Towards a Poetics of Light; The Conceits of Light is a critical quest to map associations between rhetorical figures, psychological defences and spatial tropes in an attempt to conceive a poetic design that enacts conceit. Light is an emblem which echoes with an abundance of representations in literature, history, art and architecture and parallels may be drawn between their resemblances however apparently remote. Love, knowledge, hope and creative passion mark turns in the threads that knot ideas and their representations together. Return of the Immortals, the final project in a series of works exploring these parallels and representations, gathers together a cascade of tropes to structure a spatial experience which culminates in The Conceits of Light.

In my thesis I will discuss Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” in relation to the expectations that scholars have of the gothic genre. I will break this project into four chapters, along with an introduction: (Ch.1) a critical review of scholarship on Poe’s “Usher” that will demonstrate the difficulty in coming to a critical consensus on the tale, (Ch.2) a discussion of Brown’s outline of Gothic conventions, (Ch.3) a look at Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” juxtaposed with Aristotle’s Poetics to illumine aspects of Poe’s approach to writing and how it has been informed, and (Ch.4) a close reading of Poe’s “Usher.”

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 272-279). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

In the foundational scholarship on literature and evolution, there remains a tendency to focus on Darwinian evolution's influence on Victorian literature. Without ignoring Darwin's importance to both the late-19th century and our own time, this dissertation contributes to an emerging interest among historians and literary scholars in exploring the pre-Darwinian, transatlantic contexts of evolutionary discourse. By returning to a time when 'the development hypothesis' was a more fluid concept, we can examine how writers and poets on both sides of the Atlantic were able to actively shape its meanings and to use it as a framework for reflecting on their literary craft. In this dissertation, I argue that for Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, development is a key term in their particular constructions of a distinctive American literature in the 1840s and '50s. It underlies Whitman's conception of an experimental poetic voice in the 1855 Leaves of Grass as well as Melville's ambitions for literary narrative in Mardi and Moby-Dick. At the same time, the sweep of their careers well beyond the publication of Origin of Species in 1859---into the last decade of the nineteenth century---allows us to chart their later responses as evolution increasingly gained acceptance and Darwin became a front man of sorts for evolution. Although Whitman and Melville continue to incorporate evolution and scientific modernity into their late-career self-fashioning, we can trace a movement toward increasing distance, disillusionment, and abstraction in these deployments. This dissertation has implications not only for contemporary Whitman and Melville studies but also for re-assessing the broader trajectory of 19th-century American literary history. In conventional textbook accounts, the influence of Darwinian evolution is measured primarily in terms of the emergence of literary naturalism, a realist genre known for its unsparing look at lives caught in the scope of unsympathetic natural forces. Here, I suggest that developmental evolution offered alternative formal and epistemological possibilities for mid-19th-century American literature, enabling Whitman and Melville to develop hypotheses about literary truth and human value. / text

The thesis was an in-depth study of the poetics and poetry of Jing School京派in modern Chinese literature. Jing School was a loosely formed but comprehensive and influential literary school emerged in Beijing in the early 1930s. It was an all-round literary school, which produced almost all kinds of literary works, including literary critic, fiction, prose, drama and poetry. However, only few studies focused on its achievements in the field of poetry. This study was undertaken to provide some insights into the poetic nature of Jing School and its contributions to the development of modern Chinese poetry. Unlike the Leftist and Right-wing writers in the same period, poets of Jing School persisted in composing pure poetry, which was advocated by the French symbolists. However, it was also the main aesthetic feature of traditional Chinese poetry, especially the poetry in the late Tang period. In this way, poets of Jing School successfully integrated the modern techniques and ideas employed in the western symbolist poetry, such as symbols, metaphors and synaesthesia, with those traditional artistic conceptions used in classical Chinese poetry. As a result, their works stayed away from political topics and emphasized on literary techniques. Together with poetry of other literary schools, they thereby created the golden age of modern Chinese poetry in the mid-1930s. To fully explicate the poetic nature of Jing School, the first chapter of the thesis reconstructed the background, the memberships as well as the literary pursuits of Jing School by analysing their publications on journals and supplements of newspapers that edited by Jing School members. The literary salons held by inspiring leaders of Jing School, Zhu Guangqian 朱光潛 and Lin Huiyin 林徽因 had also been re-examined. The following two chapters looked into the characteristics and significances of poetry and poetics of Jing School respectively. Poems of Feiming 廢名 and Bian Zhilin 卞之琳, poetics of Zhu Guangqian, Liang Zongdai 梁宗岱, Feiming and Lin Gen 林庚 have been taken as examples for further exploration of the aesthetic pursuits of Jing School. The last chapter proceeded to examine the fate of Jing School during and after the Anti-Japanese War (1937-1945). During the war time, some poets of Jing School shifted their lyrical writing style to realistic and political writing style. Among them, He Qifang 何其芳 was the most prominent figure and his case has been studied thoroughly in this chapter. Besides, the decline of the aesthetic pursuits of Jing School has also been reflected in the failure of resuming the publication of Wenxue Zazhi 文學雜誌, the most important journal of Jing School, after the victory. In short, the most distinguished feature of the poetics and poetry of Jing School was the flawless integration of the essence of western modernity and that of Chinese tradition. The significance of the integration and the controversial issues aroused by this aesthetic pursuit have been scrutinized and summarized in the concluding chapter. / published_or_final_version / Chinese / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

While online virtual worlds draw increasingly wider audiences of players and scholars alike, offline games continue to evolve into more complex and socially layered forms as well. This dissertation argues that virtual worlds need not exist as online, digital environments alone and probes three genres of non-digital gaming for evidence of the virtual: tabletop role-playing games, murder-mystery events, and localized alternate reality games. More broadly, then, this dissertation is about deliberate make-belief: practiced by adults, taken seriously by participants, engaged with for long hours at a time, performed in public, and integrated into everyday social relationships. Drawing on scholars who study games as social activities (McGonigal 2006, Montola 2012) and social institutions (Goffman 1974, Searle 1995), I present three ethnographic case studies that illustrate how complex forms of social gaming can conjure and sustain environments best understood as analog virtual worlds. Through the widespread use of mobile technologies and the concerted efforts of innovators, game spaces are increasingly permeating our everyday lives on- and offline. This dissolving boundary demands anthropologists to revisit questions of how, where, and with whom we play games. Dovetailing Martin Heidegger’s notions of worlding and poiesis to the semiotics of C.S. Peirce, this dissertation investigates how new forms of social gaming demonstrate the same qualities of shared intentionality, intersubjectivity, and performance essential to the production of new social meaning and cultural forms. Following, I situate the bold ethnographic case studies of make-belief in dialogue with scholars who figure exclusively online virtual worlds (Castronova 2005, Taylor 2006, Boellstorff 2008) and argue that analyzing both on- and offline virtual worlds together can help scholars better understand the fundamental nature of social interaction and shared intentionality, those everyday mechanisms that both sustain personal relationships on the one hand and maintain our broadest and most serious social institutions on the other.

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This thesis is comprised of thirty-three poems which I have written over the last year. All are lyrical and most are written in free verse, although there are a few traditional forms as well. The poems treat a range of topics and have been arranged accordingly under four broad categories: The Social, The Spiritual, The Natural, and Poetics. These four categories represent the main themes explored in the collection and serve to unify the poems according to topic. However, nearly every poem echoes, either in imagery or in ideas, the dominant themes from one or more of the three categories to which it does not belong, and these linkages are as integral to the overall structure of the work as its divisions. Titled “Everything is an Argument,” this thesis explores the emotional and intellectual stances we take in response to our experiences and surroundings. At the same time, it seeks to reflect that the boundaries between our critical categories are permeable, and that the way we understand the world in one respect is intrinsically linked to the way we encounter it in other areas. Furthermore, what the things are that we encounter are as fluid as our understanding of them, and while our labels are useful, even important in certain ways, they need not be absolutely delimiting.

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This thesis explores the poetics of the Greek Post-Symbolists, a group of early twentieth-century poets whose main period of activity falls in the years between the Generation of the 1880s and that of the 1930s. By focussing on Post-Symbolist concepts of the role of poetry and on the way in which Post-Symbolist poems are constructed, this thesis examines the poetic system of a group of poets who occupy a transitional period in the history of Modern Greek literature. The Post-Symbolists question both the nationalism of poets of the Generation of the 1880s and their own place in society. Post-Symbolist poetry focuses on themes related to the interior landscape of the individual. It promotes negation and absence, de-emphasizes external reality, foregrounding a poetic reality created through the acoustic links between words, and it undermines the importance previously attached to metre and rhythm in poetry. In this way Post-Symbolist poetic language constitutes a reaction against the dominant poetic discourse of the time, and a turning-point in twentieth-century Greek poetry. This thesis explores both the internal structure of Post-Symbolist poetry and the relationship between Post-Symbolism on the one hand and the discourses of the Generation of the 1880s and of the Generation of the 1930s on the other, placing this in the historical, socio-political and ideological context of time.