The scholars who have taken up the task of writing about Bob Kaufman have most often done so in response to a perceived demand: the lack of Kaufman scholarship, readership, anthology, publicity, canonization. The basis of this need is clear: Kaufman is almost never included as even a third-string Beat, a fringe Surrealist, or an underappreciated Jazz performer. To the committed readers of Kaufman – and almost all of his readers seem to be committed ones – it’s unforgivable. These various canons, major (mid-century American poets, Beat poets) and minor (Jazz poets, American Surrealists), are clearly missing one of their most important members. The task is to reintegrate Kaufman into the company it seems he has been omitted from, the company he deserves. The problem is that once the critic has overcome all the resistance – the capitalist publishing industry, the prison system, the white-dominated west coast poetry setting, the public demands of aesthetic production – she is resisted by the poetry itself, and by Kaufman the poet. Along the lines of Claude Pelieu’s back jacket blurb of Golden Sardine – “in spite of his continuing exclusion from American anthologies, both Hip & Academic” – Kaufman has excluded the anthology, the academy. I will read death through various critical lenses – some with nearly universal critical currency among readers of Kaufman, some with little – as Kaufman’s “FOUNT OF THE CREATIVE ACT.” But this thematic circumscription is also a reading of endurance, even of life. Kaufman writes: “[THE POET’S] DEATH IS A SAVING GRACE.” This becomes the vital relation at the center of my project: how does Kaufman, like Lorca, survive in his poem? How does Kaufman’s political poetry relate with poetic death and redemption? How does jazz involve these things? Does death exist? I want to know . . .

Long acknowledged as a committed poet of place, this thesis examines tones of outsiderness and alienation that characterize George Scarbrough’s poetry. Scarbrough draws on familiarity with his childhood in southeast Tennessee, and from an outsider’s outlook, a perspective veritably prompted by the rejection he suffered as a homosexual and lover of language, Scarbrough’s poetry addresses the daunting themes of fear and nothingness. Analysis of his poetry also reveals qualities of hope and endurance, a commitment to received forms, and Modern innovation. Through his poetic voice, culminating in the alter ego of Han-shan, Scarbrough provides vital insights into the human experience.

<p>By applying Canadian literary theory, museum theory, and material culture theory to 20th and 21st century Canadian literature, I argue that physical objects reflect Canada's continued engagement in colonial practices and the nation's resistance to acknowledging these practices. The act of selecting and including (which is also necessarily an act of excluding) objects in personal and institutional collections speak to the anxiety of the Euro-Canadian settler that is produced by a conflicting sense of privilege and colonial complicity. Collecting is a means of negotiating self- and shared knowledge, and by re-collecting and repatriating those things that haunt us we come closer to recognizing ourselves. Re-reading ourselves through objects will allow us to confront this anxiety and its implications, to destabilize the Euro-Canadian settler-as-victim, and to move forward as a nation.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>In this thesis, I investigate Canadian poetry that is explicitly about the political (politicians, political parties, or political policies) written in English. I begin by defining political poetry and its aims in Canada and then progress through an examination of three collections of poetry and one poem: <em>The Blasted Pine</em>; <em>Howl Too, Eh?</em>; and <em>Rogue Stimulus</em>. This allows for a comprehensive look at how political poetry has evolved in Canada from a pointed and critical genre that aims to mock and argue to a more subtle, playful genre that utilizes parody and wit. It also demonstrates the evolution and complication of voice in political poetry, given that each poem contains the voice of the poet, the speaker, the public, and the political.</p> <p>I argue that political poetry in Canada is not poetry as dissent, protest, or witness, but rather poetry as inquiry/commission (in the political sense). This definition relies on the fact that Canadian political poetry seeks to ascribe accountability for political actions and decisions and utilizes the poet as spokesperson, speaking for the public to the political (and the public in turn). Canadian political poetry hence arises out of a demand from the public, much like political inquiries do, and through the satirical use of politically correct language and explicit political references calls for action from the political sphere and the public. I further argue that poetry as inquiry also comments on the public itself (including the author/speaker as a member of that public) and that political poetry is transideological.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

Although Wendell Berry’s first book, a novel, appeared in 1960, he did not gain significant national attention until the publication of his nonfiction manifesto, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, in 1977. Since its publication, Berry has moved increasingly toward the prose of persuasion as he continues to sharpen his argument in support of a practical, continuous harmony between the human economy and Nature. His canon as a whole – the poems, essays, and novels – is an ongoing and thorough exploration of man’s use of and relationship to the land. Arguing that the health of a culture is linked to the health of its land, Berry focuses on agriculture, particularly the growing conflict between traditional farming (which espouses a harmonious cyclic vision) and modern agribusiness (which espouses a discordant linear vision). As a traditional farmer wedded to the land, Berry derives his ideas and images largely from his practical experiences and form his devotion to careful and responsible land stewardship. He also, in his nonfiction, turns to several agricultural (as well as a few literary) writers of the past and present to lend support to his arguments. Berry’s strong sense of Nature’s cycle is the basis for his imagery of departures and returns. As a crucial part of the cycle, death is prerequisite to life, and Berry shows the importance of understanding “that the land we live on and the lives we live are the gifts of death” (Home Economics 62). The power of Nature’s cycle is at once destructive and restorative; Berry teaches that by allying our human economy more with natural cyclic processes rather than with man-made linear – and ultimately destructive – ones, we and future generations can live with hope and assurance through the possibility of renewal. Traditional farming has taught Berry the concepts which inform his poems and essays (as well as his novels and short stories, which merit a separate study beyond the scope of this paper.) For example, he has learned, and continues to learn, the importance of understanding and acknowledging the primal, and ruling, character of a “place”; of looking to Nature for guidance, instruction, and justice; and of allying farming practices to Nature’s “Wheel” of birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay. This cycle and related motifs unify and connect his central themes, particularly death as a means of renewal. In Berry’s view, one of the cruxes in the agricultural crisis is that, whereas traditional farming seeks a natural balance between growth and decay, industrial farming, because of its pull toward mass production, stresses growth only (a linear inclination), which wears out the land and leads inevitably to infertility. Tracing our modern crisis to our past and to our present character and culture, Berry shows the ramifications of our abuse of Nature’s “gifts.”

This thesis explores Joan Didion’s concern of mass media’s infiltration on the processing and communication of her personal reality and memory. Didion herself communicates an anxiety of the infiltration of mass media into her individual communication of her unique, indescribable experience. Yet, she too is unable to escape this and instead, is forced to make this an act of adaptation, not separation. Mass media pervades Didion’s own mind, taking over her processing of experience and memory through the modes of photography and film. With these forms of mass media, Didion seeks a purity of personal expression through the form of writing. Ultimately, this proves to be just as problematic and is unable to escape the influence of mass media’s depersonalized representations of individual human experience.

While addiction narratives have been a feature of American culture at least since the early 19th century’s temperance tales, the creation of the Johnson Intervention in the late 1960s and the corresponding advent of the War on Drugs waged by U.S. Presidents have wrought significant changes in the stories told about addiction and recovery. These changes reflect broader changes in conceptions of agency and the relationship of subject to culture in the postmodern era. In the way that it iterates the imperatives of the War on Drugs initiated by Richard Nixon, the rhetoric of successive U.S. Presidents provides a compelling heuristic for analyzing popular and literary texts as reflective of the changing shape of addiction and recovery narratives over the last half century. Johnson, by defining addiction, not intoxication, as a break with reality, argued that confronting addicts with narratives of the potential crises could convince them to seek treatment before they hit bottom. Johnson’s version of “reality therapy” thus presented threatened or simulated crises, rather than real ones. Examining presidential rhetoric and popular culture representations of addiction—in horror movies, “very special episodes,” and reality television—this dissertation identifies features of the postmodern Intervention and recovery narrative in fiction by William Peter Blatty, Stephen King, Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, David Foster Wallace, and Jess Walter. I demonstrate how the Intervention is key to understanding the cultural products of the War on Drugs and its continued salience in American culture.

Mind Against Matter uses cognitive literary theory to explore a set of contemporary texts that emphasize characters’ feelings of alienation and isolation from their social and material worlds. Focusing on novels by Nicholson Baker and David Markson, short stories by David Foster Wallace, and the film The Truman Show, I consider how these texts focus on characters’ individual, subjective experiences while deemphasizing their physical environments and social contexts. I argue that by privileging subjectivity in this way, these texts portray their characters as independent, to varying degrees, from their material and cultural surroundings. The texts isolate individual consciousness, causing their characters to live in mental worlds of their own making. While the novel, as a genre, often depicts alienation as a condition deriving from a character’s status as a social outcast, the texts featured in this study treat it as a condition inherent to consciousness, derived from what their creators envision as an inevitable separation of mind from world. Rather than bemoan alienation as a loss of social connectedness, these texts portray it as inherent to mental life. The chapters of this dissertation explore the particular visions of alienation that emerge in each of these texts. In a chapter on Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, I argue that Howie, the novel’s protagonist, views his mind as a machine that operates according to self-sufficient, automatic processes. My analysis of David Markson’s final novels demonstrates that Markson portrays artistic creation as a process through which individual consciousness is isolated from society. David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion treats alienation as a general human condition, as Wallace’s interests in loneliness and solipsism derive, I argue, from his assumptions about the individualized nature of consciousness. Finally, in a chapter on The Truman Show, I argue that the film’s sense of paranoia stems from its protagonist’s sense of being alone in his worldview. I thus present a corpus of works that maintain a close, limited focus on singular fictional minds, shutting out social and physical environments in order to depict the mind as a cloistered, self-enclosed entity. My analysis highlights the ways in which the philosophical underpinnings of these narratives render consciousness as an isolating force, stranding fictional characters on mental islands of their own making.

The period following World War I can be characterized in literature by the trauma and changes that promoted crises of masculinity. These crises, however, are not discussed between the men that suffer similar feelings of insecurity and anxiety; not approached as a tension in need of resolution. Exploring the narrative voices of Nick, Jake, Darl and Anse in The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and As I Lay Dying, this thesis addresses the ways in which this unspoken phenomenon is essential to the modernist male narrative. I propose that, despite the widespread nature of this phenomenon, it is the voice of the individual – the preoccupations of his consciousness – that is the most appropriate point through which to examine these crises of masculinity.

While there have been many studies of Henry James's ghost stories, there has been surprisingly little scholarship written on postcolonial tensions in these works. In American literature, the figure of the Native American ghost is a common expression of Western settler guilt over native erasure and land seizure. In both his American and British ghost stories, though, James focuses more on the horror within the colonizer than the terrifying, ghostly other from the edge of the empire. As such, these ghost stories serve as a more significant critique of colonialism and imperialism than Gothic texts that merely demonstrate the colonizer’s fear of the racial and ethnic other at the edges of the empire. James’s earliest ghost stories address to the legacy of American colonialism, staging narratives of indigenous erasure and land seizure by centering hauntings around property disputes. The later ghost stories—written after James had emigrated to Britain— engage in a critique of the imperial British military and colonial power structures that systematically oppress indigenous groups in the name of the empire. These ghost stories all focus on the figure of the Western settler-colonizer and his guilt in creating hauntings; James’s living characters often realize they have been complicit in the wrongdoings that result in revenge-seeking ghosts, and this realization is more terrifying than the ghosts themselves. In this way, James's ghost stories present a means of questioning the validityof colonizer identity, and thus a means of deconstructing the binary of the Western “self” and the indigenous “other.”