Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2008. / "Graduate Program in Literatures in English." Includes bibliographical references (p. 220-228).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in Literatures in English." Includes bibliographical references (p. 220-232).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2010. / "Graduate Program in Literatures in English." Includes bibliographical references (p. 581-600).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2007. / "Graduate Program in English, Literatures in." Includes bibliographical references (p. 266-286).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in Literatures in English." Includes bibliographical references (p. 315-329).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in Literatures in English." Includes bibliographical references (p. 230-248).

This thesis elaborates upon Charles Baudelaire and T. S. Eliot's poetic negotiation of the erosion of the essentialist cognitive and moral foundations that hypothetically monitor human praxis and cement a stable subjectivity on the basis of the human subjects' co-inhering in a common horizon of understanding. I contend that Baudelaire's work consciously belaboured the collapse of vaulting cognitive frameworks and testimonial accountability in a way that reveals both the historical and trans-historical dimensions of the non-integratability of experience within a modem economy of existence. His work eschews the trappings of both aestheticism (history being one of its explicit and pervasive concerns) and historicism, since it reveals parameters of the reification of organic experience that are intrinsic to language and specific to the mnemonic abridgement of the subject's experiential trajectory. Moreover, Baudelaire's poetry compels the critique of the aesthetic abstraction from the social being of man, and solicits scepticism vis-a-vis straight historicism's teleological infrastructures and collateral crypto-transcendentalist angles. The examined poetry exposes the inner complicity of the two perspectives in question latent beneath their surface mutual closure. I examine T. S. Eliot's work in order to address the anti-essentialist motifs of his poetry in counterpoint to his literary criticism, and reveal the dialectic of cultural determinism (mostly materialising in the latter) and radical impersonality that resumes modernity's aporetic necessity to deploy egological categories within an agenda that has invalidated any notion of essence fundaments sustaining human experience. His poetry's homeopathic re-enactment of the experiential fragmentation that it thematically laments constitutes the privileged terrain whereupon essentialist construals of human subjectivity and history can be revealed to be inherently ideological. I have throughout drawn on Walter Benjamin's understanding of allegory and memory, along with Paul de Man's enhancement of the antagonism of the material and transcendental axes endemic in language and cognitive anchoring. This thesis explores the problematisation of essentialist configurations of subjectivity and history in the poetry of the archetypal poet of modernity, and the mutations they submitted to when they were inscribed within an aesthetic and political agenda that was far more reluctant to relinquish egological paradigms of communication and subjectivity. The underlying concern has been to elucidate Baudelaire's 'inexhaustible wealth of responsiveness vis-a-vis the collapse of organic experience, and his resistance to both historicist and reductively aesthetic appropriations. This thesis has aimed to analyse his treatment of experiential disintegration as an effect of historical juncture along with his welcoming address of cognitive and experiential reification as the outcome of the differential and semiotic character of language and memory.

Medieval nobility was a compound and fluid concept, the complexity of which is clearly reflected in the Middle English romances. This dissertation examines fourteen short verse romances, grouped by story-type into three categories. They are: type 1: romance and lost heirs (Degaré Chevelere Assigne, Sir Perceval of Galles, Lybeaus Desconus, and Octvian); type 2: romances about winning a bride (Floris and Blancheflour, The Erle of Tolous, Sir Eglamour of Artois, Sir Degrevant, and the Amis-Belisaunt plot from Amis and Amiloun); type 3: romances of improversihed knights (Amiloun's story from Amis and Amiloun, Sir Isumbras, Sir Amadace, Sir Cleges, and Sir Launfal). The analysis is based on contextualized close reading, drawing on the theories of Pierre Bourdieu. The results show that Middle English romance has no standard criteria for defining nobillity, but draws on the full range of contemporary opinion; understandings of nobility conflict both between and within texts. Ideological consistence is seldom a priority, and the genre apparently serves neither a single socio-political agenda, nor a single socio-political group. The dominant conception of nobility in each romance is determined by the story-type. Romance type 1 presents nobility as inherent in the blood, type 2 emphasizes prowess and force of will, and type 3 concentrates on virtue. However, no romance text offers just one definition; implicitly or explicitly, there are always alternatives. This internal variety indicates tha the romances imagine nobility scene-by-scene; even a text seemingly committed to one perspective is liable to abandon it temporarily if there is another better suited to the narrative moment. Ideological expression always comes second to effective story-telling. This means the texts are frequently inconsistent and sometimes illogical, but that multiplicity is of their very essence.

Caribbean writing is an emigrant tradition. The first waves of native-born authors from the region all spent significant portions of their lives abroad and, almost without exception, built their fame upon the desires of metropolitan audiences for knowledge of their colonies. Accordingly, the famous names of Lamming, Naipaul, Selvon, Césaire and Glissant are all stamped with a slightly less famous departure date. While many critics have noted these facts, there has been little sustained analysis of how the unique social positions and preoccupations of emigrants have affected the works of these five writers or their peers. This thesis is an attempt to address this issue. Its argument is that Caribbean emigrant authors spoke from unique social and conceptual loci. Through detailed, comparative readings of these five authors’ first major works, alongside considerations of their self-assessments, critical opinion on their oeuvres, Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the literary field and Antonio Gramsci’s theory of the organic intellectual, the argument advanced is that although these authors actively positioned themselves, and were positioned by their readers, in such a way that their emigrant status has had its importance elided, that status is present and potent in their post-emigration works. While the concerns of these writers all altered over the course of their careers, their early experiences of emigration shaped some of their most widely read texts and resulted in a harmony between them that transcends the authors’ differing islands of origin and their later thematic and political preoccupations.

From Poesie to Poetry: Remaniement and Mediaeval Techniques of French-to-English Translation of Verse Romance, explores the use of remaniement, the art of rewriting, as the method preferred for vernacular translations of genres such as romance. A thorough history of the practice's principles are given, drawing on comments from Classical rhetoricians, patristic writers, authorities of the artes poeticae, and mediaeval translators employing the procedure. A textual analysis of the Middle English Amis and Amiloun follows, utilising a broadly structuralist approach which compares each individual episode and 'lexie' with its Old French and AngloNorman predecessors. This examination demonstrates remaniement to be the method used to translate the romance, highlighting both the important debt owed to the francophone traditions as well as the use of dynamic interpretation to lend the work salience to an English audience. A subsequent linguistic examination includes a new definition of formulae based on prototype theory which utilises mental templates to identifY occurrences. This permits the recognition of over 3000 instances of formulaic diction, many of which can be traced back to native preConquest traditions, as can certain aspects of verse and structure. What emerges, therefore, is a composite work heavily indebted to continental and insular French sources for content and some aspects of style, but largely readapted to lend it appeal to an early fourteenth-century Anglophone audience. The thesis therefore clarifies the establishment and use of remaniement, provides a detailed examp Ie of its use, and in doing so reveals the true extent of the oft overlooked debt owed to francophone traditions in creating English romances. By way of setting these dimensions into a wider context, the conclusion suggests such translations had a general effect on the development of a new insular style, setting standards for the independent creation of works in English as that language continued to re-establish itself as an accepted medium for literary expression.