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

H.D.'s autobiographical novel HERmione is phenomenological in texture. It portrays both sides of a dynamic process: the individual "creates" the world by adjusting a "psychic lens," projecting a mental space in which objects can appear; yet at the same time, the world imposes itself on the sensing subject. The framework within which this dynamic process occurs is the body; as the novel portrays, the body is the site of juxtapositions and transformations as it comes into contact with the world. In this article, I discuss the ways in which H.D. explores the boundaries and intersections between the human body and the world around it. I will draw on several influential feminist critiques of the novel, exploring how these critiques illuminate the social and sexual forces at work behind Hermione's experiences, and I will in turn introduce phenomenological theory to expand upon the prevailing critical view of the novel. I assert that Hermione's body is both the setting and the subject of HERmione. Even as she is objectified by both specific individuals and by the social forces at work in her world, her body reacts in unique ways to counteract this tendency. Her body transforms, and her perceptions blur the lines between subject and object, person and thing. As Hermione begins to develop an understanding of the way she encounters the world, she also develops the ability to act within it. Her body becomes prosthetic, encompassing otherness and ultimately allowing her to move beyond the relationships and expectations which threaten to confine her in a solely "decorative" life.

My dissertation examines the correlations between the natural and supernatural, agency and authority, and meaning and language in the work of the modernist American writers H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Djuna Barnes. Using the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, I argue that the different kinds of spectral and otherworldly figures that appear in these works – ghosts, the living dead, divinities, individuals who are also amorphous multiplicities – correlate to the modes of negation of parental imperatives that structure the language-use of their authors. I contrast H.D.‘s and Barnes‘s visions of the relation of language to meaning and the personal to the social using Lacan‘s delineation of the different modes of psychic negation that enable or disable language use: repression, disavowal, and foreclosure. According to this model, H.D.‘s work evidences foreclosure: a mode of thought and language that fails to differentiate words, thoughts, and people from one another. This incapacity endangers the psyche with the hallucinatory return of or haunting by what cannot be symbolized. In contrast, Barnes‘s work suggests disavowal, and her language renders experience in distorted forms. She repudiates power figures and the unspeakable meanings associated with them, but her work portrays the spectral, surreptitious return of these figures and meanings. Writing that witnesses or stages a return to a state of non-difference between symbol and symbolized, as Barnes‘s and H.D.‘s work does, calls for different interpretative and methodological strategies than those usual in literary criticism. To read such work primarily as symbolic communication is to lose perspective on the structures of thought and language that it grapples with. A perspective that is rigorous and radically different from the works‘ own is necessary to produce readings of it that make symbolic ―sense,‖ though it is unable to fully account for experiences that are not conceivable. To this end, I describe ―disorders,‖ types of thought and language that psychoanalysis implicates in interminable human suffering, without drawing conclusions about the range of experiences that might be concurrent with asymbolic or anti-symbolic thought and writing. / Graduate / 2019-08-31 / 0298 / 0591

In the canon of twentieth century American poetry, "long poems" or "anti-epics" or epic poems represent a formidable genre. Defining epic poetry has proved difficult in our modern era, and the possibility that women might write epics is not often considered. This study includes a review of the literature that may define the epic genre and of the literature that contributes to our understanding of a tradition of women's poetry in American literature. The review of both issues--possible epic poetry and women's poetic tradition--is a necessary prerequisite for considering the argument that H.D.'s iielen in Eavpt and Gwendolyn Brooks's In the Mecca are twentieth century epics. With the focus on a female heroine, on personal and interpersonal values, and on a reconsideration of cultural lieroism, these poems are important literary contributions in addition to being "revised" epics.A revision of the epic signifies that the poet has found a way to accomplish individual expression in this familiar genre, a genre characterized by narration, cultural themes that may be didactic, and multiple voices for the poet. H.D. and Brooks have revised the genre of epic poetry in unusual ways. H.D. has taken a legendary figure, Helen of Troy, and made her the primary speaker and the seeker of truth. Instead of the classical glorification of war, Helen's quest includes a renunciation of war and a reconsideration of the ways we know ourselves and our history. Brooks has made an "unknown" black woman the center of her urban epic. Mrs. Sallie's quest, initiated by the real search for a missing daughter, becomes a quest for the meaning of family, community, and selfhood.Revising the genre was a unique process for both H.D. and Brooks, and studying Helen and Mecca together emphasizes the diverse traditions--literary and nonliterary--that may elucidate our understanding of each poem. Moreover, only refers to a "a genre revised" by H.D. and Brooks not only refers to a revision of epic poetry but to poetry as a whole. Each woman created her own blend of "traditions and individual talent" in order to produce Helen in Egypt and In the Mecca. / Department of English

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Studies of women’s experimental narrative in the twentieth century have often been fixed to political interests in the recovery of women’s artistic practices for inclusion in the canons of literary modernism and formal postmodernism. Concurrent trends in philosophy and critical theory, however, propose the interrogation of the limits of subjectivity itself, suggesting that the most provocative assertions about human experience eschew the very categorical delimitations, like gender, on which such recovery projects depend. This dissertation traces the literary investments of women, particularly queer women, whose experiments in life-writing reconfigure the boundaries of human subjects without relinquishing claims to the material or political conditions that shape their lives. “Rough Text” examines writing that queers or complicates autobiography by featuring self-referential protagonists whose lives illustrate the explosive consequences of both gender and genre manipulation. Writing themselves by unfastening themselves textually, temporally, and spatially, these authors do a liberating violence to their own coherence that shakes, and then rethinks, the grounds of their ontologies in ways that offer alternatives to the “psychological squalor” Fredric Jameson describes as the postmodern condition.

Studies of women’s experimental narrative in the twentieth century have often been fixed to political interests in the recovery of women’s artistic practices for inclusion in the canons of literary modernism and formal postmodernism. Concurrent trends in philosophy and critical theory, however, propose the interrogation of the limits of subjectivity itself, suggesting that the most provocative assertions about human experience eschew the very categorical delimitations, like gender, on which such recovery projects depend. This dissertation traces the literary investments of women, particularly queer women, whose experiments in life-writing reconfigure the boundaries of human subjects without relinquishing claims to the material or political conditions that shape their lives. “Rough Text” examines writing that queers or complicates autobiography by featuring self-referential protagonists whose lives illustrate the explosive consequences of both gender and genre manipulation. Writing themselves by unfastening themselves textually, temporally, and spatially, these authors do a liberating violence to their own coherence that shakes, and then rethinks, the grounds of their ontologies in ways that offer alternatives to the “psychological squalor” Fredric Jameson describes as the postmodern condition.

Historically, women have not been "speaking subjects" but "spoken objects" in Western culture--the ground on which male-dominated constructions have been erected. In literature, women have been conventionally held as the silent and silenced other. Lyric poetry especially has idealized not only the entrenched figures of masculine subject/feminine object, but poetry itself as the site of prophecy, vision, Truth. Most dramatically in lyric poetry then, the issue of women as subjects has been collapsed into Woman as object, that figure who has been the sacrifice necessary for the production of lyric "song" and the consolidation of the unified masculine voice. It has thus been difficult for women poets to take up the position of speaking subject, most particularly because of women's problematic relationship to Woman. Recent feminist theorists have explored female subjectivity, how women put into hegemonic discourse "a possible operation of the feminine." This dissertation analyzes that possibility in poetry as exemplified in the works of Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and H.D. I contend that these paradigmatic American poets constitute speaking subjects in their poetry that both figure Woman conventionally and reconfigure it, i.e. subvert the stability of those representations, thereby disturbing our view. I argue that this double identification produces, in effect, a divided or split subjectivity that is enabling for the female speaker. As an alternative to the traditionally specularized figure of Woman then, such a position opens up distinctly counter-hegemonic spaces in which to constitute the female subject, rendering problematic readerly consumption of the image of Woman as a totality. I explore the attempts to represent women's difference differently--the tenuous accession to, rejection of, or play with the lyric "I" in these poets' works. Dickinson, Moore, and H.D. reconfigure Woman and inscribe female speakers as grammatically and rhetorically, but not necessarily visually, present, thereby frustrating patriarchal economies of mastery and possession.

This study situates the literary works of Amy Lowell, Djuna Barnes, H.D., and Gertrude Stein in a genealogy of American modernist war writing by women that disrupts and revises patriarchal war narrative. These authors take ownership of war and war-related trauma as subjects for women writers. Combining the theories of Dominick LaCapra, Judith Butler, Elaine Scarry, and Elizabeth Grosz with close readings of primary texts, I offer feminist analyses that account for trauma and real-world materiality in literary representations of female embodiment in wartime. This framework enables an interdisciplinary discussion that focuses on representations of war and trauma in conjunction with identity politics.I examine Lowell's poetry collection Men, Women and Ghosts (1916), Barnes's novel Nightwood (1936), H.D.'s poem Trilogy (1944-1946), and Stein's novel Mrs. Reynolds (1952). The chapters highlight the progressively feminist and personal ownership of war and trauma embedded in the texts. Lowell and Barnes begin the work of deconstructing gendered binary constructions and inserting women into war narrative, and H.D. and Stein continue this trajectory through cultivation of more pronounced depictions of women and their bodies in war narrative.The strategies are distinct and specific to each author, but there are common characteristics in their literary responses to World War I and World War II. Each author protests war: war is destructive for Lowell, perverse for Barnes, traumatic for H.D., and disruptive for Stein. Additionally, each author renders female bodies as sites of contested identity and as markers of presence in war narrative. The female bodies portrayed are often traumatized and marked by the ravages of war: bodily injury and psychological and emotional distress. H.D. and Stein envision strategies for resolving (if only partially) trauma, but Lowell and Barnes do not.This project recovers alternative war narratives by important American modernist women writers, expands the definition and canon of war literature, contributes new scholarship on works by the selected authors, and constructs an original critical framework. The ramifications of this study are an increased awareness of who was writing about war and the shape that responses to it took in avant-garde literature of the early twentieth century. / Department of English

ix, 267 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / In English literary studies, classical epic poetry is typically regarded as a masculinist genre that imparts and reinforces the values of dominant culture. The Iliad , Odyssey , and Aeneid , after all, were written by men, feature male heroes, and recount the violent events that gave rise to the misogynistic societies of ancient Greece and Rome. Yet, in the twentieth century, women poets have found inspiration for their feminist projects in these ostensibly masculinist poems. The four poets in this study, for example, have drawn from the work of Homer and Virgil to criticize the ways that conventional conceptions of gender identity have impaired both men and women. One might expect, and indeed, most critics argue, that women like H.D., Gwendolyn Brooks, Louise Glück, and Anne Carson invoke their classical predecessors only to reject them and the repressive values that they represent. Close readings of these poets' work, however, demonstrate that, far from dismissing the ancient poems, Helen in Egypt , Annie Allen , Meadowlands , and Autobiography of Red are deeply invested in them, finding in them models for their own social critiques. The work of these four poets emphasizes that the classical epics are not one-dimensional celebrations of violence and traditional masculinity. Indeed, the work of Homer and Virgil expresses anxiety about the misogynistic values of the heroic code to which its warriors adhere, and it urges that war and violence are antithetical to civilized society. In examining the ways that modern women poets have drawn from these facets of the ancient works to condemn the sexism, racism, and heterocentrism of contemporary culture, my dissertation seeks to challenge the characterization of classical epic that prevails in English literary studies and to assert the necessity of understanding the complexity of the ancient texts that inspire modern poets. Taking an intertextual approach, I hope to show that close readings of the classical epics facilitate our understanding of how and why modern women have engaged the work of their ancient predecessors and that this knowledge, in turn, emphasizes that the epic genre is more complex than we have recognized and that its tradition still flourishes. / Committee in charge: Karen Ford, Chairperson, English; Paul Peppis, Member, English; Steven Shankman, Member, English; P. Lowell Bowditch, Outside Member, Classics