The term "Southern Gothic literature" is frequently used in discussions of works of fiction and plays, but poetry is often left out of the conversation. The critical introduction takes into consideration the established definition and traditional elements of Southern Gothic literature as they are applied to fiction and plays in order to find the elements of poetry that constitute the Gothic in American poetry of the South. I discuss the works of Natasha Trethewey and Andrew Hudgins and show how they can be considered modern-day Southern Gothic poets since their poetry contains freakish characters, an obsession with the unchangeable, and violent imagery. Then, I consider how my own work shares with Natasha Trethewey's and Andrew Hudgins's poetry some of these same attributes found in Southern Gothic fiction, thus belonging to the same tradition.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / El aprendizaje de una lengua es considerado algo indispensable. Sin embargo, para aprender cualquier idioma bien, especialmente para estudiantes de herencia en esta era digitalizada, es indispensable no solo perfeccionar las habilidades lingüísticas sino ilustrarse acerca de los orígenes y desarrollo de la cultura hispanoamericana. Para aumentar estas aptitudes ayudan tanto el estudio avanzado de la lengua como la convivencia directa con la comunidad estudiada. Esta tesis propone que ambos pueden producirse a través del estudio de problemáticas específicas planteadas en las obras literarias hispanoamericanas. Insistiendo en este aspecto, se empleará la poesía de la escritora venezolana Natasha Tiniacos, quien ha creado una voz original al adoptar un lenguaje moderno, de cambios de códigos y accesible en la red para compartir su arte y, a la vez, plantear la crisis actual de su país de origen. A lo largo de esta tesis y para probar esta hipótesis, se utilizarán poemas de dos libros de Tiniacos, Mujer a fuego lento (2006) e Historia privada de un etcétera (2016), y se analizará cómo estos proveen herramientas para que los estudiantes de herencia mejoren su competencia lingüística y entendimiento de fenómenos sociales como los descritos en los poemas de Tiniacos.

In placing Joy Harjo and Natasha Trethewey in conversation with each other, my dissertation analyzes - alongside their poetry and prose - monuments, paintings, television, film, photographs, and performance as connected to understanding the impact of historical legacies on lived experiences within the empire of U.S. America. Toni Morrison's concept of recovering the "unwritten interior life" of the slave experience - a life hidden within slave narratives - assists in understanding the historical poetics of Joy Harjo and Natasha Trethewey as artists engaged in similar projects of reclamation. For Harjo this entails shedding a light on the weight of Native American histories for the descendants of survivors while contesting the myths that abound within popular culture regarding Native peoples. Trethewey's work intervenes within the public memory of the nation by centering on the inner-lives of African Americans as well as other people of color, stressing their various gendered and racialized experiences. The gaps within the records that each poet illuminates do not constitute a failure of history, per se, but rather emphasize limitations concerning traditional methodologies of history-writing. In order to further expand on this argument, throughout my work I rely upon certain ideas from 20th century ethical philosopher Emmanuel Levinas regarding our obligations to the past of the Other as well as the potential violence inherent within Western philosophical rhetoric regarding the Other. "Tending to the Past" argues that due to the gaps within the archival records we need multiple ways of approaching our history. The absence within the archives of the "emotional truths" or "interior lives" of historical subjects proves to emphasize the necessity for the poetic interventions of Joy Harjo and Natasha Trethewey.

Three contemporary authors – Suzan-Lori Parks, Natasha Trethewey, and Colson Whitehead – within the African American Literary Tradition explore relationships to history in light of a dominant rhetoric that represents African American history through a white, hegemonic lens. In Parks’ The America Play, Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia, and Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, these authors comment on historical representation through such symbols as iconic figures like Abraham Lincoln, photographs, and elevators as starting points to explore the possibility of an independent space for African American history. Rather than remarking on just the representation of the artifact, however, the authors enter a conversation on how history is remembered and experienced. Parks, Trethewey, and Whitehead each form their own expression on historical representation; in each case, their works address the ability, or inability, to achieve historical intimacy amidst a push back from hegemonic narratives in the public eye. Historical intimacy, as the leading concept of the dissertation, refers to developing a close proximity to history not as a mere representation but as lived experience. Parks sees historical insight developing only through brief moments of intimate contact, if at all. Trethewey imagines personal, even sensual, familiarity with the subjects of her poems as a way of breaking through social frames and learning to connect with the past. Whitehead works through paradoxes to dissolve representational patterns of discourse, like verticality, and reach for a post-rational space wherein both open historical possibility, which stresses self-reflexivity, and a foundation in a “real,” experienced history unlock the opportunity for the construction of an intimate history. Although no author presents historical intimacy as an achieved goal, their works suggest varying degrees of potential and connection.

Ce projet de recherche s’inscrit dans le débat autour du concept de réconciliation entre les peuples autochtones et allochtones au Canada. Terreau fertile depuis la publication du rapport de la Commission de vérité et réconciliation sur les pensionnats autochtones, les discussions sur le sujet dépassent le champ politique et prennent aussi racine dans la littérature. Plusieurs écrivains autochtones ont abordé ce sujet dans leurs œuvres littéraires. Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, connue notamment pour son engagement au sein du mouvement Idle No More, figure parmi les jeunes artistes autochtones qui ont exprimé leur opinion sur un nombre important d’enjeux dont celui de la réconciliation. Cette recherche étudie donc la vision de l’artiste multidisciplinaire innue de la réconciliation. La contribution de cette thèse à l’avancement des connaissances se décline en deux volets. D’une part, le cadre analytique, construit à partir d’une revue de la littérature, rend compte de la complexité du concept de réconciliation au Canada. Il présente d’abord une déconstruction conceptuelle de la réconciliation d’où ressortent quatre composantes du concept – définition, intentions, processus et actions – et fait ensuite, la synthèse des positions des auteurs sur ces dernières. Cet exercice révèle les différents courants de la littérature sur la réconciliation ainsi que les tensions entre les différents usages du concept. D’autre part, ce projet contribue à faire avancer les débats sur la réconciliation en présentant la vision d’une jeune artiste innue. L’analyse méthodique des prises de parole publiques et des ouvrages poétiques de Natasha Kanapé Fontaine montre son positionnement théorique par rapport au concept de réconciliation ainsi que l’évolution de sa vision de celui-ci au fil du temps. De cette analyse croisée entre le politique et le littéraire, il ressort que la réconciliation est un concept multidimensionnel complexe et polysémique. La multiplicité de sens accordé à la réconciliation par les différents acteurs peut nuire à l’avancement du projet commun qu’est le renouvellement des relations entre autochtones et allochtones au Canada. Pour dépasser la mécompréhension interculturelle, les acteurs devraient partager leur vision de la réconciliation et travailler ensemble sur les actions pour réaliser le projet de réconciliation.

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.

Hur kan begreppet support structures förstås i relation till det konstnärliga projektet SOLO SHOW? Denna uppsats behandlar arbetets villkor och synliggörandet av dessa inom konstens fält. Support structures (stödstrukturer) kan förstås som det arbete som upprätthåller, uppmuntrar, stärker och står bakom (något). Närmandet till ett, eller flera,”svar” på frågeställningen sker genom ett resonerande i relation till utsnitt ur Julia Bryan-Wilsons Art Workers: radical practice in the Vietnam war era, Hito Steyerls ”Is a Museum a Factory?” och hennes tolkning av termerna ”work” och ”occupation”, samt det genomgående teoretiska verktyget: begreppet support structures.

This paper discusses the poetry of Audre Lorde and Natasha Trethewey, and the ways in which they bring to attention the often-silenced histories of African American females. Through close readings of Lorde’s poems “Call” and “Coal,” and Trethewey’s “Three Photographs,” these histories are brought to the present with the framework of the words “call” and “re-call.” The paper explores the ways in which Lorde creates a new mythology for understanding her identity as “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” in her innovative, intersectional feminist poetry. This is used as the framework for understanding modern poets like Trethewey, whose identity as a biracial black woman from the American South colors her lyric, more formal work. Lorde uses the vocal, oral tradition of calling as Trethewey relies on visual, gaze-focused recall. Recall is memory and re-call means bringing the hidden past into the future. The paper concludes by saying that all black female writers may participate in their own ways of calling out the truth and remembering what should be forgotten.

History, both collective and personal, often provides a stimulus for Southern poets and is useful in bridging the gap between the writers' personal memories and associations and those of the reading audience. The critical introduction to this collection explores connections between personal and shared history in the works of Natasha Trethewey, Betty Adcock, and Kathryn Stripling Byer. These poets convey their own connections to the past through reacting to historical photographs, relaying their own experiences during natural disasters, and setting private incidents within their larger historical contexts. These poets also suggest that time is concentric and malleable, and that history is essentially changed through its retelling. Poems offer a chance to rewrite one's own history. In the final section, I show that historical connections are treated similarly in my own work and that, through making associations with history, my poems also attempt to rewrite the past.

Cette recherche porte sur la production d’un discours singulier, saisi dans le champ littéraire d’auteures autochtones au Québec, dans la compréhension de dynamiques de création et de reconnaissance de nouveaux imaginaires. Le point de départ de cette recherche est l’étude de la formation et de la consolidation d’un discours qui se veut singulier dans l’interaction avec les autres discours en présence — soulevant des questions de rapports de pouvoir. L’analyse discursive vise ainsi à faire valoir certaines des lignes de force du discours de la relation au territoire produit par la nation innue dans le discours social québécois, analysé au travers d’oeuvres de quatre écrivaines innues Marie-Andrée Gill, Naomi Fontaine, Natasha Kanapé Fontaine et Joséphine Bacon. Le registre de l’intime, révélé au cours du terrain auprès de la poétesse Marie-Andrée Gill, a composé un second corpus d’analyse. Il est alors question d’un déplacement de regard de l’objet d’étude dans le dévoilement du processus créatif qui s’articule dans une compréhension du soi pour tendre vers le commun. L’analyse transdiscursive avance finalement l’idée d’une position littéraire nommée poétique des possibles, qui se comprend comme un changement de paradigme et qui se caractérise par une approche décoloniale. Mots-clés : littérature; autochtone; Innu; analyse discursive; relation au territoire; poétique des possibles; décolonisation; Marie-Andrée Gill; Natasha Kanapé Fontaine; Joséphine Bacon; Naomi Fontaine. / This study delves into the production of singular discourse in the literary field of First Nations women writers in Quebec, in understanding the dynamics of creation and recognition of new imaginaries. The starting point of this research is the formation and consolidation of a singular discourse in interaction with other discourses — raising power relations issues. The discursive analysis focus on the discourse of the relationship to the territory produced by the Innu nation in Quebec social discourse, analyzed through the works of four Innu authors Marie-Andrée Gill, Naomi Fontaine, Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, and Joséphine Bacon. The register of intimacy, revealed during the fieldwork with the poetess Marie-Andrée Gill, shifted the focus of this study. This second corpus of analysis laid the groundwork for an enquire into the creative process that is articulated in an understanding of the self to tend towards the common. Lastly, the transdiscursive analysis advances the idea of a singular literary position named poetics of possibilities, a paradigm shift, which is characterized by an approach of decolonization. Keywords : Literature; First Nations; Innu; Discursive Analysis; Relationship to the Territory; Poetics of Possibilities; Decolonization; Marie-Andrée Gill; Natasha Kanapé Fontaine; Joséphine Bacon; Naomi Fontaine.