces, these writers mobilized early twentieth-century private citizens' spirits of nationalistic pride and solidarity. Individual chapters place within historical and literary contexts how war propaganda, particularly British and American propaganda from 1914 to 1919, is composed of four stages, each stage choreographed to produce a certain response within the individual. Brooke, Borden, Dunbar-Nelson and Cather, through their writing and active involvement both on the war and home fronts, enter the domain of war in all four stages of the propaganda cycles constructed herein by superimposing a domestic landscape onto a military landscape. In individually defining as well as responding to modes of propaganda, which originated in World War I, but still persist today, these writers are vital to our understanding of how literature not only reflects our history, but shapes it as well.