Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1982. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 245-252).

This project seeks to unpack and moderate the postmodern debate surrounding James Joyce's 1922 novel, Ulysses, by examining how the text responds to global-local dichotomies, be they geographical or conceptual, and considering its stylistics in light of these themes. In doing so, it casts the likes of Laurence Sterne, Walt Whitman, Joseph Conrad, Gertrude Stein, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Bob Dylan and Kurt Vonnegut, among others, alongside Joyce, connecting similar themes and stylistic responses. Ultimately, it suggests that the avant-garde response on the part of Joyce and these others is not necessarily a manifesto bolstering the style, but a reminder to the interpreter to not take the ability of traditional narrative to subsume the surprisingly complex local moment of experience as given. Instead of being "anti-art," as these avant-garde stylistics are often accused of, these aesthetics place new value on the old aesthetic and the act of interpretation, asking the interpreter to perennially re-evaluate the old and given amid the continuously new and complex local moment of experience resulting from the convergence of contrast brought on by the dynamically mapped globe in the process of globalization.

THE BLIND ARCADE is a collection of poems chronicling several of the pressing conditions of contemporary American life: poverty and class, sex, violence, hunger, longing and mourning, and the inverse of the latter, requited love and emotional ecstasy. The poems are set in crowded markets, on trains and in apartment bedrooms, city squares and campus quads, dentist chairs, bridges, riverbanks, and kitchens. This contemporary and familiar backdrop dictates the form of most of these poems to be free verse, although terza rima, ekphrastic, haiku, and prose forms are also utilized. The book presents its poems in three sections. As if a series of decorative arches in a blind arcade, they are not broken down into themes. Rather, they are each utilized and are ordered around the weight of their individual topics to demonstrate the capriciousness of life.

The Mystic Trumpeter is intended to reflect and comment on the meaning of the poem of the same name featured in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Formally the individual movements are approximately simple territory ternary in form; however, cyclical treatment of the opening motive is the main structural concept of the work, and its appearance throughout the composition is controlled entirely by the recurring connotations of the poetry.

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This thesis will be an attempt to gather together the important ideas set forth in Whitman's early writing which are to be found also in Emerson's lectures, essays, and poems written before 1855. It will attempt to show what Whitman might have gained from Emerson if he had had no other source, and if a creative intellect had not the power of originating its own ideas.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / This dissertation examines the photographs created by Edward Weston during his travels through the United States in 1941 and intended for a luxury reprint of Walt Whitman's Leaves ofGrass published by the Limited Editions Club in 1942. By contrasting the hundreds of photographs Weston made now residing in archives and collections with the forty-nine images ultimately selected and arranged by the Club's director, George Macy, I argue that Weston's larger, more complex and diverse version of America more closely resembled Whitman's text than his publisher's limited selection. Moreover, this under-examined body of work promotes a new understanding of Weston's late oeuvre; inspired by cross-country travel, Whitman's poetry, and other artists, Weston tackled new subject matter, experimented with different styles, and synthesized artistic and documentary modes in his photographs. Chapter I introduces the commission, the role of Weston's wife Charis Wilson in the project, the timely choice in 1941 of pairing Whitman and Weston, both of whom challenged boundaries of their respective media, and the outcome of the book's design. Chapter 2 turns to an analysis of the sequence of the first ten images as representative of Macy's caption-driven approach to the book, which generally discouraged the probing of close relationships among images. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the images themselves paired with close readings of select poems in order to establish the parallels in sensibility of the two artists. Chapters 3 through 5 broaden the discussion by including Weston's unpublished images from the 1941 trip. Focusing on Weston's portraits, Chapter 3 discusses Weston's diverse sitters-African and Native Americans and womensometimes selected while researching ethnography. Chapter 4 focuses on landscapesindustrial, urban, desert, and rural-in which he engaged with popular American imagery and created art and documentary images. Chapter 5 analyzes Weston's photographs of plantation ruins and cemeteries in Louisiana, and folk art and customs for which he recorded examples of American ethnography. Through examination of these images, a new picture of Weston emerges as not only a modernist art photographer, but also a photographer with deep interests in American people, landscape, and culture. / 2999-01-01