Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:26:51Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2012-01-17Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T19:55:15Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 silva_mm_me_assis.pdf: 1731886 bytes, checksum: 557e963788ffadbf8b223af0ff522930 (MD5) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / Integrado ao projeto romântico de nacionalização da poesia brasileira, Gonçalves Dias (1823 – 1864) desempenhou um papel primordial para o estabelecimento de uma poética nacional. A crítica literária que logo tratou de lhe conferir o título de consolidador da estética nacional, acabou por estabelecer como única possibilidade de leitura para sua poesia o signo da nacionalidade. Sem maiores questionamentos sobre outras possibilidades de reconhecimentos, a mesma crítica tem se furtado a questionar-se sobre a validade do designativo “indianista”, quando o próprio Gonçalves Dias denominou sua poesia de americana. Relendo o processo de nacionalização da literatura brasileira, e a idéia de “cor local” como estratégia de nacionalização, e questionando, sobretudo, os valores que a crítica impôs ao poeta e sua obra, este trabalho elegendo a poesia americana de Gonçalves Dias, como objeto de estudo e reflexão, pretende reler essa parcela da obra do poeta maranhense, tendo como premissa a possibilidade de leitura dela como produto de uma intuição da identidade americana do brasileiro / Inserted in the romantic’s project of Brazilian poetry nationalization, Gonçalves Dias (1823 – 1864) played a fundamental role in the establishment of a national poetry. Literature Criticism quickly gave him the title of consolidator of national aesthetic, which eventually established that the only possibility of reading his poetry is the sign of nationality. Without any more regards about other possibilities of identification, the same criticism has been avoid questioning itself about the validity of the designator “Indianist”, when Gonçalves Dias himself named his poetry as American. Rereading the Brazilian literature’s nationalization process, also the idea of “local colour” as a strategy of nationalization, and, particularly, questioning the critical values imposed to the poet and his work, this dissertation, by electing the American poetry of Gonçalves Dias, as a subject of reflection and study, intend to reread this portion of this Brazilian poet’s work, having as premise the possibility of reading it as a product of one intuition of the Brazilian’s American identity

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This dissertation asks how the physiological conception of the mind promoted by scientific, philosophical and cultural forces since the mid-twentieth century has affected poetic accounts of mental experience. For the cohort of poets I identify here—James Merrill, Robert Creeley, A.R. Ammons, John Ashbery, and Jorie Graham—recognition that fallible, biological mechanisms determine the very structure of human subjectivity causes deep anxiety about how we perceive the world, exercise reason, and produce knowledge. These poets feel caught between the brain sciences’ empirical vision of the mind, which holds the appeal of a fresh and credible vocabulary but often appears reductive, and the literary tradition’s overwhelmingly transcendental vision of the mind, which bears intuitive resonance but also appears increasingly naïve. These poets find aesthetic opportunity in confronting the nature of mind: Merrill takes up forgetting as a central subject, making elegant, entropic monuments out of the distortions and perforations of embodied memory; Ammons and Creeley become captivated by the motion of thinking, and use innovative, dynamic forms to emphasize the temporal and spatial impositions of embodiment upon the motions of thought; Ashbery luxuriates in the representational possibilities of distraction as a structural and thematic principle; Graham identifies the anatomical limits of the visual system with our limits of empathetic perspective, conceiving of her poems as prostheses that can enhance our feeble power to imagine other minds. In a host of significatory practices that reimagine lyric subjectivity in physiological terms, these poets’ ambitious and influential oeuvres reveal the convergence of “raw” and “cooked” post-war poetries in a set of fundamental suppositions about our aptitudes as observers, knowers, and interpreters; this convergence exposes the vestiges of the Romantic mind in modernism’s empowered conception of the poetic imagination. Uniquely equipped to explore meaningful correspondences between physiological and literary form, the contemporary lyric defies the novel’s preeminent position in the study of literary consciousness by demonstrating an enterprising talent for philosophical investigation of the experience of mind.

This dissertation presents an account of fugitivity in poetic form as well as political practice. In this account, fugitivity is an ecological strategy of resistance to enslavement, where ecology describes both the set of relations orchestrated between words on a page and the set of relations between species, including humans, on the plantation. In order to understand fugitivity as an ecological strategy, I examine the mutual imbrication of nascent theories of race and ecology in the long nineteenth century. I thus present two competing theories of race and ecology, each of which carries distinct poetic implications. The first, plantation poetics, is evident in poems written on and about plantations in the second half of the eighteenth-century. These poems, in their rigid poetic structures, reinforce the racial and ecological logics of the plantation, in which hierarchical relations between and within species are inherited from early natural histories, and are used to support both slavery and the monocultural cultivation of the plantation. In contrast to this system, I present a fugitive poetics that, sharing the theory of race and ecology as intertwined systems, turns that theory against the ends of the plantation and toward a poetics premised on shifting, porous relations, rather than hierarchies and containment. In so doing, I link fugitivity to a set of formal strategies that were fully operative in nineteenth-century poetics, ecological thought, and political resistance, and that remain relevant for political, ecological, and poetic thought to this day. Though this project follows a chronological trajectory, its aim is not to present a history of political resistance in the plantation era, nor even a history of poetic form in the nineteenth-century. Instead, it undertakes a strategic analysis of poetic form as necessarily linked to political resistance and to the long history of environmental racism. The first chapter establishes the colonialist poetic tradition I call plantation poetics, tied to maintenance of the ecological enclosure of the plantation. In the work of James Grainger, John Singleton, and Edward Rushton, I argue that the poetic line came to stand in for both the lines of the plantation and the delineation of racial hierarchy so yoked to the natural histories of the eighteenth century. The chapters that follow offer several different models of fugitive poetics, in the work of George Moses Horton and the editors of Freedom’s Journal, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Emily Dickinson, and Albery Allson Whitman. While each of these writers engages with ecology and political domination differently, all of them combine political and ecological investments to create a poetic project that resists the plantation poetics of colonization. The distinct strategies employed by each writer teach us what poetic strategies, and what fugitive practices, are best suited to our current moment of ecological and political crisis.

This survey follows the development of working-class poetry from Whitman to contemporary poets. It begins by considering how the need for working-class poetry emerged. Whitman’s “Song of Myself” sought to democratize poetry both my challenging previous poetic formal conventions and broadening the scope of included subjects. Williams also challenged formal expectations, but both were limited by their historical and socioeconomic position. To combat this, I include the twentieth-century poets Ignatow and Levine who began in the working class so they could speak truths that had not been published before. Ignatow includes the phrase “dream of completion” which encapsulates various feelings of the working class. This dream could include moments of temporary leisure, but also feeling completed by societal acceptance or understanding. Finally, I include the contemporary poets Laux, Addonizio, and Espada. They complicate the “dream of completion” narrative with issues surrounding gender and race, and do not seek to find resolution.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(人間・環境学) / 甲第20474号 / 人博第824号 / 新制||人||197(附属図書館) / 28||人博||824(吉田南総合図書館) / 京都大学大学院人間・環境学研究科共生文明学専攻 / (主査)教授 桂山 康司, 教授 水野 眞理, 准教授 池田 寛子, 教授 長畑 明利 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Human and Environmental Studies / Kyoto University / DGAM

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The origins and ongoing legacies of American Spiritualism in their relations to mainstream religion, science, and politics are by this point well-charted. As a vector between, on one side, esoteric philosophy and diffuse pseudo-scientific and occult disciplines, and, on the other, exoteric mass culture and the 19th century groundswell of popular progressive rhetoric, Spiritualism as a historical phenomenon has in the past decades become more legible than ever as a religious, political, and social movement. Less thoroughly studied, however, is the enormous mass of print culture left behind by Spiritualists. Spiritualist newsletters, journals, and small presses printed vast quantities of written matter, running from the obvious sermons, lectures, and seance transcriptions to Spiritualist novels, Spiritualist hymns, and, in particular, Spiritualist lyric verse. While critics like Helen Sword in Ghostwriting Modernism have begun to approach this archive as literary matter and not merely as the incidental byproduct of the movement, much work remains to be done. In this dissertation I want to draw connections from this mass of widely read, but little remembered, Spiritualist poetry to the late 19th century and early 20th century’s proliferation of occult and metaphysical poetry. In doing so I hope to illuminate the recurring esoteric streak running from high modernism to, in fits and spurts, the present. The crux of this dissertation pursues the trail of breadcrumbs leading from Spiritualist poet-mediums like Achsa Sprague and Lizzie Doten to the mediumistic elements of 20th century poets H.D. and Jack Spicer, before arriving in the conclusion at the 21st century and its fresh proliferation of esoterically inclined medium-poets. I propose that there is a meaningful thread wending from the 1850s to the present, and that this thread can be tracked by taking seriously the claims made by these poets regarding the composition of their verse, no matter how outrageous or unlikely those claims may at first seem. What would it mean to interrogate in earnest the logistics of authorship when a poem is attributed to a ghost? How do Spicer’s extraordinary claims about Martians and angels inflect how we read his body of work? What complications emerge from H.D.’s World War II-era poems of grief and trauma if we grant her the premise that their composition was saturated with the tangible presence of the dead? These allowances-- or at least the agreement to take these writers seriously in their compositional, metaphysical, and aesthetic claims-- reveals intriguing and consistent fissures in the normative understanding of the lyric. While Sprague and Doten, along with other Spiritualist poets, largely sought to write verse recognizable in terms of form and content as “lyric verse,” they began from first principles seemingly dramatically opposed to the received 19th century wisdom regarding what constituted the lyric and how it functioned. By contrasting these poets, who sought to write and publish from a position of authorial multiplicity and supernatural collaboration, with the lyric philosophy of thinkers such as John Stuart Mill, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hegel, and Poe, I hope to demonstrate the theoretical radicalism quietly bubbling away under the sometimes deceptively staid and conventional surface of these poems. I track these fissures as they widen and grow more unruly in their contours, underlying the daring and experimental poetry of H.D. and Spicer, for whom the grounds staked by the category of the “lyric” exist in productive tension and conflict with the desire to complicate, subvert, and sidestep the attending assumptions about subjectivity, audience, and the stability of the figure of the author. By rejecting the Millsian atomism of the writing self, and opening the position of authorship to both supernatural gnosis and abject supplication, these practices of the “mediumistic lyric” offer an apophatic poetics embraced by over a century of poets eager, for one reason or another, to locate alternatives to the model of the lyric subject as persistent, singular, masterful, and solitary. In doing so I propose that it becomes an attractive, durable, and remarkably flexible model for queer writers, writers orienting themselves against the subject of colonialism, and writers otherwise displaced from lyric stability and sovereignty. Chapter One: “Voices From the Other Sphere”: The Poet in Emerson and Sprague: This chapter begins by offering a comparison between two near-contemporary texts with identical titles but drastically different aspirations. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Poet” provided a sturdy blueprint for American Romanticism by drawing on the example of European poets as well as esoteric philosophers contemporaneously in intellectual circulation such as Swedenborg and Boehme. Achsa Sprague’s verse drama “The Poet,” on the other hand, is a full-throatedly Spiritualist didactic narrative, offering amidst its supernatural and allegorical narrative, a domestic plot strikingly attuned to class and gender-based inequalities. I use these two texts as a springboard to begin to delineate the differing trajectories of their respective authors-- Emerson the public intellectual and religious progressive, Sprague a rural school teacher turned radical activist and spirit medium-- as well as the considerable overlap in their essential reference points. Chapter Two: “The Harp-Strings of My Being”: Lizzie Doten and the Phenomenology of Spirits: The next two chapters focus on major Spiritualist woman poets who in quite different ways drew on the mythic figure of Poe as compositional grist, offering two disparate models of how a Spiritualist metaphysics could inform an aesthetic orientation towards imitation, influence, and the knotty category of “originality.” Chapter Four takes up Lizzie Doten, whose 1863 Poems From the Inner Life contains a mix of original poems and poems allegedly dictated by controlling spirits, including Poe. I discuss how imitation functions in these poems, and in particular how the desire to replicate the stylistic and formal tics of well-known authors interacted with the desire to produce didactic religious verse in which the post-mortem reform and uplift of seemingly morally vexed poets like Poe, Burns, and Byron. In this verse, deceased poets were represented as writing not as themselves but as better versions of themselves, creating a rich juxtaposition between the formal challenge of imitation and the didactic demands of poetic content. I also discuss her essay “A Word to the World,” a strikingly thorough prose exposition of what, in her framing, mediumship felt like and how the linguistic output of spirits filtered through the mortal hands of the poet. Chapter Three: Sarah Helen Whitman’s Poe: Performing Spiritualism: This chapter juxtaposes Doten’s explicitly supernatural and metaphysical understanding of imitation with the more socially mediated practice of Sarah Helen Whitman, a poet who maintained a somewhat wider distance between her poetics and her participation in Spiritualist mediumship and seances. A former lover of Poe and one of his primary early literary executors, Whitman’s Spiritualism can be read in the context of her widely circulated “secular” Poe imitations, situating them, after the pattern of Eliza Richards’ Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle, in a social and aesthetic milieu in which mimicry and virtuosic copy-catting was not only expected of woman poets but imposed as a closed formal horizon. I argue that Spiritualism offered an avenue in which female poets could leverage the formal games of imitation so foregrounded in contemporaneous practices of poetic reading and writing towards wider modes of didactic and polemical expression, a method, in other words, of “hijacking” imitation’s limits and turning these assumed voices towards their own ends. Chapter Four: “Why Should We Not, At a Certain Stage, Remember?”: H.D. and the Echoing Other: Here I turn from the 19th century to the 20th, beginning with H.D. and concluding with the Berkeley Renaissance poet Jack Spicer. Chapter four offers a brief overview of H.D.’s history in esoteric and occult research and a survey of her contemporary milieu. It revolves around the 1919 prose work Notes on Thought and Vision, an intense description of an early visionary experience and a sustained exegesis of her thinking, at that time, on the intersection of visionary experience and privileged, quasi-mediumistic states of knowing. I read these texts and other early explorations of these themes as H.D.’s experimental studies on writing the self seemingly overdetermined by socialization and history, as well as on fashioning a generative middle-ground between spiritual supplication and modernist theories of mastery. I then track these motifs through the vision of gnosis described in her later text, the World War II-era The Flowering of the Rood. In short, I propose that H.D. leveraged the language and practices of mediumship as a vehicle for a novel species of autobiographical writing, one which might simultaneously privilege to a heightened degree the phenomenology of knowing, thinking, and perceiving, while offering a vantage point from which to observe the position of selfhood from a distance. Chapter Five: “The Ghost Is a Joke”: Jack Spicer and the Bathos of Outside: Chapter five centers on Jack Spicer and broadly, his mediumistic theory of poetic dictation (what his peer Robin Blaser dubbed his “practice of Outside”) and the playful, punning language of Martians, angels, and ghosts in which he scaffolded it. I argue that for Spicer, “dictation” provides not only a means for him to explore an abject, apophatic queer poetics, but to articulate his sense of longing for a poetics of proximity between the world and the word that was otherwise impossible, repeatedly linking the linguistic communion between poet and received language as a fantasized analogue to the gulf between signifier and signified, desirer and object of desire, and life and death. Chapter Eight introduces the figure of the “Martian” in Spicer’s poems and lectures, along with the models of bodily sovereignty he inherited from his early studies with Kantorowicz, arguing that the loss of physical agency and the absence of semantic meaning are two elements of a broader poetics of absence throughout his career. Conclusion: “A House That Tries to Be Haunted”: The conclusion revisits the arguments of the dissertation as a whole, retracing the line of lyric development and subversion from the 19th century Spiritualists to Spicer, before ending with a brief survey of the continuing diffusion of mediumistic lyric into the 21st century. First I gesture to the mediumistic writing of several 20th century poets not included in this project-- e.g., Robert Duncan, Nathaniel Mackey, Hannah Weiner, and James Merrill-- before describing the influence of mediumistic ideas on contemporary poets such as CA Conrad and Ariana Reines, for whom the occult and metaphysical themes of mediumship are just as important as its potential for lyric modes outside of the discourse of mastery and agential authorship. I thus end by positing this new flourishing of poet mediums as not only a continuation of a long tradition, but as a final example of such mediumship’s position at the intersection of lyrical and vanguard writing practices. / English

A remarkable amount of award-winning contemporary American poetry incorporates nostalgia as a prominent idea discussed. This poetry appears to use nostalgia as means to a greater end. In other words, nostalgia, while a dominant theme within different works, is more a way to treat concepts such as representation and memory, more so than the work being an actual commentary on nostalgia itself. Given the poetry's predominant concept, it seems poets such as Carl Dennis, Natasha Trethewey and Ted Kooser could be representative of a literary historical moment. This moment is one which comments heavily on the past's presence within the present. While each poet's writing is heavily influenced by nostalgia, I posit the theory that these poets are speaking to a greater literary historical moment found in both the literature itself as well as current trends in literary theory. It is not that these poets are writing to a specific theory, rather, their Pulitzer-prize winning poetry is rooted in a trend of yearning for the past. As overt a connection between contemporary poetry's treatment of nostalgia and nostalgia theory itself, little, if any, literary criticism has connected these two. In his essay "Theorizing Nostalgia Isn't What It Used to Be," Paul Grainge contends, "Since the late 1980s, when memory became a topic of concerted critical interest, nostalgia has been taken up in critiques of reactionary conservatism, in accounts of retro phenomena, in relation to the growing memorial tendencies in Europe and America, and as central to particular theories of postmodernism" (20). Grainge continues on to describe two forms nostalgia takes: "mood" and "mode." Similarly, Svetlana Boym suggests nostalgia as either "reflective" or "restorative" (41). This type of current scholarship addressing nostalgia seems to set up a nostalgic reading of texts as more the end game of the literature—the literature is nostalgic. However, if literature then ends as only nostalgic, there seems to be a lack of nostalgic theory's breadth. Dennis, Trethewey and Kooser all address this gap through their poetry—expanding the notion of nostalgia as being more the vehicle leading one through the landscape of memory. Suggesting nostalgia as merely reflective or restorative, as Boym and Grainge have done, seems to create a sense of nostalgia as stagnant rather than as a dynamic movement within the literature, and even the act of recollection itself. The three poets addressed in my project all suggest at some level that this residue of the past can lead one to see that perhaps experience itself delights in memory. Furthermore, nostalgia's dependence upon present memory indicates not just a longing for the past, but rather the past's presence in the present. The act of remembering serves as a type of catalyst which transforms memories to manifestations in present circumstance.

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