Thesis (Ph. D.)--University OF MICHIGAN.

<p> This dissertation examines the Spanish visual poetry of the 1960s and 1970s, which appeared during the later period of the Franco regime and responded to the rise of mass media and consumer capitalism. It draws on the theoretical work of Gilles Deleuze and F&eacute;lix Guattari to examine how this poetry created an oppositional practice that destabilized the conventional use of codes in media, art, and literature. It brings to light what I will explore as the "schizoid" character of their work and how it redefines the roles of reader, writer, and text in order to create an awareness that is critical and resistant to what the visual poets position as authoritative discourses, such as capitalism, consumerism, and the authoritarianism of the dictatorship. They see these discourses as subjugating the individual's thought through codes of language and image, and they go about subverting such discourses by destabilizing the language and image itself on which those discourses are built. </p><p> This study focuses on the representative works of three different writers, <i> Quiz&aacute;s Brigitte Bardot venga a tomar una copa esta noche</i> by Alfonso L&oacute;pez Gradol&iacute;, <i>La ca&iacute;da del avi&oacute;n en el terreno bald&iacute;o</i> by Jos&eacute; Luis Castillejo, and Textos y antitextos by Fernando Mill&aacute;n. L&oacute;pez Gradol&iacute;'s book restructures the notion of desire as it is represented in capitalist narratives of lack, ultimately schizophrenizing desire as a displaced logic of lack and creating new, interpersonal codes that redefine desire as immanent connection. Castillejo's work deconstructs representation through open-ended texts that multiply possible reading strategies, thus grounding desire in the process of building new codes. Mill&aacute;n's book deconstructs representation into a figural narrative that redefines the reader's role from that of a passive consumer to that of an active schizoanalyst that co-creates poetic codes and schizophrenizes transcendental structures that govern language and image. </p>

<p> <i>Condolences to All of You</i> assembles various poems whose creation spans the period between late 2011 and late 2014, with the vast majority formed during the latter half of that time. Included are conceptual poems of a visual or ideological nature, narrative poems exploring adolescence and ecology, and lyrical examinations of the crisis of mortality in the twenty-first century. Many of these darkly humorous poems obscure distinctions between elegy, eulogy, epitaph and celebration, while pleading for the imagination's affirmation in a human era of purported existential certainty. The essay preceding the poems debates their roles and merits among the flailing despair of twentieth century literary criticism, and puts forth a guide to formal and content-driven motives for the mechanics of the poems themselves. </p>

This thesis investigates the roles played by etymology in the work of three late modernist poet-critics: W. H. Auden, J. H. Prynne, and Paul Muldoon. The relationship between poetry and etymology has a long history, but the advent of modern linguistics at the beginning of the twentieth century brought about a change in this relationship. Structuralism developed a more comprehensive condemnation of the etymological fallacy – the view that historical forms and meanings are relevant to current ones - that both isolated etymology as an abstract field of study and undermined its scientific validity. One reaction to this state of affairs has been to re-evaluate etymological discourse itself as poetic or rhetorical. But it is the tension created by what Paula Blank has called 'the quasi-disciplinarity of etymological desire' that motivates Auden, Prynne, and Muldoon's concerns with linguistic historicity. Etymological poetry encourages, even necessitates, very close reading. While this thesis accepts the challenge to read arguably too closely, it also examines the limits of such an approach and its implications for the relationship between poetry and criticism. The first three chapters consider how Auden, Prynne, and Muldoon invoke etymologies in their own criticism, and how etymology affects the ways their poetry may be said to communicate. The second three develop these analyses into new interpretations of commonly debated aspects of their work: Auden's landscape poetry, Prynne's lyricism, and Muldoon's onomastics. It is argued that the fact of obsolescence is key to the etymological poetic; obsolete forms and meanings make poetry difficult, but in the process they intimate that a truer way of representing the world may be (re)discovered. All three poet-critics confront and absorb the consequences of etymological obscurity. Their preoccupation with the history of words is self-consciously and unavoidably pedantic, and it is this pedantry that plays the most significant role in the poetic power they accord to etymology.

Writers from both world wars, concerned with the representation of war, wrestled with the predicament of partial sight. Their work reveals the problematic dichotomy that exists between the individual’s selective range of vision and the immense scale of conflict. Central to this authorial dilemma is the question of the visual frame: how do you contain – within the written word – sight that resists containment and expression? The scale of the two world wars accentuated the representative problem of warfare. This thesis, by examining a wide range of World War One and World War Two literature, explores the varied literary responses to the topical relationship between sight and reality in wartime. It examines the war poetry of Wilfred Owen, Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy Parade’s End, The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day, and Virginia Woolf’s novels Mrs Dalloway and Between the Acts alongside less well-known works such as David Jones’s prose-poem In Parenthesis, the two short stories ‘The Soldier Looks for His Family’ by John Prebble and ‘The Blind Man’ by D.H. Lawrence, as well as William Sansom’s collection of short stories Fireman Flower, and Louis Simpson’s war poetry. This thesis, by focussing on the inherent difficulties of reconciling perception and representation in war, interrogates the boundaries of sight and the limits of representation. The changing place of sight in writing from the two world wars is examined and the extent to which discourses of vision were shaped and developed, in the early decades of the twentieth century, by war experience is explored. The critical containment and categorisation of sight that often dominates readings of sight in texts from both world wars is questioned suggesting the need for a more flexible understanding of, and approach towards, sight.

Despite having a rather weak family connection to Ireland, the American modernist poet Marianne Moore (1887-1972) described herself in a letter to Ezra Pound in 1919 as ‘Irish by descent’. This thesis relates Moore’s claim of Irish descent to her career as a publisher, poet and playwright, and argues that her decision to shape an Irish inheritance for herself was linked with her self-identification as an American poet. Chapter 1 discusses Moore’s self-confessed susceptibility to ‘Irish magic’ in relation to the increase in contributions from Irish writers during her editorship of The Dial magazine from 1925 to 1929. Moore’s 1915 poems to the Irish writers George Moore, W. B. Yeats and George Bernard Shaw, which reveal a paradoxical desire for affiliation to, and disassociation from, Irish literary traditions, are scrutinized in Chapter 2. Chapters 3a and b discuss Moore’s ‘Irish’ poems ‘Sojourn in the Whale’ (1917) and ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ (1941). In both poems political events in Ireland – the ‘Easter Rising’ of 1916 and Ireland’s policy of neutrality during World War II – become a backdrop for Moore’s personal anxieties as an American poet of ‘Irish’ descent coming to terms with her political and cultural inheritance. Expanding upon previous chapters’ discussion of the interrelation of poetics and politics, Chapter 4 shows how Moore’s use of Irish sources in ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ and other poems including ‘Silence’ and the ‘Student’ reflects her quixotic attitude to Irish culture as alternately an inspiration and a tool for manipulation. The final chapter discusses Moore’s adaptation of the Anglo-Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth’s 1812 novel The Absentee as a play in 1954. Through this last piece of ‘Irish’ writing, Moore adopts a sentimentality that befits the later stages of her career and illustrates how Irish literature, rather than Irish politics, has emerged as her ultimate source of inspiration.