In the 1990s, the US poetry academy sought to create scholarship that represented diverse identities and appealed to public audiences. However, the poetry establishment misses a crucial opportunity to reconsider who might be said to count as a scholar, even as new forms of schol…
This dissertation focuses on the manifold afterlives of Greek antiquity in the German-language poetry and poetics during the era of Weimar Classicism (1788-1805). I approach this thematic complex through the study of prosody situated at the confluence of poetry, philology, and p…
The broad objective of this dissertation is an interdisciplinary study uniting historical linguistics, classical philology, and comparative poetics in an attempt to investigate archaic Greek poetic texts from a diachronic perspective. This thesis consists of two parts. The first…
Taking a holistic approach to individual psalms as distinct and complete poems, this study explores the topic of divine protection in the Psalter. Specifically, three psalms are analyzed: Psalms 5, 91, and 140. The study is a contribution to a growing body of research that syste…
This dissertation examines two major parallel but intersecting trajectories: that of kangaku (Chinese studies), specifically the Kidendō (history and literature) curriculum that flourished at the State Academy in the Heian period (794-1185), and kagaku (waka studies), which emer…
The work of the Persian poet Mas'ud Sa'd Salmân (d. 1121 C.E.) is studied by situating him in his appropriate historical and cultural context, while exploring the idea that writing at the frontier of empire contributed to various types of innovations in his poetry. There is a pe…
This dissertation examines the place of difference in black women's writing of the African diaspora. Afrodiasporic women writers since the late 1960s have subverted generic conventions to foreground complex black female identifications. These writers develop what I term a "poeti…
Religious poetry raises fundamental questions not only about the nature of the religious, but about the nature of poetry. The central argument of this essay is that what makes a poem “religious” is not its content or meaning but its “way of meaning.” Just as religion is fundamen…
As a contemporary Franco-Algerian writer, Leïla Sebbar has been sensitive to the changing cultural and political landscapes of France and Algeria over the course of the eighties and nineties. This dissertation underscores the interconnected shiftings of socio-historic context, t…
In a contribution to the study of biblical narrative and the analysis of the Primary History (Genesis-Kings, Jewish canon), I argue that three biblical texts are mises-en-abyme. Mise-en-abyme is a term used by literary critics to refer to a part of a literary work that duplicate…
This dissertation explores the poetics of loss in the autobiographical writing of Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Born in 1928, Wiesel spent his early childhood in the shtetl of Sighet, situated in the Carpathian mountains of Transylvania. In 1944…
This practice-based thesis asks, "In what unique ways can contemporary performance address our preoccupations with narrative?" It reframes what are frequently discussed in screenwriting handbooks as "the rules of storytelling" as "narrative conventions," then asks what central c…
This thesis investigates the relationship between sound and written text. The subject is explored through practice, theory, and reflection. These research areas are preceded by an introduction to the phenomenon of the ‘book with a soundtrack’ as it has been set up within the fie…
This thesis comprises a novel and poetics exploring how creative writing practice can be influenced by engaging in psychogeographic studies of landscapes containing nuclear power stations. The focus of this research is the Exclusion Zone surrounding the Chernobyl Nuclear Power S…
Adapting the question at the end of Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale', this thesis argues that reading poetic texts involves a form of suspension between waking and sleeping. Poems are not the product of an empirical dreamer, but psychoanalytic understandings of dream-work help to …
My dissertation offers a new reading of one of Denmark's great writers of the nineteenth century as first and foremost a Jewish artist. By offering an alternative to the nationalistic discourse so prevalent in the scholarship, my study examines Goldschmidt's relationship to the …
This dissertation presents a new chapter in the story of Christian culture's engagement with classical literary culture. The Codex of Visions , part of the Bodmer Papyri discovered in upper Egypt in 1952, provides the material for my study. This codex contains previously unknown…
My Voice is My Weapon examines the dynamics of music, nationalism, and resistance as realized through performance among Palestinians in Israel, the occupied territories, and Jordan. Based on eighteen months ethnographic fieldwork this dissertation explores the ways in which musi…
This dissertation explores the occurrences and the functions of various poetic devices within the four alphabetic acrostic psalms found in Book I of the Psalter. These psalms are: Pss 9/10; 25; 34: and 37. These acrostics are four out of a total of eight alphabetic acrostic poem…