Thesis (Ph. D.)--Āgarā Viśvavidyālaya. / In Hindi. Includes bibliographical references (p. 249-264).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, December 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

This thesis reads the poetry and poetics of Charles Bernstein in relation to his interest in sophistry and sophistics. Taking his 1987 volume The Sophist as a central text, the influence of a sense of sophistics is developed across his wider range of published works. This involves identifying some of the many different interpretations of the sophists throughout the history of philosophy, from the early dismissals by Plato and Aristotle to the more recent reappraisals of their works. A secondary aspect of the thesis is in examining the renewal of interest in the Ancient Greek sophists and suggesting some of the affinities between contemporary literary theory and poetics and the fragments of the works of the major sophists (primarily Protagoras and Gorgias). Finally, I suggest that The Sophist itself is a valuable and contemporaneous re-examination of sophistic ideas, that in fact goes further than those by academics from within philosophy and rhetoric by virtue of employing the stylistic innovations and linguistic experimentation that was so central to the sophistic approach.

The purpose of this thesis is to study the poetry written by H.D. between 1912- 1925 in relation to two Romantic categories: beauty and sublimity. I shall attempt to show how H.D. subverts and revises the Romantic sublime offering alternatives that can be identified with a "female sublime". A direct consequence of such revision will be her commitment to beauty, which acts in her poems as a generative drive. Her understanding of beauty will be shown to have its roots in Sappho, Plato and the Victorian Hellenists, among others, and to have undergone analogous transformations to those of sublimity. Chapter I reopens the debate around Imagism and Imagist poetry showing that the problem of defining what Imagism is or was originates in the overwhelming authority of theory versus praxis. My goal is to deconstruct the critical fallacies on which Imagism has been built and to free the poetry which it represents. This allows me to question the myth of H.D. as "Imagiste" and to open her early poetry to new readings and interpretations. In Chapter n, I review the theoretical background to the aesthetics of the sublime represented by Longinus, Burke, Kant and Wordsworth. I also establish the critical frame within which this research will take place, drawing on Thomas Weiskel, Patricia Yaeger and Joanne Diehl. I initiate a study of sublimity in H.D.'s first volume, Sea Garden, and show the alternative treatment that this Romantic genre receives from this female poet. H.D.'s revisions of the Romantic sublime take us in Chapter m to a study of her poetics, as presented in her essay "Notes on Thought and Vision". I discuss a variety of sources for the composition of these "Notes", such as Havelock Ellis' influence, H.D.'s letters to John Cournos and her friendship with D.H. Lawrence. I show how H.D. understands artistic and poetic creativity as 'vision' and how the recovery of the abject female body allows her to formulate a notion of creativity that transcends gender. Chapter IV, pursues H.D.'s transformations of the Romantic sublime in Hymen, and presents Sappho as a model for the fusion of sublimity, love and eroticism in the poems of this volume. Chapter V begins with a theoretical discussion surrounding the aesthetics of the beautiful in relation to Chapter II. It continues with H.D.'s understanding of beauty within her essays, in particular, "Responsibilities", "Notes on Thought and Vision" and "Notes on Euripides, Pausanius and Greek Lyric Poets". In the light of recent work on Pater's masculine model of Hellenic beauty, I discuss H.D.'s own configuration of beauty.

Thesis--Marburg. / Vita. Bibliography: p. 226-242.

stack: Minimalist Poetics consists of a portfolio of practice-led research — a volume-length minimalist poem entitled stack — and a critical essay. The poem applies and adapts several minimalist writing strategies, which are evaluated in the critical essay to create a text that is rich in imagery yet indeterminate in meaning. In addition, stack is innovative in its structural approach — through original use of enjambment, footnoting and repetition, lines may be treated as discrete entities and, also, as combinations. A key research question that the practice-led component and the critical essay interrogate is the applicability and development of the poetics of the “New Sentence”, and other formally innovative approaches in the field of minimalist writing. The first part of the critical essay contextualises the creative portfolio in relation to the field of minimalist poetics as a whole. It sets out how stack belongs to a strand of minimalist poetry that evolved out of imagism and objectivism, and whose key practitioners include Robert Grenier, Robert Lax and Aram Saroyan. Subsequently, the thesis outlines the methods that were used to generate the creative portfolio. Effectively these latter sections present a manual for making minimalist poetry. Aside from exploring the written elements of stack, the thesis also examines my practice of conducting what I refer to as ‘minimalist interventions’ (embodied, micro-actions). These interventions, which have taken place in a range of environments, generally function as stimuli for the written aspects of the poem.

This dissertation examines the evolution of poetic theory in English and Scottish writing between c.1470 and 1530. By examining important but neglected works by Stephen Hawes, Gavin Douglas, and Alexander Barclay, as well as influential poetry by Robert Henryson and John Skelton, it demonstrates that the contours and preoccupations of rhetorical poetics in England and Scotland emerged long before the appearance of such seminal works as Philip Sidney’s Apologie for Poetrie (c.1580) and George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589). The poets at the heart of this dissertation did not assert their authority by writing rhetorical treatises or formal defences, but by critiquing their predecessors, by insulting their peers, and by showing an occasional disregard for the ‘gruntynge hogges’ of their audience. Some of them, such as Robert Henryson, praised the ‘polit termes of sweit rhetore’, while others, such as Gavin Douglas, argued that poetry was a source of ‘hie knawlage’ and profound philosophical truths. But their opponents claimed that ‘the knowlege of poetes’ simply ‘vanissheth awey’ when compared to that of the Bible. On the eve of the English Reformation this struggle for authority intensified, with at least one English writer declaring that ‘God maketh hys habitacion | In poetes’. Unlike previous scholarship, which attributes such idealism to emerging humanist influences, this dissertation argues that the early defenders of poetry in England and Scotland were motivated not by the transcendent idealism they frequently espoused, but by less noble impulses, such as bitterness, disillusionment, and the struggle for court favour. These writers sought to redefine the relationship between literature and the rest of life, and in the process, they formulated new reasons for their own importance as moral authorities in an increasingly unstable world.

Thesis--Amsterdam. / Cover title: Lucrèce. Bibliography: p. 341-352.

Thesis--Amsterdam. / Cover title: Lucrèce. Bibliography: p. 341-352.

Thesis (doctoral)--Uppsala universitet, 1985. / Abstract and summary in English. Errata sheet laid in. Includes bibliographical references (p. 185-196) and index.