<p> This dissertation, &ldquo;Towards a Poetics of I/Eye-Witness: Documentary Expression and Jewish American Poetry of the 1930s,&rdquo; explores the ways in which a lens of witnessing can shed light on the ethical and aesthetic concerns embedded in the work of three Jewish-American poets. The study begins with the English writing and verse of Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) and Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), and continues to the Yiddish poetry of Berish Weinstein (1905-1967). It situates their poetry and ancillary writings from the early thirties within the culture of documentary expression that permeated artistic creation, social action and public discourse throughout the Depression era. By focusing on poetry that deals with human catastrophe, including historical and contemporary contexts of racial injustice, Jewish persecution, personal loss and animal slaughter, my analysis weighs the burden of representation on personal and universal levels. Transcending the visual and moral divide between the &ldquo;eye&rdquo; and the &ldquo;I,&rdquo; the poets in this study use verse to document the memories, experiences, histories and testimonies of Others; in doing so, they uphold their own ethical ideals of reparation, truth and justice. In the prologue, I set the stage for the dissertation by examining the link between lynching photography and Jewish poetry embodied by the famous Jazz song &ldquo;Strange Fruit.&rdquo; The introduction presents the theoretical framework and historical background central to the literary analysis of the dissertation. I offer an overview of the Great Depression and the American documentary scene and demonstrate how the visual and ethical ideas of &ldquo;documentary&rdquo; and &ldquo;witness&rdquo; have been utilized in various contexts. Chapter One builds a case for a Jewish poetics of I/eye-witness in the work of Objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff. I trace the intersections of documentary form, historical consciousness, personal rectitude and justice through a selection of poetic texts and archival materials, including two long works published by The Objectivist Press in 1934, Testimony and In Memoriam: 1933. Chapter Two reflects on the emerging sense of poetic witness in Muriel Rukeyser&rsquo;s early poetry and documentary writing. I locate her ideas about responsibility, utility and truth in her Jewish upbringing and education at the Ethical Culture-Fieldston School. I then offer a comparative reading of the three genres Rukeyser utilized to represent her experiences as a witness to the second Scottsboro Trial: diary entry, reportage and poetry. Chapter Three contributes new translations and an in-depth analysis of a selection of Yiddish poems from Berish Weinstein&rsquo;s first published collection, Brukhvarg (1936). I focus on Weinstein&rsquo;s representation of the slaughterhouse as the symbolic locus of modern suffering, and the relevance of such a trope for the historical barbarism against African Americans, as well as Jews. </p>

<p> La poes&iacute;a de la escritora Rebeca Uribe (1911-1949) pertenece a un corpus literario que requiere ser atendido por la cr&iacute;tica. La presente investigaci&oacute;n tiene como objetivos dar a conocer las composiciones er&oacute;ticas de esta autora mediante el an&aacute;lisis cr&iacute;tico y metodol&oacute;gico, as&iacute; como brindar un primer acercamiento que fomente estudios posteriores. En esta investigaci&oacute;n se propone que los poemas er&oacute;ticos de Rebeca Uribe presentan una voz l&iacute;rica que se entrega totalmente al ser amado con la finalidad de ser correspondida con la misma intensidad, y practica una sexualidad liberada que se manifiesta en la experimentaci&oacute;n de relaciones er&oacute;tico-amorosas de tipo bisexual. Por estas razones, las composiciones sensuales de esta autora se revelan como transgresoras de un discurso patriarcal que en la primera mitad del siglo XX mexicano dictaba c&oacute;mo deb&iacute;a experimentarse la sexualidad femenina y restring&iacute;a su representaci&oacute;n en las obras literarias. </p>

This thesis looks at Edward Dorn s work from his early poems in the late 1950 s to Gunslinger, his mock epic of the American West written between 1968 and 1974. The overall background premise to the present study is that, in this period, Dorn s work develops from a form of lyric, in his early work, to the construction of a multiple and epic consciousness within the four books of Gunslinger. Some critics of Dorn see quite radical shifts within this development, which often leads to a periodizing of Dorn s work. But this thesis argues for a strong continuity that runs alongside these shifts, driven by a consistent anti-capitalism that informs Dorn s writing. Chapter 1 assesses several of Dorn s early poems and finds within the construction of his poetic subject, a tendency to undo and undermine the traditional lyric voice of interiority. Comparisons are made with Frost and Thoreau, and Olson is introduced as Dorn s first and foremost major influence. The poet s dealing with otherness is considered, as are the influence of Whitman and Blake among others, with the aim of placing Dorn in a literary sense, and showing how his poetry continues and subverts various traditions and conventions of poetry, In Chapter 2, examples of Dorn s prose works - short stories, sketches and his autobiographical novel By the Sound (1971) - are explored both in their own terms and as experiential backdrop to the poetry. This section is particularly concerned with Dorn s configuration of poverty in his work and how it is consstructed as a form of American otherness. Chapter 3 s primary concern is with Dorn s treatment of the American West in his 1964 volume Hands Up! Particularly important here is Dorn s undemining of myth, its process of privileging certain stories to the detriment of history, and the West s reliance on capitalism. The second half of this chapter continues these ideas through an assessment of 'The Land Below'. Chapter 4 critiquse Geography (1965) through the influence of Charles Olson and the cultural geographer Carl Otwin Sauer. The first half is concerned with Dorn s push for expansiveness in his poetry and his attempts to achieve, what he calls, a 'condition of the simultaneous.' The second half of the chapter however, locates in this collection, a poetics of melancholy and isolation that is more in keeping with his early work and in tension with his development toward epic. Chapter 5 assesses The North Atlantic Turbine (1967), focusing primarily on the two long poems of the volume, 'The North Atlantic Turbine' and 'Oxford.' This section looks at the further expansion in Dorn s poetics with the collection s global reach, and also considers the introduction of the experimentation with made-up voices. The final chapter on Gunslinger looks first at Dorn s treatment of the first-person pronoun as a continuation of his consistent testing of poetic subjectivity. Also explored, are 'The Cycle' and Dorn s creation of Robart as a monstrous manifestation of capiralism and finally, how the poem utilises the genre of eopc. The goal of the thesis is to explore beneath the presumptions about Dorn s development as a poet and understand how the complexities of such a development are played out within the texts themselves. Also, the aim here is to show how the movement from lyric to epic takes place in Dorn s work by very gentle degrees and is inextricably connected to his anti-capitalist politics.

<p> This dissertation centers its readings of <i>Tender Is the Night, Save Me the Waltz,</i> and <i>The Garden of Eden</i> through the women protagonists&rsquo; voices, a radical critical shift. By considering the evolutionary attempts of Nicole, Alabama, and Catherine, regardless of their ultimate level of success, reifies their autonomy as individuals capable and worthy of development themselves. Examining their use of language, emotions, and actions reasserts their voices as creators of their own narratives, recentering the texts as important explorations of Modern women and their conceptualizing of self on the Riviera. </p><p> This important work of conceptualizing the self as other, outside the normative behaviors and conditions expected of American women of the time, is figured in these stories (as in American culture at large) as mentally unstable, diseased in some way; they make poor decisions and commit regrettable actions; they destroy as much as they create. But by courageously giving voice to their own sense of selves in a world which prizes muteness in its women, their attempts at creation are inspiring nonetheless. </p><p> Chapter One examines F. Scott Fitzgerald&rsquo;s <i>Tender Is the Night</i> and the ways in which Nicole is able to move from the oppression of dehumanizing silence to a powerful and self-affirming fluency of language and selfhood. Chapter Two looks as Zelda Fitzgerald&rsquo;s <i>Save Me the Waltz</i> and Alabama&rsquo;s struggles toward individualization and agency. Chapter Three investigates how Catherine, the transitioning protagonist of Ernest Hemingway&rsquo;s <i>The Garden of Eden,</i> at once acts as a subversive factor against authority and is ultimately scripted as doomed because of it.</p>

<p> This dissertation examines the function of family as a thematic in the contemporary Anglo-American novel. It argues that contemporary aesthetics increasingly presents the family as an enabling platform for conciliation with the social totality: as a space of personal development, readying one for life in the wider social field. This analyses hinges on readings of Jonathan Franzen&rsquo;s <i>Freedom</i> (2010), Zadie Smith&rsquo;s <i> NW</i> (2012), A. M. Homes&rsquo; <i>May We Be Forgiven</i> (2012) and Caryl Phillips&rsquo; <i>In the Falling Snow.</i> In approaching these novels, this project addresses the theoretical lacuna left open by the much-touted retreat of postmodernism as a general cultural-aesthetic strategy. This project identifies these novels as examples of a new and competing ideological constellation: metamodernism. Metamodernism encompasses the widely cited return of sincerity to contemporary aesthetics, though this project explains this development in a novel way: as a cultural expression from within the wider arc of postmodernism itself. One recurrent supposition within this project is that postmodernism, in its seeming nihilism, betrays a thwarted political commitment; on the other hand contemporary metamodern attitudes display the seriousness and earnestness of political causes carried out to an ironic disregard of the political. Metamodernism, in other words, is not a wholesale disavowal of postmodern irony, but a re-arrangement of its function: a move from sincere irony to an ironic sincerity. The central inquiry of this dissertation is into this re-arranged role of family and familial participation amidst this new cultural landscape. My argument is that family and the political have maintained a tense relationship through the twentieth century in the American consciousness. They represent competing models of futurity in a zero-sum game for an individual&rsquo;s life-energy. What metamodernism represents, so this dissertation will articulate, is a new form of anti-politics: a fully gratified impulse to depoliticize. Analyzing what this project terms the &ldquo;politics of the local,&rdquo; this dissertation will argue that the highly popular and successful models of conscientious capitalism have been superseded. Today, increasingly, redemption from consumerism guilt is itself wrapped up in commodities: the utopian impulse celebrated by Fredric Jameson has itself obtained a price tag. The contemporary novel thus reflects new social functions for that which has trumped the political: the family. </p>

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There is no abstract available for this thesis.

Concerned with developments in contemporary innovative fiction Experimental Forms in Contemporary Fiction locates 'post- Modernist' writing largely within a North American context. William Burroughs, Ronald Sukenick, Donald Barthelme, Ishmael Reed, Robert Coover and Steve Katz are identified as the exemplary post-Modernist figures; their favoured techniques --a combination of cancellation and erasure, fragmentation and discontinuity, game and play--express an indeterminancy of meaning which places post-Modernist writing at some distance from the writing of contemporary figures like Vladimir Nabokov, John Hawkes and John Barth, who, as identifiably 'neo- Modernists', are essentially concerned with extending Modernism's restorative and paralleling features into the contemporary literary discourse. At the same time, post- Modernist fiction bears only a passing resemblence to the work of innovative contemporary British writers like B. S. Johnson, Gabriel Josipovici and J. G. Ballard, who are inclined to impose a series of disruptive forms upon mimetic substance. Uniquely post-Modernist fiction celebrates an eternity of displacement by insisting that unity, coherence and system are totalitarian concepts inimicable to the necessary free- lay of the imagination. Therefore, even as Burroughs et al express long-standing American literary concerns, post- Modernist fiction is demonstrably part of the deconstructive shift away from holistic and humanistic ideas and procedures. Post-Modernist writing, therefore, initiates a crisis within literary criticism, one which needs to be examined against the background of contemporary philosophical, cultural, and social developments.