This thesis intervenes in current critical debates about space, place and landscape in late-twentieth and twenty-first century British and Irish poetry, by examining models of excavation in selected work by Geoffrey Hill, Ciaran Carson, Geraldine Monk and Alice Oswald. It argues that the influence of the spatial turn on literary criticism over the last thirty years has led to the deployment of a limited set of spatial tropes as analytical tools for interpreting the spaces and places of poetry. By deploying excavation as a critical method it seeks to challenge existing approaches that tend to privilege ideas of space over time, and socio-spatial practices over literary traditions of writing place. In doing so it develops a new model for reading contemporary poetries of place that asserts the importance of locating spatial criticism within temporal and literary-historical frameworks. The four poets examined in the thesis exhibit a common concern with unearthing the strata of language as well as material space. Starting from a premise that excavation always works over the ground of language as well as landscape it investigates the literary traditions of landscape writing in which each of these poets might be said to be embedded. After surveying the critical field the thesis sets out four principles of excavation that it argues are transformed and renewed by each of these poets: the relationship between past and present; recovery and interpretation of finds; processes of unearthing; exhumation of the dead. The subsequent chapters contend that these conventions are put into question by Geoffrey Hill’s sedimentary poetics, Ciaran Carson’s parodic stratigraphy, Geraldine Monk’s collaborations with the dead, and Alice Oswald’s geomorphology of a self-excavating earth. The critical method that underpins the discussion in each of the chapters is also excavatory in that it unearths both the historical and literary strata of specific sites (the Midlands, Belfast, East Lancashire, Dartmoor and the Severn estuary) and resonances in the work of earlier poetic excavators (Paul Celan, Edward Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, Dante Alighieri and Homer). Through careful exegesis of these poets and their precursors this thesis demonstrates that by transforming existing forms of excavation, contemporary poetry is able to renew its deep dialogue with place and literary history.

abstract: ABSTRACT Understanding complex and adaptive socio-ecological systems (SES) to deal with our most challenging and overlapping problems such as global climate change, biodiversity loss, and rising consumption rates requires sustainability theory that is commensurate with these problems’ size and complexity. The received United Nations-based sustainability framework aims to achieve a balance among three pillars—economics, environment, and social equity—for today and for future generations. Yet, despite applying this sustainability framework for over a quarter of a century, the Earth is less sustainable, not more. Theoretical trade-offs between environmental conservation and economic growth have often reinforced business-as-usual practices and educational paradigms, and emphasized economic values over ecological limits. How can the principles of foundational naturalists help clarify, enhance, and advance sustainability discourse? I propose that the principles of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Aldo Leopold (1887-1948), Rachel Carson (1907-1964), and Edward O. Wilson (1927-), express a worldview that captures and integrates a range and depth of historical, normative, economic, ecological, scientific, and social values for a viable and applicable discourse of sustainability. This analytical study relies on (i.) textual analysis and interpretation of four key naturalists and humanists, (ii.) analysis of secondary sources that illuminate their proto- ecological and sustainability principles, and (iii.) interviews with leading sustainability scholars. Because these thinkers integrate science and ethics, natural history and philosophy, ecology and society, and environmental and economic problems within a holistic worldview, I call them systems naturalists. Their transdisciplinary worldview of one holistic system, with economics subordinated to environmental limits, links important values from the natural sciences and the humanities. The writings and examples of systems naturalists provide more robust historical sustainability principles that can help solve our most challenging SES problems by synthesizing a broad range of knowledge in the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities to inform sustainability paradigm, practices, and pedagogy. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Sustainability 2015

This thesis uses four works by the contemporary Canadian poet Anne Carson (born 1950) to argue that it is in the embracing of failure and difficulty that modern poetics may negotiate formal erosion and the limits of language. The introduction addresses Carson’s divisive reputation, and uses two separate criticisms of her poetic skill to delineate her liminal position in the modern poetic landscape, and therefore demonstrate her potential as a valuable framework for discussing innovative form. Via an examination of the criticisms of Robert Potts and David Solway, I argue that Carson is neither high priestess of postmodernism nor a collagist of poorly produced forms. This illuminates two points: one, that she occupies a space outside several modern ideologies of poetic authenticity, expression and form, and two, that this position can be effectively used to interrogate those ideologies and investigate new possibilities for poetic creativity. In Chapter 1, Nox, Carson’s elegy for her brother Michael, is argued to experiment with traditional elegy form – but not in a mode that wholly follows Jahan Ramazani’s famous framing of 20th century elegy form as traumatically fractured. Nox is shown not to be merely subversive, but also interrogative of its own formal tradition, embracing the inherent contradiction within elegy: that absence could be rendered as presence, that a living, flawed language could make the dead speak. From this contradiction, I argue, Nox creates a solution: it occupies a position of formal non-forming, a return to the state of poesis, refusing to emerge as a completed poem or retreat into fragmentation but instead occupying a liminal space of continual creation. In the second chapter, this preoccupation with elegy’s paradox is shown to be part of a greater theme within Carson’s work. The failures of language in Carson are elucidated with reference to the sceptical 19th-century theorist Fritz Mauthner. Mauthner is argued to be the best theorist for the thesis’s framework because of his belief in the possibilities of language’s resurrection as a valid communicative medium. Through three texts, “By Chance The Cycladic People”, The Glass Essay and Just For The Thrill, Carson’s interrogation of this hope is shown to produce creativity from difficulty, creating monstrous form-combinations to render the silence beyond language’s limits as poetically productive. Carson’s texts, in their struggle with failure and their obsessive doubt, can be used to construct several means of negotiating the limits of form and the inherent fallibility of language. The conflict between the drive for authentic expression and the perceived failure of expressive mediums is one of the defining features of both Carson’s work and modern poetry in general. However, it is by inhabiting and challenging the fraught areas at the edge of meaning that poetry of the 21st century can, in the words of Carson’s influence Samuel Beckett, try again, fail again, fail better. Synopsis: The Traitor’s Symphony is an experimental novel in three voices, set in an unspecified totalitarian state known only as the Regime at some point in the twentieth century. It follows the career of David, a young composer who rises from tortured outcast to celebrated Regime talent through scheming, moral ambiguity, and a deal with the Professor, a translator and populist radio pundit. David trades the sexual attentions of Dion, a beautiful but brain-damaged boy, for the Professor’s help in rising through the ranks of the Regime’s musical system. The voices of the Professor and his doctor wife Anne, who have just lost their newborn son, alternate with David’s as the bargain binds them together in disaster. The narrative is inspired by the lives of collaborationist composers in various 20th century states, including Dmitri Shostakovich and Carl Orff, but is not focussed on any one figure. Instead, it takes various elements of their experience - the state apparatus of approval, the minute observation of ‘doctrine’ in musical content, and the humiliation and blacklisting of composers who did not produce acceptable content - as the starting point for a narrative exploring the complex relationship between art, artists and the modern totalitarian state. Research in this area was shaped by Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise: listening to the twentieth century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) and the work of Michael Kater, most notably Composers of the Nazi era: eight portraits (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), and supplemented by archival work in the Stasimuseum and Bundesbeauftragten in Berlin. More broadly, the novel focusses on the difficulties of grief, love and survival in totalitarian environments. Its setting, the Regime, was created by combining elements of daily life under the Stalinist Terror, The Democratic Republic Of North Korea, and Nazi and Stasi Germany, drawing on sources including Anna Akhmatova’s poetry and Chol-Hwan Kang’s The Aquariums Of Pyongyang (New York: Basic Books, 2001). The Regime’s embedded paranoia, hyper-vigilance, rigorous propaganda, regulated femininity, cult-like leader worship and brutal reprisal for non-conforming citizens are constructed from these historical precedents. Each of the three voices is stylised as a poetic form, as a method of expressing the repression of the individual and the culture of fear in the Regime’s system. This formal dimension draws on modernist literature in its use of language as expression of identity, but also on Wittgensteinian doubt that true communication could ever exist between such personal webs of meaning. Both David and Anne must actively suppress their private pain, he the agony of torture and burden of being labelled a traitor, she the disorienting grief of her son’s death and the loss of her husband’s love. Their inner emotional states are reflected in the forms of their vocals: David’s fractured voice, with its distressed percussive rhythm, is the voice of a musician physically and mentally smashed, while Anne’s blank, frantic segments express the dislocation of her foreignness and the gulf that grief has created in her marriage. The Professor, in contrast, begins the novel in supreme command of language, with brief breaks into sensual chaos as the only manifestation of his hidden mourning. The vocal shifts reflect and form the narrative progression.

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The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter thrust Carson McCullers onto the literary scene at the age of 23. The year was 1940, and anticapitalistic fervor was at its peak. McCullers, familiar with the writings of Karl Marx, expresses in this novel her concern for the exploited classes, her disdain for a materialistic society that keeps the masses oppressed, and her conviction that societal reform was desperately needed. Marxist theory is evident in every aspect of this novel, from the characters to the setting. Alienation, failure to communicate, poverty, and an atmosphere of despair permeate the work. A product of the Great Depression era, McCullers was familiar with poverty; like many other intellectuals of the time, she embraced Marxism for its commitment to rid the world of this evil. This novel, arguably her finest, displays the influence that Marxist philosophy had on McCullers’s perception of society.

Environmental rhetoric has the capacity to render private citizens a concerned public. In doing so, it can prompt in individual practices of what, in classical rhetoric, was described as civic virtue and engage them in activities of responsible citizenship that work toward practical change. Within the recent tradition of environmental public discourse in the United States, Rachel Carson and Al Gore have each realized this capacity in their use of environmental rhetoric, by addressing, respectively, the issues of pesticide pollution and global warming in ways that galvanized citizens as an active public. This thesis examines the reasons behind this effectiveness. It asserts that both Carson and Gore employed a modernized epideictic as a rhetorical tool through which on the one hand, enabled them to invoke the shared values and associated emotions that have the capacity to bind citizens together in common cause, and on the other hand, to convey their own ethical character as civic speakers worthy of trust and emulation. My project in this thesis is to comprehensively track the process of arousing those political emotions and character in the writings of Rachel Carson and Al Gore, both of whom entered the public discourse in moments of environmental crises.

Ce mémoire porte sur la représentation littéraire de la honte entrevue comme un affect productif et étroitement lié à l’identité queer. Cette interprétation de la honte s’appuie sur la recherche d’Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick qui suggère que l’affect inaugure un pouvoir inextinguible de transformation. Il devient ainsi possible d’appréhender l’articulation entre la honte et l’identité, l’intime et le social, la répression et l’expression dans le roman Autobiography of Red (1998) d’Anne Carson et les recueils de poésie The Dream of a Common Language (1978) et A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981) d’Adrienne Rich. Dans le roman, le protagoniste Geryon, un monstre queer inspiré d’un mythe grec ancien, tente de saisir la signification de son existence dans le monde. Au fil du récit, il construit son « autobiographie » pour mieux façonner son identité. Son apparence monstrueuse empreinte d’affects et une relation amoureuse queer se trouvent au cœur de sa production artistique. En ce qui a trait aux recueils de poésie, Rich projette de créer un langage commun pour enfin représenter les femmes (lesbiennes). Elle promet de leur bâtir un espace affectif en réécrivant l’histoire lesbienne par le biais de sa poésie. Celle-ci permet d’éclaircir le lien entre la honte et l’identité ainsi que d’énoncer les possibilités politiques que cette relation provoque. Ce mémoire développe donc deux manifestations distinctes de la honte chez le sujet queer. D’un côté, il étudie son expérience hautement intime et personnelle, enchevêtrée dans le processus de la constitution de soi. De l’autre, il analyse la façon dont le traitement de la honte par Rich conduit à la création, autant artistique que politique. / This master’s thesis engages with the literary representation of shame as a productive affect that is closely tied to queer identity. This interpretation of shame draws on the research of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who argues that this affect inaugurates the place of identity and “a near-inexhaustible source of transformational energy.” In doing so, it enables a comprehension of the nexus between shame and identity, the intimate and the social, repression and expression in Anne Carson’s novel Autobiography of Red (1998) and Adrienne Rich’s poetry collections The Dream of a Common Language (1978) and A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981). In the novel, the protagonist Geryon, a queer monster derived from an ancient Greek myth, attempts to grasp the meaning of his existence in the world. As the story unfolds, he constructs his “autobiography” to better construct his identity. His monstrous appearance, marked by affect, and a queer love story are at the heart of his artistic production. Concerning the poetry collections, Rich launches the project of creating a common language to at last represent (lesbian) women. She vows to shape an affective space for them by rewriting history through her poetry. It allows us to clarify the connection between shame and lesbian identity, and articulate the political possibilities that this relationship provokes. This master’s thesis therefore develops two distinct manifestations of shame within the queer subject. On the one hand, it examines the highly intimate and personal experience of shame as it is entangled in the process of self-constitution. On the other, it analyzes the ways in which Rich’s treatment of shame leads to sociability and to creation, both artistic and political.

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Les structures maçonnées sont largement connues en génie civil comme constituant d’une partie des bâtiments, mais également en tant que garnissages réfractaires dans des structures utilisées à hautes températures, par exemple en sidérurgie. Malheureusement, les outils actuels ne sont pas suffisamment puissants pour prédire le comportement de ces structures avec l’apparition de fissures et pour tenir compte du comportement non linéaire d’un des deux constituants (le mortier par exemple). Ce travail de thèse contribue à la modélisation multi-échelles des maçonneries classiques et des garnissages réfractaires avec un faible coût numérique grâce à la technique d’homogénéisation périodique. Les techniques de modélisation et de simulation du comportement des maçonneries sont présentées et développées. L’influence des lois d’interface entre briques et mortier, des paramètres géométriques et matériels, ainsi que de la densité des fissures sur le comportement effectif des maçonneries est étudié. Trois approches (une extension analytique de Cecchi et Tralli, une approche numérique et un modèle micromécanique) sont proposées pour la détermination du comportement effectif d’une cellule périodique dans le cas de maçonneries avec mortier viscoélastique microfissuré et briques saines élastiques ou rigides. Les résultats des calculs sur deux exemples de maçonneries (1D et 2D) ont confirmé que l’approche multi-échelle est une solution appropriée avec une grande capacité à exprimer le comportement des maçonneries viscoélastiques microfissurées. Ce travail, limité au cas sans propagation de fissures, peut être étendu aux mortiers à comportement viscoplastique. / Masonry structures are widely used in civil engineering as part of buildings or in refractory linings of structures working at high temperatures, like in steel industry. Unfortunately, the present tools are not powerful enough to predict the behavior of these structures at their micro-cracked state and/or if one of their constituents behaves nonlinearly (e.g. the mortar). This research contributes to the multi-level modeling of classical masonries and refractory linings with a low numerical cost using basically the periodic homogenization technique. Modeling and simulation techniques of masonry behavior are presented and developped. The influence of interface law between bricks and mortar, of geometrical and material parameters, and of crack density on the effective masonry behavior is studied. Three approaches (analytical extension of Cecchi and Tralli, numerical approach and micromechanical modeling) were proposed to determine the effective behavior of a periodic masonry cell with micro-cracked viscoelastic mortar and safe elastic or rigid bricks. The results obtained on two examples of masonry (1D and 2D) confirmed that the multi-scale approach is a suitable solution with a great ability to model the effective behavior of microcracked viscoelastic masonry. This work, actually limited to the case without crack propagation, could be extended to mortars with viscoplastic behavior.