Dissertação (mestrado)-Universidade de Brasília, Instituto de Letras, Departamento de Teoria Literária e Literaturas, 2008. / Submitted by Allan Wanick Motta (allan_wanick@hotmail.com) on 2011-05-03T14:32:25Z No. of bitstreams: 1 2008_LucianaBarretoMachadoRezende.pdf: 319724 bytes, checksum: b11589fcf5eaa56a601b9030d46ece8a (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Daniel Ribeiro(daniel@bce.unb.br) on 2011-05-11T00:28:15Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 2008_LucianaBarretoMachadoRezende.pdf: 319724 bytes, checksum: b11589fcf5eaa56a601b9030d46ece8a (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2011-05-11T00:28:15Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 2008_LucianaBarretoMachadoRezende.pdf: 319724 bytes, checksum: b11589fcf5eaa56a601b9030d46ece8a (MD5) / Da obra ficcional da escritora paulista Hilda Hilst (1930-2004), os contos “Lázaro” (1970) e “Rútilo Nada” (1993) figuram como narrativas emblemáticas, reunindo as principais características do conjunto de sua prosa tanto no campo da complexidade estrutural quanto na seara das questões que dialogam com o imaginário cristão e com temas associados a Deus, Tempo, Morte, comportando, ainda, os elementos fundamentais do seu universo literário – o desamparo, a solidão e o ideal do sublime e da transcendência conjugados ao reino dos baixos instintos, resvalando para o obsceno, o torpe, o vil, o abjeto. Por meio de pistas intertextuais, analisamos, nesta dissertação, o modo como Hilda Hilst evoca e reelabora, à luz da contemporaneidade, símbolos presentes em obras da tradição religiosa, a exemplo da Bíblia e da Divina Comédia, apontando para uma reflexão sobre o divino e sobre a maneira pela qual o homem moderno se situa em um mundo dessacralizado. _________________________________________________________________________________ ABSTRACT / Of the fictional works of the Paulista writer, Hilda Hilst (1903 -2004), the short stories “Lázaro” (1970) and “Rútilo Nada” (1993) appear as emblematic narratives, gathering the main characteristics of her prose assemblage not only in the field of the structural complexity but also in the fictional crop of the issues which converse with the Christian imaginary and with themes associated with God, Time, Death, bearing, yet, the fundamental elements of her literary universe – the abandonment, loneliness and the urge for the sublime and the transcendence, conjugated into the realm of the low instincts, slithering into the obscene, torpid, vile, and abject. By means of inter-textual clues, we analyze, on this dissertation, how Hilda Hilst summons out and re-elaborates, in the light of contemporaneousness, symbols that are present in the works of the religious tradition, as in the Bible and The Divine Comedy, pointing at a reflection on the holy and the ways the contemporary man is placed in a desecrated world.

Submitted by Liliane Ferreira (ljuvencia30@gmail.com) on 2018-11-14T10:39:01Z No. of bitstreams: 2 Tese - Cristyane Batista Leal - 2018.pdf: 1867650 bytes, checksum: 73acc2103008b981aad6b385cd35c494 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Luciana Ferreira (lucgeral@gmail.com) on 2018-11-14T12:56:02Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 Tese - Cristyane Batista Leal - 2018.pdf: 1867650 bytes, checksum: 73acc2103008b981aad6b385cd35c494 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-11-14T12:56:02Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 Tese - Cristyane Batista Leal - 2018.pdf: 1867650 bytes, checksum: 73acc2103008b981aad6b385cd35c494 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-03-08 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / This study presents an interpretative reading of six plays by Hilda Hilst: The Company, The Rat in the Wall, The Auto of the Ship of Camiri, The Birds of Night, The New System, and The Patriarch’s Death, through theoretical assumptions of the Theater of the Absurd, especially those of Eugène Ionesco, and the Theatre of Cruelty, of Antonin Artaud. These plays have in common the distance, at different levels, which they establish in relation to the traditional forms of development and resolution of the dramatic conflicts, configuring themselves as static dramas. Considering the fact that it is an essentially lyrical theater, this study sees lyricism as a style that contributed to the constitution of Modern Arts, with an emphasis on the Symbolist theater of the end of the 19th century, bringing the Hilstian theater closer to the Theater of the Absurd of the XX century and locating its marginality in the Brazilian theater because of its distance from the Brechtian and realistic aesthetics that, at the time of its writing, was predominant in the Brazilian scene.The peripheral situation of Hilda Hilst’s theater here is presented because of the very place that theatrical culture occupies in Brazil, always at a disadvantage if compared to other arts. The singularity of her theater rests in its slippage between dramatic, lyrical and absurd categories, revealing the consciousness of incommunicability and the inability of the hero-poet to ensure human integrity in the eternal totalitarian social systems, hence their approach to the Artaudian Theater of Cruelty. Yet, imploding reality by abstract choices of character composition, action, time and space, the Hilstian dramas present themselves as a resilient and conscious response to the social collapse resulting from human deterioration. / Este estudo apresenta uma leitura interpretativa de seis peças de Hilda Hilst: A empresa, O rato no muro, Auto da barca de Camiri, As aves da noite, O novo sistema e A morte do patriarca, por meio de pressupostos teóricos do Teatro do Absurdo, especialmente aqueles de Ionesco, e os do Teatro da Crueldade, de Antonin Artaud. Essas peças têm em comum a distância, em diferentes níveis, que estabelecem em relação às formas tradicionais de desenvolvimento e resolução dos conflitos dramáticos, configurando-se como dramas estáticos. Considerando o fato de se tratar de um teatro essencialmente lírico, este trabalho enxerga o lirismo como um estilo que contribuiu para a constituição das artes modernas, com ênfase no teatro simbolista do final do século XIX, aproximando o teatro hilstiano do Teatro do Absurdo do século XX e localizando sua marginalidade no teatro brasileiro, em razão de seu afastamento da estética brechtiana e realista que, na época da sua escrita, era predominante na cena brasileira. A situação periférica do teatro de Hilda Hilst é aqui apresentada como consequência do próprio lugar que a cultura do teatro ocupa no Brasil, sempre em desvantagem se comparado a outras artes. A singularidade de seu teatro repousa em seu deslizamento entre categorias dramáticas, líricas e do teatro do absurdo, revelando a consciência da incomunicabilidade e incapacidade do herói-poeta em assegurar a integridade humana nos eternos sistemas sociais totalitários, daí também sua aproximação ao Teatro da Crueldade artaudiano. Mesmo assim, implodindo a realidade por escolhas abstratas de composição de personagens, ação, tempo e espaço, os dramas hilstianos se apresentam como resposta resistente e consciente ao colapso social resultante de deteriorações humanas.

A dissertação se propõe a uma tentativa de testemunhar a experiência de leitura de duas obras da escritora brasileira Hilda Hilst, em particular dois livros: “Tu não te moves de ti” (1980) e “A Obscena Senhora D” (1982). A partir de um lançamento utópico como método de pesquisa e sua categoria do ainda não, utilizamos a Psicanálise, a Arte Contemporânea e a Crítica literária como uma defesa do pensamento móvel e aberto ao devir, acolhendo a medida de indeterminação que permeia toda criação. Com elas problematizamos a noção de escritura, de leitura e de gesto escritural como acontecimento em processo, participando da própria construção da pesquisa. O método se caracterizou por instaurar o próprio objeto de pesquisa na medida mesma do pesquisar. Tivemos como norte da dissertação a busca por unir a forma e o conteúdo apostando na arte como o exercício experimental da liberdade. Encontramos na repetição de começos, na forma dispersiva, nas páginas soltas, somado à produção do vídeo e das fotografias como resultantes da pesquisa poética que nos propomos. Por fim, a pesquisa e a escritura produziram encontros com a queda e o abismo, experimentando um pensamento que possui a arte de cair, com o humor, com o testemunho e com a morte, encontrando nos movimentos de dispersão e de suspensão os caminhos percorridos pela palavra escrita, na dupla via de escritura e leitura a que ela convoca. / The dissertation is an attempt to witness the reading experience of two works by the brazilian writer Hilda Hilst, mainly two books: “Tu não te moves de ti” (1980) and “A Obscena Senhora D” (1982). Having (an) utopian launching as research method and its “not yet” category, we used Psychoanalysis, Contemporary Art and Literary Criticism as a defense of mobile and opened thought, accepting the measure of indeterminacy that pervades all creation. With them we discussed the notion of writing, reading and writing gesture as an event in process, participating in the actual construction of the research. The method is characterized by introducing the proper object of study in (….) The dissertation guidance was the search for the union of form and content, focusing on art as an experimental exercise of freedom. We find in the repetition of beginnings, in dispersible form, in loose pages, added to the video and photographs production as resultants of the poetic research that we propose. Finally, the research and writing produced meetings with the fall and the abyss, experiencing a thought that has the art of falling, with the humor, the testimony and death, discovering the paths followed by the written word in dispersion and suspension movements, in the double paths that writing and reading evoke.

A tese propõe um encontro da trilogia pornográfica da escritora brasileira Hilda Hilst com o pesquisador, e decidiu-se pela forma do ensaio. A trilogia, composta pelos livros O Caderno Rosa de Lori Lamby (1990), Cartas de um Sedutor (1991) e Contos d’escárnio/Textos Grotescos (1992) apresentam uma mudança na trajetória da escritora, que anuncia na passagem para a escrita pornográfica, uma desistência da “literatura séria” e, por fim, entre os anos 1998 - 2004, a escritora assume um novo discurso: a desistência da literatura, quando declara publicamente: “não tenho mais nada a dizer”. Para investigar esses períodos, foi feita uma imersão nos arquivos pessoais da escritora, além da leitura das obras, seguindo a proposição de Didi-Huberman sobre as imagens: o regime da imagem e da imaginação é um local de luta política, principalmente aquelas imagens que portam memórias e têm um poder de transmitir algo de um tempo que se passou. O confronto de diferentes temporalidades se dá como uma estratégia de análise do material de arquivo, uma vez que a hipótese da tese é que, quando Hilda Hilst se “sente livre para fracassar”, acontece junto uma mudança de formato no uso do humor em sua literatura. Através de ferramentas teóricas do campo da psicanálise, da arte, da literatura e da crítica, a pesquisa investiga as noções de erótico, pornográfico e obsceno que compõe o universo da escritora, junto dos seguintes eixos de análise: problematização de imagem, escrita, arquivo, sobrevivência e do realismo grotesco como estratégia para o risível. O método utilizado foi o ensaio, com o objetivo de desenvolver uma pesquisa poética no processo de trabalho. A escrita hilstiana desse período tem por objetivo acordar o leitor com um soco, e aqui, acabou por acertá-lo em cheio. Desse choque se operou uma queda no espaço e uma desestabilização. Diante desta literatura, a tese se constituiu como um percurso de investigação da queda, propondo “Os estudos da gravidade - oscilações entre o peso e a leveza”, como resultados da pesquisa poética. / The thesis proposes a meeting between the Hilda Hilst’s pornography trilogy and the researcher in the essay form. The trilogy is composed by the books “The Pink Book of Lori Lamby (1990)”, “Letters of a seductive (1991)” e “Mockery Short Story/Grotesque Writing (1992)” presenting a change in the author’s trajectory, which is announced in the route to the pornography writings, a called forsake of the “serious literature”, and lastly, between the years 1998 – 2004, the writer assumes a new speech; the forsake of literature, when she declares publicly: “I have nothing else to say”. To investigate these periods of time, an immersion work was made in the personal archives of the author, besides the reading of the author’s works, followed by the proposition of Didi- Huberman about the images: the image system of imagination is a place of political fight mainly in those images that carry memories and have the strength to transmit something of a lost time. The confrontation of different times is an analyses strategy of the archives material, once the thesis hypothesis is that when Hilda Hilst “feels free to fail” occurs together a change of the format in the use of humor in her literature. By the theoretical tools of the psychoanalyses field, the art, the literature and the critic, the research investigates the concepts of erotic, pornography and obscene, that composes the authors universe, along with the following analysis axes: questioning of image, writing, archive, survival and the grotesque realism as a strategy for the laughable. The method was the essay as an objective to develop a poetic research in the work progress. The hilstian writing of this period has as an objective wake up the reader with a punch, and here in this work has just hit her (the author Hilda) in the face. From this shock, a falling into the space and a destabilization operated. Thereby having in mind this literature, the thesis was built as a route in the investigation of fall, proposing The studies of gravity - fluctuation between the weight and lightness, as the results of this poetic research.

Orientador: Antonio Alcir Bernárdez Pécora / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-22T22:34:07Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Purceno_Sonia_D.pdf: 8845454 bytes, checksum: 9c4c445aa2340af018082f7223681e2b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013 / Resumo: O objetivo da tese é mostrar o potencial dramático do escritor anti-herói representado na obra de Hilda Hilst (1930-2004), particularmente em "Fluxo" - primeiro texto do primeiro livro em prosa: Fluxo-Floema (1970). O bloco original de prosa degenerada, poética e violentamente humorística, é estruturado de forma não convencional e omite: pontuação esclarecedora, origem das elocuções, localizações espaciais, temporais e marcação de personagens - além de trazer um escritor-narrador-personagem que se confunde com o texto criado por ele. Entre a Introdução e a Conclusão, este trabalho cria um miolo como adaptação teatral em seis atos, somando 35 cenas - nas quais, as falas são distribuídas às personae do artista persona-personae. Afora os recortes e a atribuição das vozes, absolutamente nada é mexido no texto de Hilda: centro da argumentação. Cada cena, após esforço de sistematização sinóptica, é analisada individualmente, evidenciando o processo metaliterário de criação em fluxo e queda textual. As noções hilstianas, de dentro e coexistência, são aproximadas à radicalização das categorias, experiência interior e comunicação, de Georges Bataille - todas minadas pela dramaticidade irônica, dilacerante, que caracteriza a obra da autora: colada ao conceito mordaz de humorismo de Pirandello. Problematiza-se, drasticamente, a leitura da categoria humorismo na linguagem corrente brasileira, ao se mostrar a humorista Hilda Hilst cruzando sua literatura com a ficção aterradora de Samuel Beckett. Desta forma, o escritor persona-personae de "Fluxo" resiste às determinações do destino (encarceramento em si, coexistência e morte), fraturando-se em trindade, quaternidade e multidão; pratica sua dramaticidade como embuste cômico que exibe aos leitores, a partir de sua torre de capim textual, a linguagem poética que recusa o projeto, é sacrifício em ato / Abstract: The aim of this thesis is to display the dramatic potential of the antihero writer as represented in Hilda Hilst's oeuvre, especially in "Fluxo" ("Flow") - the first text from her first prose book: Fluxo-Floema (1970). The original block of degenerate prose, poetic and violently humorous, is structured in an unconventional way, omitting clarifying punctuation, the origin of the elocutions, spatial and temporal locations and characters' definitions, and also presenting a writer-narrator character who gets confused with the text he has created. Between the Introduction and the Conclusion, this thesis constitutes the core of a theatrical adaptation in six acts of the aforementioned text, totalizing 35 scenes. Besides all the cuts and attributions of voices, absolutely nothing is altered from Hilda's original text - which is the core of the argumentation. Each scene, after an attempt at a synoptic systematization, is individually analyzed, evidencing the metaliterary process of creation in textual flow and fall. Hilst's notions 'of the inside experience' and coexistence are likened to George Bataille's categories radicalization of inner experience and communication, all of them undermined by the ironic and lacerating dramaticity of the author - coalesced with Pirandello's mordant concept of humor. The concept of humor in the usual Brazilian Portuguese is drastically problematized by showing Hilst the humorist intercrossing her own writing with Samuel Beckett's terrifying fiction. Thus, the persona-personae 'writer' in "Fluxo" resists fate's determinations (self-imprisonment, coexistence and death), fracturing itself into trinity, quaternary and multitude, and practices its dramaticity as a comic hoax which exhibits to the readers, from the writer's textual grass tower, the poetic language that refuses the project, being a sacrifice in action / Doutorado / Teoria e Critica Literaria / Doutora em Teoria e História Literária

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Literatura / Autor no autoriza el acceso a texto completo de su documento. / El presente trabajo tiene como objetivo analizar dos novelas de la escritora brasileña Hilda Hilst, específicamente indagar en ellas cómo se constituyen los sujetos -desplegados en personajes y narradores- y la arquitectura textual. Desde mi punto de vista, estamos en presencia de una escritura con rasgos singulares y que a mi parecer se inscriben en lo que Hélène Cixous en un momento denominó escritura femenina. El corpus seleccionado corresponde a dos obras claves, de la tardía trayectoria de Hilst, en el territorio de la prosa: Flujo-Floema y Tu não te moves de ti. En la primera me concentraré en la complejidad de la experimentación que la autora despliega en su narrativa: la multiplicidad de los narradores y la arquitectura textual per se; mientras que en el segundo me enfocaré en el contenido simbólico y la oposición propuesta entre Razón y Fantasía, y como la autora parece asociar estas dos dimensiones a una binaridad sui generis masculino/femenino. Asimismo, también trabajaré cómo se constituye la diferencia en la representación de lo corpóreo en ambas novelas / The present work aims at analyzing two novels by the Brazilian author Hilda Hilst, especifically at venturing into the process of construction of the subjects -split into characters and narrators- and the textual architecture. From my point of view, her writing is one of very particular characteristics that may correspond to what Hélène Cixous has once called feminine writing. The corpus selected is composed of two key works of her late experiences with prose writing: Fluxo-Floema and Tú não te moves de ti. In the former I will concentrate in the complexity of the structural games the writer inscribes in her narrative: the multiplicity of narrators and the textual architecture per se; while in the latter I will focus on the symbolic contents and the opposition between Reason and Fantasy, and how the author seems to associate these two dimensions with a sui generis duplicity male/female. Besides, I will also work on how the difference is constituted in the representation of the body in both novels.

Orientador: Joaquim Brasil Fontes Júnior / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Educação / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-22T10:47:29Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Tacca_PaulaCristinaDolencCabral_M.pdf: 5563981 bytes, checksum: c0376d69299d90030997c3c8991070d7 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013 / Resumo: Este estudo parte de uma construção autoral poético-fotográfica, desenvolvida a partir da leitura, fragmentação e interpretação do livro Do Desejo, da escritora e poeta Hilda Hilst. Desde essa produção experimental, que dialoga diretamente com fragmentos da poesia hilstiana e com as ideias e construções sobre o desejo apresentadas pela escritora em seu livro, intenciona-se uma fusão entre o tema do desejo e outros motivos na obra de Hilda Hilst e os de uma leitora que se envolve e interpreta a sua poética a partir do suporte fotográfico. Para ajudar a desenvolver uma reflexão sobre essa produção, alguns pensamentos e autores são colocados em cena para um diálogo sobre o processo criativo desenvolvido na relação texto-fotografia, autora-leitora, assim como textos de narrativa mais poética que pretendem apresentar referências, motivações e construções que perpassam a produção autoral que é o foco do trabalho. / Abstract: This study starts from an authorial poetic-photographic construction developed from the book "The Desire"'s reading, fragmentation and interpretation, writer for Hilda Hilst. Sinc that trial production, which speaks directly with fragments of the poet and her ideas and constructions about desire, intends to be a fusion between the desires and issues Hilst and a reader who is involved and interprets her poetry from the photographic support. To help develop a reflection about this production, some thoughts and authors are placed on the stage for a dialogue about the creative process developed in the text-picture relationship as well like author-reader relationship. Personal poetic narrative texts wish and intend to present references, motivations and constructions that underlie the authorial production that is the focus of the work. / Mestrado / Educação, Conhecimento, Linguagem e Arte / Mestre em Educação

During the last years many mobile health applications have emerged on the market. Most of these collect and compiles physical data that can be followed over time. Now the next generation of health care applications are on their way. With an increasing capacity and high quality sensors, smartphones have the potential to be used as diagnostic tools. Calmark Sweden AB is a company that has developed a smartphone based diagnostic platform for analysis of colorimetric assays integrated on a disposable plastic chip. Their first product, the hilda Neo system is a Point of care test (POCT) for semi quantitative measurement of the biomarker Lac- tate dehydrogenase (LDH). The system consists of a disposable colorimetric LDH test with inte- grated chemical assay, a separate light-box for controlled light conditions and a smartphone appli- cation for image acquisition and test analysis. The purpose of this Master Thesis project was to develop and evaluate a method for smartphone based semi quantitative colorimetric analysis of the hilda Neo LDH test that would work without the light-box in different light settings. The method was to be implementable as an iPhone applica- tion and should be able do correctly determine LDH activity in the four LDH ranges; 0-300, 300- 600, 600-900 and >900 units per litre (U/L). Also, the computed LDH levels among cards run with the same sample were not to have a standard deviation higher than 50 U/L. Two methods based on continuous measurements of the colour stimuli given from the assay site were developed. In both methods, measurements were made by using the iPhone camera for taking an image series following the colour development of the assay over time. The image series was then processed in MATLAB and the LDH level was computed in two different ways. None of the two proposed methods did reach the stated objectives. Neither of the methods gave the correct LDH interval in all evaluation cards and the computed LDH levels had a larger standard deviation then aimed for. However the results indicate that the variation in light settings is not the only factor for the unreached objectives. It is believed that with further studies of the colour proper- ties of the hilda Neo assay and with the continuing development of smartphone technology, it is possible to find a method for smartphone-based colorimetric analysis without having to control the light setting. / Under de senaste åren har många hälso-applikationer introducerats på marknaden. De flesta samlar och sammanställer hälso-data som sedan kan följas över tiden. Nu är en ny generation av hälso- applikationer på ingång. Med ökande kapacitet och högkvalitativa sensorer har våra smartphones potential att användas för medicinsk diagnostik. Calmark Sweden AB är ett företag som har utvecklat en smartphone-baserad diagnostisk plattform för analys av kolorimetriska tester i form av plastkort för engångsbruk. Deras första produkt hilda Neo är ett patientnära test för semikvantitativ mätning av biomarkören Lactatdehydrogenas (LDH). Systemet består av det kolorimetriska engångstestet för mätning av LDH, en separat ljus-box för kontrollerade ljusförhållanden och en smartphone applikation för bildtagning och test analys. Målet med detta masterexamensarbete var att utveckla och utvärdera en metod för smartphone- baserad semikvantitativ kolorimetrisk analys av hilda Neo testet som fungerar utan ljus-box i olika ljussättningar. Metoden skulle vara implementerbar som en iPhone applikation och skulle kunna bestämma LDH aktivitet inom fyra intervall; 0-300, 300-600, 600-900 och >900 enheter per liter (U/L). De beräknade LDH nivåerna för kort körda med samma prov skulle inte heller ha en standardavvikelse över 50 U/L. Två metoder baserade på kontinuerlig mätning av provets färgutveckling togs fram. För båda metoderna användes iPhone kameran för att ta en bildserie som följde testets färgutveckling över tiden. Bildserien behandlades sedan i MATLAB och ett LDH värde beräknades med de två olika metoderna. Ingen av de två föreslagna metoderna uppnådde de uppsatta målen. Ingen av metoderna gav rätt LDH intervall för alla kort som användes för utvärdering och de beräknade LDH nivåerna hade en för hög standard avvikelse. Dock indikerade resultaten på att variationer i ljussättningen inte var den enda faktorn som bidrog till de ouppnådda målen. Författaren tror att med fortsatt studerande av hilda Neo testets färgegenskaper och med den fortlöpande utvecklingen av smartphone tekniken, kommer det att vara möjligt att hitta en metod för smartphone-baserad kolorimetrisk analys utan kontrollerad ljussättning.

<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>

The origins and ongoing legacies of American Spiritualism in their relations to mainstream religion, science, and politics are by this point well-charted. As a vector between, on one side, esoteric philosophy and diffuse pseudo-scientific and occult disciplines, and, on the other, exoteric mass culture and the 19th century groundswell of popular progressive rhetoric, Spiritualism as a historical phenomenon has in the past decades become more legible than ever as a religious, political, and social movement. Less thoroughly studied, however, is the enormous mass of print culture left behind by Spiritualists. Spiritualist newsletters, journals, and small presses printed vast quantities of written matter, running from the obvious sermons, lectures, and seance transcriptions to Spiritualist novels, Spiritualist hymns, and, in particular, Spiritualist lyric verse. While critics like Helen Sword in Ghostwriting Modernism have begun to approach this archive as literary matter and not merely as the incidental byproduct of the movement, much work remains to be done. In this dissertation I want to draw connections from this mass of widely read, but little remembered, Spiritualist poetry to the late 19th century and early 20th century’s proliferation of occult and metaphysical poetry. In doing so I hope to illuminate the recurring esoteric streak running from high modernism to, in fits and spurts, the present. The crux of this dissertation pursues the trail of breadcrumbs leading from Spiritualist poet-mediums like Achsa Sprague and Lizzie Doten to the mediumistic elements of 20th century poets H.D. and Jack Spicer, before arriving in the conclusion at the 21st century and its fresh proliferation of esoterically inclined medium-poets. I propose that there is a meaningful thread wending from the 1850s to the present, and that this thread can be tracked by taking seriously the claims made by these poets regarding the composition of their verse, no matter how outrageous or unlikely those claims may at first seem. What would it mean to interrogate in earnest the logistics of authorship when a poem is attributed to a ghost? How do Spicer’s extraordinary claims about Martians and angels inflect how we read his body of work? What complications emerge from H.D.’s World War II-era poems of grief and trauma if we grant her the premise that their composition was saturated with the tangible presence of the dead? These allowances-- or at least the agreement to take these writers seriously in their compositional, metaphysical, and aesthetic claims-- reveals intriguing and consistent fissures in the normative understanding of the lyric. While Sprague and Doten, along with other Spiritualist poets, largely sought to write verse recognizable in terms of form and content as “lyric verse,” they began from first principles seemingly dramatically opposed to the received 19th century wisdom regarding what constituted the lyric and how it functioned. By contrasting these poets, who sought to write and publish from a position of authorial multiplicity and supernatural collaboration, with the lyric philosophy of thinkers such as John Stuart Mill, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hegel, and Poe, I hope to demonstrate the theoretical radicalism quietly bubbling away under the sometimes deceptively staid and conventional surface of these poems. I track these fissures as they widen and grow more unruly in their contours, underlying the daring and experimental poetry of H.D. and Spicer, for whom the grounds staked by the category of the “lyric” exist in productive tension and conflict with the desire to complicate, subvert, and sidestep the attending assumptions about subjectivity, audience, and the stability of the figure of the author. By rejecting the Millsian atomism of the writing self, and opening the position of authorship to both supernatural gnosis and abject supplication, these practices of the “mediumistic lyric” offer an apophatic poetics embraced by over a century of poets eager, for one reason or another, to locate alternatives to the model of the lyric subject as persistent, singular, masterful, and solitary. In doing so I propose that it becomes an attractive, durable, and remarkably flexible model for queer writers, writers orienting themselves against the subject of colonialism, and writers otherwise displaced from lyric stability and sovereignty. Chapter One: “Voices From the Other Sphere”: The Poet in Emerson and Sprague: This chapter begins by offering a comparison between two near-contemporary texts with identical titles but drastically different aspirations. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Poet” provided a sturdy blueprint for American Romanticism by drawing on the example of European poets as well as esoteric philosophers contemporaneously in intellectual circulation such as Swedenborg and Boehme. Achsa Sprague’s verse drama “The Poet,” on the other hand, is a full-throatedly Spiritualist didactic narrative, offering amidst its supernatural and allegorical narrative, a domestic plot strikingly attuned to class and gender-based inequalities. I use these two texts as a springboard to begin to delineate the differing trajectories of their respective authors-- Emerson the public intellectual and religious progressive, Sprague a rural school teacher turned radical activist and spirit medium-- as well as the considerable overlap in their essential reference points. Chapter Two: “The Harp-Strings of My Being”: Lizzie Doten and the Phenomenology of Spirits: The next two chapters focus on major Spiritualist woman poets who in quite different ways drew on the mythic figure of Poe as compositional grist, offering two disparate models of how a Spiritualist metaphysics could inform an aesthetic orientation towards imitation, influence, and the knotty category of “originality.” Chapter Four takes up Lizzie Doten, whose 1863 Poems From the Inner Life contains a mix of original poems and poems allegedly dictated by controlling spirits, including Poe. I discuss how imitation functions in these poems, and in particular how the desire to replicate the stylistic and formal tics of well-known authors interacted with the desire to produce didactic religious verse in which the post-mortem reform and uplift of seemingly morally vexed poets like Poe, Burns, and Byron. In this verse, deceased poets were represented as writing not as themselves but as better versions of themselves, creating a rich juxtaposition between the formal challenge of imitation and the didactic demands of poetic content. I also discuss her essay “A Word to the World,” a strikingly thorough prose exposition of what, in her framing, mediumship felt like and how the linguistic output of spirits filtered through the mortal hands of the poet. Chapter Three: Sarah Helen Whitman’s Poe: Performing Spiritualism: This chapter juxtaposes Doten’s explicitly supernatural and metaphysical understanding of imitation with the more socially mediated practice of Sarah Helen Whitman, a poet who maintained a somewhat wider distance between her poetics and her participation in Spiritualist mediumship and seances. A former lover of Poe and one of his primary early literary executors, Whitman’s Spiritualism can be read in the context of her widely circulated “secular” Poe imitations, situating them, after the pattern of Eliza Richards’ Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle, in a social and aesthetic milieu in which mimicry and virtuosic copy-catting was not only expected of woman poets but imposed as a closed formal horizon. I argue that Spiritualism offered an avenue in which female poets could leverage the formal games of imitation so foregrounded in contemporaneous practices of poetic reading and writing towards wider modes of didactic and polemical expression, a method, in other words, of “hijacking” imitation’s limits and turning these assumed voices towards their own ends. Chapter Four: “Why Should We Not, At a Certain Stage, Remember?”: H.D. and the Echoing Other: Here I turn from the 19th century to the 20th, beginning with H.D. and concluding with the Berkeley Renaissance poet Jack Spicer. Chapter four offers a brief overview of H.D.’s history in esoteric and occult research and a survey of her contemporary milieu. It revolves around the 1919 prose work Notes on Thought and Vision, an intense description of an early visionary experience and a sustained exegesis of her thinking, at that time, on the intersection of visionary experience and privileged, quasi-mediumistic states of knowing. I read these texts and other early explorations of these themes as H.D.’s experimental studies on writing the self seemingly overdetermined by socialization and history, as well as on fashioning a generative middle-ground between spiritual supplication and modernist theories of mastery. I then track these motifs through the vision of gnosis described in her later text, the World War II-era The Flowering of the Rood. In short, I propose that H.D. leveraged the language and practices of mediumship as a vehicle for a novel species of autobiographical writing, one which might simultaneously privilege to a heightened degree the phenomenology of knowing, thinking, and perceiving, while offering a vantage point from which to observe the position of selfhood from a distance. Chapter Five: “The Ghost Is a Joke”: Jack Spicer and the Bathos of Outside: Chapter five centers on Jack Spicer and broadly, his mediumistic theory of poetic dictation (what his peer Robin Blaser dubbed his “practice of Outside”) and the playful, punning language of Martians, angels, and ghosts in which he scaffolded it. I argue that for Spicer, “dictation” provides not only a means for him to explore an abject, apophatic queer poetics, but to articulate his sense of longing for a poetics of proximity between the world and the word that was otherwise impossible, repeatedly linking the linguistic communion between poet and received language as a fantasized analogue to the gulf between signifier and signified, desirer and object of desire, and life and death. Chapter Eight introduces the figure of the “Martian” in Spicer’s poems and lectures, along with the models of bodily sovereignty he inherited from his early studies with Kantorowicz, arguing that the loss of physical agency and the absence of semantic meaning are two elements of a broader poetics of absence throughout his career. Conclusion: “A House That Tries to Be Haunted”: The conclusion revisits the arguments of the dissertation as a whole, retracing the line of lyric development and subversion from the 19th century Spiritualists to Spicer, before ending with a brief survey of the continuing diffusion of mediumistic lyric into the 21st century. First I gesture to the mediumistic writing of several 20th century poets not included in this project-- e.g., Robert Duncan, Nathaniel Mackey, Hannah Weiner, and James Merrill-- before describing the influence of mediumistic ideas on contemporary poets such as CA Conrad and Ariana Reines, for whom the occult and metaphysical themes of mediumship are just as important as its potential for lyric modes outside of the discourse of mastery and agential authorship. I thus end by positing this new flourishing of poet mediums as not only a continuation of a long tradition, but as a final example of such mediumship’s position at the intersection of lyrical and vanguard writing practices. / English