My dissertation examines the traces of inverse (mytho)mysticism, more synchronous with mythical alchemy than transcendent mystery, in H.D.’s mature work (1946-1961). Whereas H.D.’s earliest works respond to a fin de siècle occultism and a collective psyche troubled by the eschatological distress that, as Susan Acheson writes, “was widespread amongst modernist writers grappling with …world events and with the implications of Nietzsche’s inaugural annunciation of modernity in terms of the death of God” (187), her later oeuvre is dedicated to the same work of soul undertaken by the “secret cult of Night” in Vale Ave. Here, her thematic scope faces two ways: backward to ancient Greek mystery cults and their palingenesic rites and forward to depth psychologists searching for the Soul of the World. Vale Ave plays a pronounced role in my study as symbolic guide; in its seventy-four sequences the layering of time in the “trilogy” of past, present, and future that H.D. had explored during the years of the Second World War in order to get behind the fallen walls of cause and effect collapses into two distinct phases of human origin—“meeting” (evolution) and “parting” (involution)—and the poem invites Lilith and Lucifer to be its archetypal guides. My method for the study is imaginal, entering such disciplines as history, philosophy, and theology and bringing psychological understanding to them. John Walsh’s introduction to Vale Ave notes H.D.’s theme “that the human psyche exists in a dimension outside of time and space as well as within them. In Vale Ave, H.D. presents the extremity of this dual-dimensionality: metempsychosis” (vii). However, the concept that H.D. investigates is more than a literary processus of characters who adopt different masks and appear at various junctures in a chronological unwinding of history. I explore H.D.'s works as part of a Modernist tradition of writing “books of the dead” designed not to guide the soul after death, but to draw the gaze upon “a nearer thing,” as H.D. writes in Erige Cor Tuum Ad Me In Caelum, the wisdom intrinsic in the spirit of life itself. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2011-08-31 20:54:49.581

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In section fifteen of the poem The Walls Do Not Fall author Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) address her audience and articulates the purpose of the poet in the following lines: "we are the keepers of the secret,/ the carriers, the spinners/ of the rare intangible thread/ that binds all humanity/ to ancient wisdom,/ to antiquity;/â ¦every concrete object/ has abstract value, is timeless/ in the dream parallel" (Trilogy 24). H.D. mined her own life for charged relationships which she then, through writing, connected to the mythic characters of antiquity whose tales embodied the same struggles she faced. Reading concrete objects as universal symbols which transcend time, her mind meshed the 20th century with previous cultures to create a nexus where the questions embedded in the human spirit are alive on multiple planes. The purpose of this research project is not to define her works as "successful" or "unsuccessful," nor to weigh the works against each other in terms of "advancement." Rather it is to describe the way she manipulates this most reliable of tools, mythic metamorphosis, in works stretching from her early Imagist poetry, through her long poem Trilogy, and finally into her last memoir End To Torment, taking note of the way she uses this tool to form beauty from harsh circumstances and help heal her shattered psyche. / Master of Arts

Poet/ Editor/ Publisher is an annotated edition of the selected correspondence of Sylvia Beach, publisher and owner of the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, the writer and editor Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), and her partner, the poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). The years covered by this selection, 1918 to 1931, are some of the most prolific for these women and for modernism. Beach published James Joyce’s Ulysses, H.D. wrote several books of poetry and prose, Bryher established POOL Productions and Close Up, the first magazine devoted to film criticism, and much more. The relationships fostered among H.D., Bryher, and Beach express an unconventional model for creative production—one more concerned with helping each other than making a profit. This model is expressed not only in Bryher’s publishing endeavors and financial support of Shakespeare and Company and other artists in her sphere, but also in the well-documented sacrifices Beach made to bring out Ulysses. Chatty and endearing, the letters demonstrate the way these relationships passed seamlessly from social to professional and back again. They are full of gossip, but also valuable professional advice and encouragement. For Bryher and H.D., who lived in Territet, Switzerland, Beach provided an essential connection not only to a major center of avant-garde art, but also, and more practically, to the mechanisms of distributing modernist writing: publishers, editors, literary journals, and printers. This dissertation joins a recovery of the work of women in the early twentieth century as well as a reconsideration of the roles each woman played in developing the modernist canon. These letters offer evidence of the influence of each woman’s efforts on an international network of artists and insight into the labor behind the great works of modernism.

H.D., Djuna Barnes et Laura (Riding) Jackson incarnent trois visages du modernisme américain expatrié. C’est autour de leur place paradoxale dans le contexte d’instabilité et de circulation de ce moment littéraire que s’articulent leurs parcours respectifs. Cette thèse cherche à montrer comment l’expérience du déplacement géographique s’incarne dans le texte thématiquement, stylistiquement, grammaticalement, génériquement et dans le genre (gender) pour produire une écriture autobiographique déplacée qui interroge et transgresse les frontières. On analysera comment l’expatriation des trois auteurs et leur marginalité dans la communitas des expatriés produisent une écriture qui remet en question la limite entre personnel et impersonnel. On explorera les représentations du déplacement géographique lui-même comme thématique et esthétique. En adoptant une méthode de cartographie littéraire, nous mettons au jour une écriture nomade et interrogerons le rapport à la nation dans les textes qui travaille le trope du Grand Tour. L’analyse de l’esthétique du déplacement de l’autobiographie sur les éléments organiques du texte met au jour la métaphorisation du déracinement et le processus de déterritorialisation/reterritorialisation de l’expatriation et du genre féminin chez H.D., Barnes et (Riding) Jackson. / H.D., Djuna Barnes and Laura (Riding) Jackson embody three facets of American expatriate modernism. Their trajectories hinge on their paradoxical place in modernism’s context of instability and circulation. This thesis purports to show how their works are imbued with the experience of geographical displacement at various levels (thematic, stylistic, grammatical, generically and in gender). This porosity between life and work results in a displaced autobiographical writing which questions and transgresses frontiers. The first section deals with how these authors’ expatriation and marginality in the expatriate communitas produce texts which probe the limit between the personal and the impersonal. The second part focuses on the representations of the geographical displacement itself—both as theme and aesthetics. By resorting to a literary cartography method, we argue for a nomadic writing and interrogate the writers’ relation to the concept of nation in texts which deploy the Grand Tour trope. The final section analyzes the aesthetic transference of the autobiography on the organic elements of the text. These motifs act as metaphors of the subject’s uprootedness and of the deterritorialization/reterritorialization process at work for expatriate women writers.

This dissertation examines the influence of film on the poetry of H.D., Marianne Moore, and Adrienne Rich. It builds on scholarship by Susan McCabe (2005), Lawrence Goldstein (1994) and others, who have traced the way twentieth-century American poets reacted formally to film culture in their writing. My project responds to the call of the editors of the volume of Close Up 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism for critics to interrogate how authors harnessed the aesthetic and political possibilities opened up by cinema. This study draws from theories of feminist film phenomenology by Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks to analyze the aims and arguments of the texts. The literary works studied include: H.D.’s Sea Garden, “Projector” series, Trilogy, Helen in Egypt, and film essays; Marianne Moore’s animal poems from the 1930s and early 1940s and film essays; and Adrienne Rich’s The Will to Change. This dissertation argues that the poets drew from film to renovate their poetic vision and forms and ply at questions of power, visuality, and bodies. The poems articulate an awareness of the filmic gaze and how it constructs feminine or animal others. Through careful analysis of the poems, this dissertation locates each poet’s particular rapport with film and how it influenced her literary style and prompted her to challenge dominant patriarchal scripts. This dissertation makes several original contributions to twentieth-century Anglo-American poetry scholarship. It sets these three authors alongside one another to reveal how their engagements with film inspired their poetics and politics at various points throughout the twentieth century. The conclusions herein determine how the poets turned to film to construct their poetic projects. The dissertation offers new readings of the work of H.D., Moore and Rich as queer women poets invested in film culture. / Graduate

Knowledge organization is perceived as a central, constituting activity defining the notion of libraries. Critique calling for a new theoretical foundation voiced by active researchers within library and information science concerning the current knowledge organization has been utilized as a point of departure. Specifications concerning a new theoretical foundation implied by these critiques are considered within this thesis and theory found in The Order of Things by Michel Foucault proposed as an alternative theory for understanding knowledge organization as a human science where meaning, value and representation, by which the ordering of things is possible, is acknowledged as a result of human activity and history. Thus meaning, value and representation must be perceived as dynamic. An example of implementation of the proposed theory has been achieved by the use of bibliometrics. In order to do this bibliometrics has been discussed in relation to the proposed theory. A bibliometric method, founded by Howard D. White, where one constructs pennant diagrams by the means of term frequencies (tf) and inverse document frequencies (idf) in relation to a seed term, is used here as a method to organize texts dynamically based on human activity. Two main pennant diagrams derived from two different seed terms: Hjorland, B. and Rothstein, B. have been constructed and analyzed using the proposed theory. The results show that dynamic representation and organization of texts via bibliometrics is possible where, amongst other things, the specificity or generality of a text in relation to the seed term is visible. / Program: Bibliotekarie

<p>This dissertation traces invocations and theories of electric power in modernist literature by women, showing how four modernist authors—Edith Wharton, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), Olive Moore, and Jean Rhys—deploy electricity in their fiction and highlight its varied and contradictory cultural meanings. Modernist literature by women leverages the open and strange impressions from the era of what electricity might mean, so that authors might make their own arguments about where artistic impulses originate, how homes would change when they became wired, how modernization would change modernist art forms, or why some social spaces gleam brighter than others. Edith Wharton and Jean Rhys highlight cultural and class system dynamics with their electric metaphors and electrically wired settings, in which they fuse mental states with modern atmospheres. H.D. and Olive Moore explore how women experience artistic inspiration, as either a transcendent space of unlimited possibility for the former, or as proof of the limitations of gender for the latter. </p>

H.D.'s autobiographical novel HERmione is phenomenological in texture. It portrays both sides of a dynamic process: the individual "creates" the world by adjusting a "psychic lens," projecting a mental space in which objects can appear; yet at the same time, the world imposes itself on the sensing subject. The framework within which this dynamic process occurs is the body; as the novel portrays, the body is the site of juxtapositions and transformations as it comes into contact with the world. In this article, I discuss the ways in which H.D. explores the boundaries and intersections between the human body and the world around it. I will draw on several influential feminist critiques of the novel, exploring how these critiques illuminate the social and sexual forces at work behind Hermione's experiences, and I will in turn introduce phenomenological theory to expand upon the prevailing critical view of the novel. I assert that Hermione's body is both the setting and the subject of HERmione. Even as she is objectified by both specific individuals and by the social forces at work in her world, her body reacts in unique ways to counteract this tendency. Her body transforms, and her perceptions blur the lines between subject and object, person and thing. As Hermione begins to develop an understanding of the way she encounters the world, she also develops the ability to act within it. Her body becomes prosthetic, encompassing otherness and ultimately allowing her to move beyond the relationships and expectations which threaten to confine her in a solely "decorative" life.

H.D.’s novel Palimpsest has often been analyzed using psychoanalytic theories due to her relationship with Sigmund Freud and his work. However, her own approach to the science of psychoanalysis reveals that she often complemented her scientific understanding with her syncretic religious beliefs, a perspective she referred to as “spiritual realism,” which suggests that analysis with a spiritual nuance may provide a deeper understanding of the novel’s intended purpose. Postsecular theory makes for a useful lens by which to analyze Palimpsest’s treatment of reintegrating spiritual knowledge into Freud’s secular understanding of the modern world by providing the benefits of such a paradigm shift. Because H.D. adopted the ocean as her metaphor for spirituality, eternity, and transcendence, integrating oceanic and archipelagic theories also help to analyze H.D.’s intentions for spiritual realism by providing the characteristics with which illustrate her ritualistic writing process and its transformative experiences.My reading of the novel using postsecular and oceanic/archipelagic theories reveals that Palimpsest has more significance beyond a psychoanalytic treatment of H.D.’s own traumatic past. Instead, H.D.’s reasons for breaking down secular constructs of reality—such as time, space, memory, and individuality—emerge, showing that as an artistic modernist, she was attempting to outline the spiritual solution to modernity’s weaknesses and secularity’s limitations. By providing examples of characters’ poetic communions with eternity, Palimpsest explores the spiritual potential within humanity’s palimpsestic multi-layered consciousness, expressing how that which can transcend time, space, limits of communication, and personal failures can be discovered inward through outward spiritual connection to the eternal. This reading also provides justifications for H.D.’s decisions to write poetic prose novels, an answer to the alienating secular approaches to psychoanalytic knowledge that denied her identity as a poet-oracle, revealing her intent to share spiritual realism’s transformative power despite its secular critics.