Browsing by Subject "Lyric"
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Item Divine desire : incarnational poetics in the Harley lyrics(2013-05) Landtroop, Luke Michael; Birkholz, Daniel, 1967-This essay develops a literary-historical and theoretical framework within which to consider the anonymous Middle English penitential lyric “An Old Man’s Prayer,” from British Library MS Harley 2253. Beginning with a review of the methodological problems involved in contextualizing medieval lyrics, I proceed to situate the religious lyrics in relation to the rise of affective devotion to the humanity of Christ in the later Middle Ages. By arguing for the capacity of the genre for aesthetic and conceptual complexity, I seek to establish lyrics as a form of ‘vernacular theology,’ a recently developed critical category in medieval studies from which lyrics have so far been excluded. “An Old Man’s Prayer,” examined in relation to other selected Harley lyrics, serves as the primary textual test case for a hermeneutic which reads for “Incarnational poetics,” that is, the ways in which the claims of orthodox Christology shape and structure the form and thematics of medieval poetry. Emphasizing the centrality of Incarnational doctrine, I contend against the reduction of the essence of medieval Christian worldview to contemptus mundi. More specifically, I seek to demonstrate the reconciliation effected by the Incarnation between this-worldly and spiritual desire, between the material and transcendent realms, as represented in “An Old Man’s Prayer” by the speaker’s implicit affective identification with Christ’s passion. Invoking the discourse of desire, I engage the psychoanalytic approach to literary studies, which I find ultimately insufficient for achieving a satisfactory interpretive “fusion of horizons” between medieval texts and current criticism. Thus, I turn to the contemporary theological perspective of John Milbank, whose ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ provides a theoretical basis for an Incarnational hermeneutic.Item No comets to point to(2022-09-12) Flanagan, Abigail; Acha, Beverly; Sutherland, Daniel; Awai, Nicole; Lucas, KristinThrough a series of interconnected inquiries, references, and anecdotes, this thesis charts my path to making the artwork I make today and my relationship to specific subjects such as abstraction, lyricism, perception, and materiality. I argue for the definitions of these terms to freely meander across the various media I use to demonstrate a capacious yet incomplete form of knowledge that is in keeping with the wide-ranging artistic and literary references I draw from in my practice. I write into a conviction of epistemological equilibrium, where binaries are already uncoupled, rather than write in defense of a non-binary position. I write to blur, not to distinguish. I wonder how the abstract and the concrete contain each other, how instances of hearsay stain fact with fiction, and how the documentary image embeds truth with perpetual doubt. Lastly, I will share a story that traces threads of my art practice. Spatially and temporally, this thesis serves as a branch from which to alight, pause, and take off.Item Renaissance lyric, architectural poetics, and the monuments of English verse(2012-05) Leubner, Jason Robert; Whigham, Frank; Rebhorn, Wayne A., 1943-; Bruster, Douglas; Barret, J. K.; Bizer, MarcMy dissertation revises our assumptions about the Renaissance commonplace that poetic monuments last longer than marble ones. We tend to understand the commonplace as being about the materiality of artistic media and thus the comparative durability of text and stone. In contrast, I argue that English Renaissance poets and theorists treat the monument of verse as a space where their hopes for the poem’s future converge with broader cultural concerns about the reception of the ancient past and the place of English vernacular poetry within the hierarchy of classical and contemporary European letters. In Renaissance poetics manuals, authors appropriate a newly classicizing architectural vocabulary to communicate confidence in the lasting power of English poetic structures. Through their use of architectural metaphors, they defend their vernacular against charges of vulgar barbarism and promote the civilizing potential of English verse. Yet if lyric poets also turn to architectural metaphors to make claims about poetry’s enduring quality, they simultaneously disclose a deep unease about the perils of textual transmission. Indeed, monumentalizing conceits often appear most powerfully in poetic genres predicated on failed hopes and frustrated desires, that is, in the sonnet sequences and complaints of Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, and William Shakespeare. In acknowledging the fragility of the textual and architectural remains of antiquity, lyric poets from Spenser forward consider their own textual futures with an entirely new sense of urgency. I argue, however, that their unease about the future of their art has as much to do with the genres in which they write and their suspicions about the shifting reading practices of future audiences as it does with the material vulnerability of the medium that transmits that art. In the sonnet sequence in particular, lyric poets who monumentalize their beloved partake in—and anxiously question—early modern practices of constructing funeral monuments for the living. I argue that these poets’ fantasy of entombing those who are still in the prime of their lives turns out to be less about a future rebirth than an obsessive, premature preparation for death.Item Rhetoric, poetics, and the devotional lyric in early modern England(2020-09-10) Sharp, Zachary Daniel; Charney, Davida; Rebhorn, Wayne A., 1943-; Green, Lawrence D.; Longaker, Mark G.; Walker, JeffreyRecently, scholars have argued that poetry provided the foundations for the development of rhetoric in antiquity. Lyric poetry in particular functioned as epideictic performance, a public, generalized art able to encompass a range of rhetorical motives. I propose that poetry played a similar role in early modern England, especially in the development of the devotional lyric. This contrasts with the prevailing view, that poetry served a primarily dialectical role in humanistic classroom and, more broadly, acted as a propaedeutic to ethical and philosophical instruction. I argue that these different uses of poetry actually represent two coevolving traditions centered on two competing ideas about the goal of poetry: "performative" poetics sees poetry as a situationally-defined, rhetorical art of invention; "paideutic" poetics sees poetry as a hermeneutic art that trains ethical and philosophical judgment. I examine how these traditions manifest themselves in Renaissance poetics, particularly in George Puttenham's Art of English Poesy and in William Scott's Model of Poesy. The former imagines poetry to be a performative, courtly art, where rhetoric and poetry are fundamentally alike; the latter sees poetry as a theoretical art of moral instruction defined by an Aristotelian criterion of mimesis. I argue that these traditions also influence the religious lyrics of George Herbert and John Donne. Herbert and Donne, I suggest, innovate within these two very different paradigms: Herbert treats his lyrics as public, liturgical performances, while Donne sees his as "literary critical" artifacts meant to exercise practical judgment and train aristocratic taste.Item “Woven alike with meaning” : sovereignty and form in Native North American poetry, 1800-1910(2017-07-20) Grewe, Lauren Marie; Cohen, Matt, 1970-; Cox, James H. (James Howard), 1968-; Winship, Michael; Bennett, Chad; Fitzgerald, StephanieThe story of American poetry has developed alongside the idea of America itself, becoming almost synonymous with national sovereignty projects in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this time the figure of the Indian was, in poetry, customarily depicted as melancholy and moribund, a noble savage making way for a supposedly superior civilization and race. Yet indigenous North American poets also composed and published poetry and participated in reading communities during this time. Examining this poetry reveals how indigenous writers manipulated poetic genres to contest U.S. hegemony and assert sovereignties from the sexual to the tribal to the national. Indeed, understanding early indigenous poets’ formal choices and poetic communities challenges critical narratives of American poetry’s history as having been linear and progressive, demanding a new way of organizing the study of American poetry. In this dissertation, I argue that early Native North American poets chose to write in specific poetic genres in response to local, national, and international publishing worlds. Each chapter examines how indigenous poets comment on the practice and form of poetry, thus speaking to a diverse community of poets and readers through a variety of verse traditions. Jane Johnston Schoolcraft draws from multiple cultural traditions as she manipulates time and genre through her mourning poems, ballads, and lyrics in the Anishinaabe world of the Great Lakes. In the Chicago area, Simon Pokagon uses insurgent practices of appropriation to criticize and revise colonialist American poetry through cross-racial citations and borrowings in his birchbark pamphlets and novel. As public literary tastes shift from poems to legends at the turn of the twentieth century, E. Pauline Johnson helps invent a different kind of modernist poetry that challenges representations of indigenous peoples as pre-modern. Alex Posey composes skeptical elegies, dialect poems, and political newspaper verse from western and Creek literary forms in Indian Territory to heal a divided Creek Nation, practicing poetic appropriations that offered ways of relating to genre that remain powerful for Native American poets today.