The present work explores the presence of Andean textile imagery in the poetry and the visual art of Jorge Eduardo Eielson and Cecilia Vicuña with the goal of illustrating how these woven aesthetics enrich the content of the written word and other artistic media by supplementing them with non-verbal, visual and tactile planes of meaning. Through the discourse of the thread, Eielson and Vicuña generate an alternative means of expression that dialogues with the conventionality of human language, the creation of cultural memory and the connection between intercultural groups. To prove this thesis, I approach the authors’ poetry and visual art based on theoretical and cultural studies regarding the materiality and the visuality of the text and other media in combination with a comparative analysis of the structural and the design properties of Andean and indigenous cloth products, namely the tejido and the khipu. In addition to close readings of poems that illustrate how the presence of the textile augments the meaning of the written text, I also illustrate how Andean weaving aesthetics provide the metaphorical springboard of comparison upon which a critical analysis of their visual art is based. / text

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This dissertation demonstrates how poetry about Appalachia expanded American considerations of democracy, ethnicity, and cultural values. I argue that poetry is profoundly communal in its construction and investigate how the value of poetry changes based upon its transfer through varying networks of production, circulation, and reception. Informed by theories of cultural capital and rhetoric, the chapters trace three books of poetry from their composition and publication to their reception and influence, noting how central political and social institutions and individuals shaped that process. The dissertation establishes how the poets crafted their writing to sway specific interpretive communities attitudes on pluralism. In Hounds on the Mountain (Viking, 1937), James Still sang about the erosion of the quiet earth for the liberal, middleclass readers of The Atlantic. In U. S. 1 (CoviciFriede, 1938), Muriel Rukeyser wrote about the deaths of migrant and African-American miners, the Spanish Civil War, and the threat of fascism for popular-front readers of The New Republic, Poetry, and the New Masses. In Clods of Southern Earth (Boni and Gaer, 1946), Don West catalyzed resistance in an interracial readership of southern (and mountain) sharecroppers and factory workers. In each case, the complex interrelations between history, authors, and readers show their mutually transformative effects on pluralism. Within American pluralism from1900 to 1948, my work reveals the vital relations between established ethnicitiesAfrican-American, Jewish, Anglo, American Indian, and Southernand Appalachia. My account follows the concrete connections of pluralism from Plessy vs. Fergusons judicial theory of racial purity, through a cultural pluralism based on national origins during WWI, to the Harlem Renaissance, and ends with an examination of regional pluralism in the 1930s. Appalachia was then often understood as preserving remnants of a premodern America, and the authors about whom I write used it to authenticate the values of community, which they felt to be endangered by the threats of modern dissociation, industrial exploitation, and fascist culture. Through close readings of poems in the three books, I establish Appalachias role in the discourse of modern American pluralismthe poetics of region and race.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2003. / Adviser: Linda Bamber. Submitted to the Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 246-251). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Auburn University, 2007. / Abstract. Includes bibliographic references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Eastern Illinois University, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 97-101).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Auburn University, 2007. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 29-244).

Thesis (M.A.)--Wake Forest University. Dept. of Liberal Studies, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 62-65)

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2008. / Title from title screen (site viewed July 22, 2008). PDF text: iv, 76 p. ; 617 K. UMI publication number: AAT 3295234. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in microfilm and microfiche formats.