Thesis (D.A.)--Illinois State University, 1988. / Title from title page screen, viewed September 19, 2005. Dissertation Committee: Irene Brosnahan (chair), Ron Fortune, Maurice Sharton, Janet Youga, Ray Lewis White. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 113-126) and abstract. Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 249-256).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1993. / Includes portions of British Library Manuscript Cotton Julius E VII. in the original Old English and modern English transcription. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [291]-312).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lehigh University, 1997. / Includes vita. Bibliography: leaves 210-221.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Catholic University of America, 1932. / At head of title: The Catholic university of America. Bibliography: p. 73-76.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2009. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 280-307).

This thesis reads John Ashbery as a major poetic thinker about nature whose work convenes a multitude of nature writing traditions, from classical pastoral to the 21st-century eco-sublime. Challenging a critical consensus that would cast Ashbery as either a belated romantic in search of lost nature or an arch-postmodernist who dissolves "nature" into text, this study reveals his deep historical awareness of the transmission and collision of literary ecologies. The poet who emerges delights in putting different poetic natures into contact with each other—and in humorously making nature unnatural. Surveying Ashbery’s long historical moment, the thesis uses four terms of critique—transparency, vagrancy, flow, and badness—to map his "invisible terrain." Chapter one historicizes Ashbery’s turn to a poetics of contradictory "transparencies" during his sojourns in France from 1956-1965 and his concurrent dream of writing poems that would be like "natural landscapes" in a world of "painted ones." Chapter two considers the pastoral and anti-pastoral topoi of Ashbery’s Vietnam-era poetry and his tendency to "wander away" from political commitment. Chapter three examines Ashbery’s recurrent tropes of "flow" and his tendency to literalize the stream-of-consciousness metaphor and "dissolve" his own style at decisive moments of his career. Chapter four reads the "bad" nature poetry of Ashbery’s late period (1987 to the present) as the culmination of a career-long investment in camp irony’s "good taste of bad taste" and as a response to ecological crisis. The coda, a survey of Ashbery’s critical prose, examines his penchant for “a completely new kind of realism."

This thesis investigates a subset of the lexical items which appear to be involved in the phenomenon of conversion in English. In its most canonical form, conversion involves pairs or sets of word forms which share both their phonological (and orthographic) form as well as some element of meaning, but which seem to belong to di↵erent word classes. In this study, the focus is on the relationships (or lack thereof) between monosyllabic verbal and nominal forms in conversion pairs. The investigation takes as a starting point the patterns of linguistic behaviour within and across these pairs. The situation which is revealed is complex, but not unsystematic. Instead, it is shown that in many cases, the relationship between the nominal and verbal forms is clearly asymmetrical. In contrast to these clearer patterns, however, there are also a number of cases wherein the relationship appears to be more symmetrical in nature. In view of the complexity of the situation, the question of how to best model the linguistic behaviour of such forms has been a subject of some debate in the literature. A variety of theoretical explanations for these relationships have been proposed, though none has managed to account for the wide range of data. This study therefore suggests a mixed model, in which asymmetrically-related forms are involved in a derivational morphological process, while symmetrical forms represent inflected forms of a single lexeme which lacks a specification of word class. However, given the fertile – and in no way settled – research background, the primary contribution of this study is an experimental exploration of how these forms and the relationships between them might be synchronically represented in the mental grammar of current speakers. To that end, three behavioural experiments are conducted with a view to uncovering how di↵erent types of conversion items are processed, and how information about their processing might inform our theoretical understanding. The results of these experiments suggest that the processing of these forms is indeed in line with the patterns of symmetry and asymmetry found in their linguistic behaviour, and suggests that some conversion pairs may be involved in a derivational process, while others may not be pairs at all but rather a single, underspecified lexical entry. However, in addition to the results concerning the forms which display clearer patterns of behaviour, it is suggested that the patterns across the phenomenon of conversion as a whole may best be understood as a continuum, rather than all suggesting a single underlying pattern of mental representation.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1963. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 171-186).

Habilitationsschrift--Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken. / Includes indexes. Includes bibliographical references (p. 285-303).