Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

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Removed from its artistic origins in the French avant-garde during the interwar period, the European based group known as the situationist international is often represented as being solely occupied with politics to the exclusion of all else, particularly art and aesthetics. In what follows I argue that throughout the sixties the anti-aesthetic position was actually the governing model in France obliging the avant-garde to adjust their strategies accordingly. Artists and artists' collectives that placed politics before aesthetics were the norm, enjoying widespread popularity and recognition from both the public and the French State. These overtly partisan groups and individuals sapped art of the power it had enjoyed in the fifties as a venue removed, or at least distanced from, formal politics. In response, the situationists officially rejected the art world, turning to the popular and vernacular culture of the streets in an attempt to get beyond both classical aesthetic principals and the overt propagandistic objectives of groups such as le Salon de la jeunePeinture. Turning to the climactic moment of 1968 I track the ways in which these debates informed the posters and graffiti which marked the unfinished revolution, sorting out the various aesthetic positions and political persuasions that dominated the events. My thesis contends that the situationists were not anti-aesthetic, that they simply advocated a different kind of aesthetics: one that rejected traditional notions of beauty for the more active and open concept of poiesis or poetry. Beyond words on a page, this notion implied art as a way of life, emphasizing production, creation, formation and action and can be traced back to the groups prewar origins in the Dada and surrealist movements. Moreover, this concept of poetry was not adverse to issues of form being highly dependent on the materiality and physicality of the urban centre, specifically the streets. Finally my conclusion expands upon the similarities between this notion of poetry and the 17th century understanding of beauty, the latter concept being associated with a subtle criticality and strategic wit. It was this interpretation of beauty that defined and produced the art of 1968. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate

The purpose of this project was to prepare a script for group interpretation based upon the theme of "alienation" as it occurs in selected works of contemporary American poets. The script was produced for an audience on the North Texas State University campus under the direction of the writer. The thesis includes the script, a discussion of the process of adaptation, and an evaluation of the production. The evaluation is based, in part upon the written critiques of four expert guest critics.

Luis Cernuda (1902-1963) was exiled from Spain in 1938 due to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. He lived in Great Britain, America and Mexico and he never returned to his homeland. Until the mid-1960s, he was considered by the Spanish literary establishment to be an evasive and astringent poet. Since then, critics have recognised and praised the ethical quality and nature of his work and he is now considered to be one of the most profound and influential Spanish poets of the twentieth century. Despite the growing body of critical work on Cernuda, the salient role played by memory in his poetry has received little sustained critical attention. Critics have tended to stress the nostalgic and the evasive rather than the ethical and contemplative role played by memory in his work both before and after his departure from Spain. The objective of this thesis is to provide a more balanced view of the poet’s use of memory in his early and mature poetry. Rather than limiting his concept of memory to nostalgia for his youth or his homeland, it argues that he deploys memory as an instrument of self-analysis, self-discovery and self-criticism. The first chapter concentrates on his pre-exilic poetry in order to show that memory plays a fundamental role in his poetics prior to the experience of physical exile. The central body of the thesis examines the increasingly analytical and philosophical role played by memory in a selection of his mature prose and verse texts written outwith Spain.

published_or_final_version / Asian Studies / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

The American Projectivist verse of Jack Spicer, Charles Olson, and Robert Duncan contains within its poetics many epistemological assumptions shared by quantum physics. These assumptions exist in three broad categories: perception, process, and wholeness. In physics, the epistemology of perception has been profoundly altered by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Relation, which creates a symbiotic relationship between the observer and the observed. At least one photon of light is necessary to observe an electron; one photon is sufficient to alter the electron's momentum or position; therefore, a physicist affects an electron's "fate" in the act of observing it. Similarly, in Projectivist poetics, the perceptions of the reader are often enlisted to help "compose" the poem which is offered to him in "pieces," or, as in Robert Duncan's poetry especially, in self-reflexive segments. By "self-reflexive," we further mean that the Projectivist poem often "mirrors itself" as an electron "mirrors itself" as wave or as particle, while it is paradoxically both. A Projectivist poem may pause halfway through and "unravel" itself, i.e., study its own etymology. The reader thus must participate in "putting the poem back together," as the physicist participates in the phenomena he observes. The second epistemological model in physics and poetry stresses becoming, rather than being. Matter at the subatomic level has been defined as energy-in-flux. Similarly, the Projectivist poems of Charles Olson especially often exist as "fields" with no syntactical beginnings or endings. Moreover, the "I" of the Maximus Poems is often seen in a perpetual process of becoming the world of spacetime in the poems, creating a system similar to the being-and-becoming model of particle-and-field in quantum mechanics. Third, wholeness is a premise governing poetry and physics separately and together. Jack Spicer's thematics blend matter and consciousness, as "love and death matter/Matter as wave and particle." Similarly, Robert Duncan's poetics describes a "dancing organization between personal and cosmic identity." In physics, wholeness is seen primarily in an "implicate order" which attempts to overturn the old paradigms of fragmentation and connect matter and consciousness, including language, as interrelated systems of information.

This dissertation comprises two parts: Part I, which discusses use of second person pronoun in contemporary American poetry; and Part II, The Museum of Coming Apart, which is a collection of poems. As confessional verse became a dominant mode in American poetry in the late 1950s and early 60s, so too did the use of the first-person pronoun. Due in part to the excesses of later confessionalism, however, many contemporary poets hesitate to use first person for fear that their work might be read as autobiography. The poetry of the 1990s and early 2000s has thus been characterized by distance, dissociation, and fracture as poets attempt to remove themselves from the overtly emotional and intimate style of the confessionals. However, other contemporary poets have sought to straddle the line between the earnestness and linearity of confessionalism and the intellectually playful yet emotionally detached poetry of the moment. One method for striking this balance is to employ the second person pronoun. Because "you" in English is ambiguous, it allows the poet to toy with the level of distance in a poem and create evolving relationships between the speaker and reader. Through the analysis of poems by C. Dale Young, Paul Guest, Richard Hugo, Nick Flynn, Carrie St. George Comer, and Moira Egan, this essay examines five common ways second person is employed in contemporary American poetry-the use of "you" in reference to a specific individual, the epistolary form, the direct address to the reader, the imperative voice, and the use of "you" as a substitute for "I"-and the ways that the second-person pronoun allows these poems to take the best of both the confessional and dissociative modes.

This study examines Basil Bunting's development as a poet from his meeting with Ezra Pound in Paris in 1923, through his collaborations with Pound, Louis Zukofsky, and other members of the Objectivist circle in the 1930s, up to his meeting with Allen Ginsberg and Tom Pickard in 1960s Britain against a backdrop of social activism and modernist revival. In particular, it seeks to query the critical commonplace that Bunting was a sceptic interested solely in the autotelic form of poetry, and to argue that his revival at the time of the long poem Briggflatts in the sixties should be read historically - as a case study that shows the Poundian tradition of praxis and orality acquiring a newly communitarian, leftist emphasis in the context of post-war Anglo-American poetry. The study draws extensively on unpublished manuscripts and letters held at the Basil Bunting Archive, Durham University, the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas (Austin), and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

University of Macau / Faculty of Arts and Humanities. / Department of Chinese Language and Literature