This thesis examines the conscious amalgamation of conflicting forms in Byron’s verse, and how these forms strain to create meaning in the processes of his poetry. Through a series of close readings and critical engagements with other Romantic poets, I endeavour to show how Byron’s poetry is often a rich site of contention between revolutionary and conservative impulses; both in its style and subject matter, and more often than not, in the complicated relationship between them. Beginning with Byron’s problematic place in the English Romantic canon, I attempt to lay a foundation for my claims that for all his mistrust of closed systems and predetermined positions there remained an urging desire to reconcile definitive artistic contour with internal form-developing process in many of his most intense poetic engagements. In his efforts at reconciling an awareness of the ever-moving provisional nature of subjectivity with a deep-rooted demand for evaluative permanence, Byron habitually employs a hybrid poetic idiom which seeks to be both timeless and time specific. In many of his most distinctive compositions, Byron holds a so-called ‘High Romantic’ lyrical mode, in which meaning is immersed in a persistent flowing rhythm, in tension with an eighteenth-century rhetorical style in which the careful placement of weighty words offsets its continuity to striking effect. By bookending my enquiry with Byron’s penetrating discursive conflicts with the naïve lyrical impulses of Wordsworth’s blank verse and what he perceived as the rhetorical appropriations of Keats’s poetry, I wish to demonstrate that Byron’s poetry enacts a curious meeting of nature and culture by a refusal to cleave them.

In this essay, I argue that the angel Raphael introduces a poetic sensibility into Paradise in order to provide Adam and Eve with “equipment for living” after the Fall. Unlike other critics who have interpreted Raphael as a poet, I focus on the implications of Raphael’s poetic teaching for postlapsarian life. I also call attention to the dangerous effects of Raphael’s “song,” which awakens Adam’s insatiable curiosity about forbidden subjects even as Raphael cautions him to practice temperance and “be lowly wise.” Raphael aims to both “delight and instruct” his audience through poetic discourse, but Milton shows him struggling as Adam’s delight interferes with the angel’s efforts to instruct him. I discuss Raphael’s attempts to mitigate Adam’s enthrallment at his words through disclaimers that remind him to remain temperate in his pursuit of knowledge and to resist subjection to beauty and pleasure—including the charm of “song.” Through Raphael’s meditations on the challenges of poetic representation, Milton reflects on the double-sided nature of his own craft. My essay seeks to reconcile the beneficial purpose of Raphael’s visit with its troubling effects. By reading Raphael’s careful efforts to temper and reorient Adam’s curiosity alongside Milton’s statements on the value of literature in Areopagitica, I explore Milton’s sense of how pleasure, doubt, and even temptation—if rightly tempered—can aid fallen humans in the cultivation of faithful obedience. / text

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Adapting the question at the end of Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale', this thesis argues that reading poetic texts involves a form of suspension between waking and sleeping. Poems are not the product of an empirical dreamer, but psychoanalytic understandings of dream-work help to provide an account of certain poetic effects. Poetic texts resemble dreams in that both induce identificatory desires within, while simultaneously estranging, the reading process. In establishing a theoretical connection between poetic texts and drearit-work, the discussion raises issues concerning death, memory and the body. The introduction relates Freudian and post-Freudian articulations of dream-work to the language of poetry, and addresses the problem of attributing desire "in" a literary text. Interweaving the work of Borch-Jacobsen, Derrida and Blanchot, the discussion proposes a different space of poetry. By reconfiguring the subject-of-desire and the structure of poetic address, the thesis argues that poetic "dreams" characterize points in texts which radically question the identity and position of the reader. Several main chapters focus on texts - poems by Frost and Keats, and Freud's reading of literary dreams - in which distinctions between waking and sleeping, familiarity and strangeness, order and confusion are profoundly disturbed. The latter part of the thesis concentrates on a textual "unconscious" that insists undecidably between the cultural and the individual. Poems by Eliot, Tennyson, Arnold and Walcott are shown to figure strange dreams and enact displacements that blur the categories of public and private. Throughout, the study confronts the recurrent interpretive problem of reading "inside" and "outside" textual dreams. This thesis offers an original perspective on reading poetry in conjunction with psychoanalysis, in that it challenges traditional assumptions about phantasy and poetry dependent upon a subject constituted in advance of a poetic event or scene of phantasy. It brings poetry into systematic relation with Freud's work on dreams and consistently identifies conceptual and performative links between psychoanalysis and literature in later modernity.

This thesis reads the poetry and poetics of Charles Bernstein in relation to his interest in sophistry and sophistics. Taking his 1987 volume The Sophist as a central text, the influence of a sense of sophistics is developed across his wider range of published works. This involves identifying some of the many different interpretations of the sophists throughout the history of philosophy, from the early dismissals by Plato and Aristotle to the more recent reappraisals of their works. A secondary aspect of the thesis is in examining the renewal of interest in the Ancient Greek sophists and suggesting some of the affinities between contemporary literary theory and poetics and the fragments of the works of the major sophists (primarily Protagoras and Gorgias). Finally, I suggest that The Sophist itself is a valuable and contemporaneous re-examination of sophistic ideas, that in fact goes further than those by academics from within philosophy and rhetoric by virtue of employing the stylistic innovations and linguistic experimentation that was so central to the sophistic approach.

Thesis advisor: Richard Kearney / This dissertation work examines culture as a condition, as a context, and, finally, as an achievement. The research objectives for this examination are both historical and philosophical. The historical objective is to retrace the appearance of the notion of culture in the works of Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005), and to demonstrate that Ricoeur adopts and adapts the term to his philosophical vocabulary. The accompanying philosophical objective, the proper task of this dissertation, is equally twofold. At the scholarly level this dissertation reconstructs - in the form of a hermeneutic of cultural recognition - Paul Ricoeur's cultural theory, and explicates why such a theory is necessary relative to Ricoeur's more openly-argued anthropological phenomenology of "being able." I maintain that all anthropological thought requires the support of cultural understanding, as no comprehensive anthropology is possible without the philosophical elaboration of the cultural condition that concerns human situatedness. The ultimate aim of this dissertation, however, is to go beyond this scholarly analysis and point out a subjective cultural hermeneutic process under the peculiar "dramatic" modality of this dissertation. This postcritical process is what I sum up with the term re-con-naissance. The reception of a cultural heritage is reaffirmed in the incessant task of acquiring a notion of one's self through hermeneutic reappropriation, or, as a perpetual task of freedom and the fulfillment of fundamental human possibilities in the interpretation of one's culture. Put differently, the matter of this dissertation is to recognize (reconnaître) this level of cultural hermeneutics that is unceasingly present; to expose a postcritical depth structure that takes place in the reader's own reconfigurative process as culturally enabled re-con-naissance. Since this hermeneutic concerns the postcritical interpretive reflection of a living, acting and struggling human subject - and is, therefore, not directly explainable - this reconfiguration can only be pointed at or suggested. In spite of its postcritical aim, therefore, the dissertation remains an academic work that functions at the level of critical explanation. The postcritical cultural hermeneutics has to be approached through the critical means that are exemplified by the scholarly analysis in this dissertation; our analysis stands for the critical and objectifying (academic) culture within which the reader reads this dissertation as a cultural and interpretive subject. After having propaedeutically explained the critical scholarly course and the ultimate postcritical task of this dissertation in part one, part two then breaks open the realm of cultural hermeneutics in the work of Paul Ricoeur by "letting it appear" through the critical analysis of the different perceptions concerning his last major work The Course of Recognition. This is the moment of "re-" or re-membering again the cultural condition. Ricoeur's post-Hegelian notion of "cultural objectification" necessitates, however, examining the synthetic moment of "con." Part three analyzes this "con" by pointing out a trajectory of Ricoeur's "post-Hegelian Kantian" though in his early works that runs from the condition of objectivity to cultural objectivity, and furthermore to a poetically constituted hermeneutic of culture. In turn, part four contrasts Ricoeur's thought with that of Martin Heidegger, focusing on Ricoeur's later works that propose an etho-poetics of culture that is manifested in institution. Part four, which closes off the scholarly analysis of Ricoeur's cultural hermeneutics, thereby displays the moment of "naissance," or "having-been-born-as-an-ethico-political-subject." The last part of this dissertation, part five, distances itself from the academic or scholarly mode by revealing the underlying "dramatic" structure of this dissertation. As a re-reading of the reading of Ricoeur's work in parts two, three, and four, part five exposes a new dimension to the whole of this work; namely, an experiential one that concerns the current reader of the work and his or her cultural re-con-naissance. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

This thesis examines the concept of vision in the major novels of Javier Marías in light of the philosophy of José Ortega y Gasset and Julián Marías. Marías's fictions present us with a series of characters that prove to be acute observers, interpreting the world both to understand it better and to orientate themselves within it. I argue that this hermeneutical approach extends to Marías's poetics, which reflect two main concepts not yet well studied: on one hand, what Marías, borrowing a term from his father, Julián Marías, calls 'pensamiento literario', which describes creative writing as one of the best tools the author has to 'see' or understand the real world; and on the other, his concept of 'reconocimiento', which defines the sympathetic process by which the reader 'sees' or 'recognises' him or herself in the narrative. These 'visual' poetics reveal a number of epistemological and ethical implications that gesture not towards the postmodern relativism often associated with Marías, but rather towards a modern intellectual paradigm whose possibilities were curtailed after the Civil War.

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The World by Memory and Conjecture collects thirty poems written and refined over the course of two and a half years. An analytical essay discussing the reading and writing of poetry as a medium, with reference to ancient and contemporary poets, is included.