Student Number : 0303239 - MA research report - School of English - Faculty of Humanities / This component comprises a volume of ekphrastic poems followed by a theoretical postscript. The poems were influenced either by individual works of art or by a particular artist’s work in general. The postscript examines the nature of ekphrasis. It also discusses the connection between my poems and the artworks that inspired them relating this to existing ekphrastic theory and to my writing process. The poems appear in a separate collection followed by reproductions of the relevant works.

Manuel Machado is known as one of the most innovative Spanish modernist poets of the twentieth century. Despite his recognition as a literary figure in Spain, the mimetic descriptions in Machado's poetics are interpreted as mere innovations in Spanish poetry. Those mimetic descriptions are examples of ekphrasis in Spanish literature. Ekphrasis is both a literary and representational art. The mimetic dimension in Machado's poetry is ignored or misinterpreted by the critics of his poetics. This study written in Spanish investigates the use of ekphrasis in terms of Machado's poetic style. An analysis of Manuel Machado's ekphrastic poems will determine: ekphrastic poetry is a representational art; how visual and acoustic aspects of Machado's poems create enargeia; and the manifestation of ekphrasis in Spanish verse. In using Machado's poems, this project will contribute to future explorations of ekphrasis in Spanish literature.

This collection of poetry explores the intersection of elegy and ekphrasis. The poems contemplate and take inspiration from a range of painters and artists, often as a way of thinking about themes of invention, technology, and both father/son and teacher/student relationships.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 242-253).

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RI, Brown Univ., Diss.--Providence. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [283] - 296) and index.

This thesis is an inquiry into the creative processes of poetry and poetic expression in documentary. The practice-based element is a 60 minute video about a poet living in Exeter, UK, called James Turner. The documentary is entitled, The Knotweed Factor. This written element of the thesis contextualises the investigation as a discourse on blindness and visual impairment. There are few representations of blindness and/or visual impairment (VI) in The Knotweed Factor. Rather, the documentary is concerned with how visual information (e.g., filming a poet) is translated non-visually (e.g., the sound of the poem being recited). It also addresses the issue of how the non-visual is translated into the visual. I argue in this text that blindness/VI is marginalised in visual studies/culture. This is unfortunate because blindness/VI studies provides valuable context for understanding the dynamics of sound and vision in creative media, which is a central concern of The Knotweed Factor. The rationale for taking this approach is as follows: During the editing, it was noticed that Turner (who is sighted) provides a kind of unprompted audio description (AD) of events in his environment to the audience, as if he is participating in a radio documentary. This raised questions, not only about the ekphrastic possibilities of his technique, but also about the potential to contextualise such scenes as a disquisition on blindness/VI. Blindness/VI is an important and under-theorised element of visual studies/culture (VS/C). Many films, plays, animations, documentaries, and television programmes are audio described. AD enables the blind/visually impaired (also VI) to comprehend and enjoy visual action. It is suggested here that AD theory is an insufficient model for critically reflecting on the creative processes in The Knotweed Factor. This is because the field is presently more concerned with practicability than with aesthetics. It seemed more helpful to address the broader question of how blindness/VI is positioned in VS/C. Doing so has highlighted instances of exclusion and marginalisation in VS/C. In the course of the video production, it was discovered that the interaction of dreams, memories, and ideas (the mindscape) informs the temporal creative process. Most analytical models within VS/C (e.g., Deleuze) offer a dialectical approach to understanding creativity. Henri Bergson, however, proposes a theory of multiplicity, which considers the interplay of phenomenological creativity of the mindscape as a homogenous, multifaceted process, in place of a dialectical one. Martha Blassnigg interrogates Bergson’s responses to audiovisual media and argues that Bergson’s multiplicity formula is more useful for understanding these processes, both for artist and audience. Blassnigg interprets Bergson’s theory as a universality of idea communication. This thesis considers what the universality of audiovisual experience implies for blindness/VI studies. It does so by contextualising the written research as a discourse on VS/C. In The Knotweed Factor, the emotions, sounds, and visual ideas, memories, and dreams which inform James Turner’s creativity are conveyed to the audience in two ways: 1) By sound (Turner’s recitations, interviews, and conversations), and 2) by the documentary’s abstracted audiovisualisations of Turner’s poetry and mindscape. For Turner, the ‘image’ is a personalised, innate phenomenon. It is ephemeral, intangible imagination. Turner’s experience (audiovisualised in The Knotweed Factor) is compared in this written part of the thesis to pre-Socratic ideations of image-making. It is argued that for many cultures, the image was (and for some remains) an emanation of spirit or idea. In other words, the image was considered a transcendent force, and the ‘soul’ of the image eternal and universal. This transcendence is considered in this written element of the thesis as a bridge between the present academic gap in the fields of blindness/VI studies and visual studies/culture. In this text, The Knotweed Factor serves as a case-study to test how non- and minimal-visual elements of audiovisual art and media are positioned in VS/C. Constructed here is a history of the interpretation of blindness and the image, from pre-Socratic aesthetics to the Enlightenment, where ideas concerning the phenomenology of blindness and visual impairment were transformed into epistemological inquiries. This approach enables the researcher to reflect critically on the aesthetics of The Knotweed Factor, using the framework of the non-visual (in this case recited poetry) to test and interrogate the visual (i.e., ‘poetically’ visualised poetry).

Holography is a form of 3D imaging. Its practice spans the disciplines of science and art. My original contribution to knowledge is in making a claim for holography as a new context for writing ekphrastic poetry which most usually refers to poetry written in dialogue with the visual. The scholarship of ekphrasis cites examples of poems written in response to painting, sculpture, photography and film but not to holography. This is practice-led research and my collection of poetry Equinoctial arising from it derives its structure, and the linguistic and formal properties of its poems, from a process of holographic enquiry arising from processes of holography and the properties of holograms. Furthermore, I construe this holographic enquiry as a form of ekphrastic enquiry. My primary sources for ekphrastic dialogues are the holopoetry and theories of holopoetry of Brazilian artist and poet, Eduardo Kac; the essay: ‘Stopping Time: Harrison’s Holograms’, and holograms of John Harrison’s timekeeper, ‘H4’ by Martin Richardson; the essays in The Aerial Letter and the novel, Picture Theory by French-Canadian writer, Nicole Brossard. For Brossard, the hologram is a trope associated with liberatory and visionary feminist reading and writing practices. The scholarship of ekphrasis revels its gendered nature which I go on to scrutinize via the various lenses of my primary sources. In order to consolidate my positioning as a feminist researcher, I develop the methodology, ‘flâneuserie’ from poetry and poetics by women poets and scholars which describes an agency-making approach to bringing together the creative and critical components of a practice-led thesis in creative writing in a poetics I come to describe as ‘holopoetics’. I conclude by upholding holography as a technology of perception that emphasises the position of the viewer or reader in relation to artwork and poem, and, in doing so offers multiple perspectives and possibilities of interpretation. Throughout, I emphasise the significance of my study as an example of concept-driven practice-led research in creative-writing which upholds a claim for poetry as new knowledge.

This thesis explores the way Willa Cather’s writing parallels visual art’s tenebrism – a dramatic way of illuminating a single person, object or idea by juxtaposing light against dark. Throughout her career, Cather uses this technique to convey truths relating to self realization, aestheticism, spirituality, and social awakening.

My dissertation focuses on nineteenth-century American literature texts that engage with ruins and monuments. Traditionally, this interaction has been treated as a formal curiosity for literary critics, but this project argues interarts literature carries important implications for public sphere theory, especially in cases when an author writes about nationalist architecture and iconography.