R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "Doody, Terrence A."

Browsing by Author "Doody, Terrence A."

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"A heightened degree of messiness": "J R", "Nashville", "The Dead Father", and the refusal of narrative
(1996) Levine, Michael Louis; Doody, Terrence A.
If the late 1960s and early 1970s in America could be characterized as a period which disrupted the narratives that structured both public and private life, then William Gaddis's J R, Robert Altman's Nashville, and Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father, all of which appeared in 1975, are emblematic of this period, products of both the aesthetic principles of these three artists and the social milieu in which they created their most exemplary works. All three works subvert or abandon narrative conventions in three general ways. First, they render time as a continuous present, endless and without gaps, as opposed to a narrativized kind of time which suggests a recovery of the past, and which starts and stops with the beginning and end of each event included in the narrative. Second, these works contain no internal organizing center which could stabilize the relationships between their characters. Third, all three works eschew a narrating consciousness, offering no indication of the significance of anything in their fictional worlds. In their non-narrative aspects, the forms of each of these works show the influence of other media; Gaddis's novel possesses cinematic qualities, while Altman's film and Barthelme's novel invite comparisons to painting. By looking to other media, Gaddis, Altman, and Barthelme extend the representational capacities of their own. The result of this refusal of narrative is not the creation of a space within the work, left by elements said to be missing from it, that is filled by the reader or spectator, who then becomes to some degree the "subject" of the work, and is therefore capable of articulating its meaning. On the contrary, by refusing narrative, these works undermine the illusion, perpetuated by narrative, that the world speaks to us in intelligible terms, as well as the illusion of a shared reality made possible by acts of identification between one consciousness and another. J R, Nashville, and The Dead Father attest to the constructed nature of shared reality and illuminate both the limits of individual subjectivity and the irreducible difference between art and its audience.
Affinities of forms: Chinese poets and Pope, Pound, Eliot and Williams
(1988) Liu, Wan; Doody, Terrence A.
Despite the tremendous linguistic particularities and cultural differences, Chinese poetry shares some formal and technical similarity with Anglo-American poetry. Through an effective use of the couplet-based verse form well suited for the play of parallelism and antithesis, classic Chinese poets and Alexander Pope achieve precision and concision in emotional and intellectual communications, making extremely precise distinctions between the elements of their thoughts or feelings. In terms of the "aesthetic form," "the relation between the sensuous nature of the art medium and the conditions of human perceptions," a certain type of Chinese Tang poetry and poetry by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams display affinity, as manifested in the employment of juxtaposition to project a subjective state through presentation of external objects.
Elemental gyres: The structure of William Butler Yeats' "A Vision" (Ireland, Carl G. Jung)
(1996) Schneider, Stephen Patrick; Doody, Terrence A.
This dissertation presents a method for reading William Butler Yeats's A Vision. Establishing parallels between the language of A Vision and that of Jung's Psychological Types both renders A Vision comprehensible at the sentence level and identifies the classical theory of temperaments as a crucial unacknowledged influence on both Yeats and Jung. A reading of Book I of A Vision demonstrates how its cycle of lunar phases functions as a sophisticated psychological typology and reveals the underlying structure of Yeats's system.
Everyday Imperialism: The Landscape of Empire, London, 1870-1939
(2013-12-05) Francis, Pamela; Michie, Helena; Doody, Terrence A.; Sanders, Paula
While many historians of the British Empire have dismissed the presence of imperial motifs and themes in Britain in the early twentieth century, this dissertation identifies and analyzes two discourses of Empire that shaped the material and cultural landscape of London during that period. Chapter one establishes several contexts relating to this period, including New Imperialism, as outlined by Disraeli and later, Joseph Chamberlain. As Disraeli?s New Imperialism evolved, it incorporated the national efficiency movement as a way to make the Empire modern and relevant while maintaining traditional social and political hierarchies, resulting in a cultural milieu of ?conservative modernity.? While uncovering these ideas in the imperial spectacle of the first four decades of the twentieth century, I employ aspects of critical human geography to demonstrate how those ideas inscribed themselves onto the urban landscape of London. Chapter two describes three royal Jubilees in terms of imperial spectacle. These events reflect an imperial ethos built on the concept of the Empire as modern, prosperous, healthy, and tasked by Providence with a civilizing mission. Once identified, I introduce seemingly opposite ways of talking about the Empire: discourses of exceptionalism, and discourses of degeneration and decline. I explain that these discourses manifest themselves in numerous cultural practices as well as official programs and policies that are then reflected in the urban landscape. A description of the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924-1925 focuses on public and private responses to the dominant narrative of empire. Chapters three and four investigate exceptionalism and decline and provide examples of ?official? responses to these themes, as in the institution of new bureaucracies, such as the Ministry of Health, as well as from ?below,? as in the celebration of Empire Day. A close look at both formal and informal responses to these discourses of exceptionalism proves that patriotic imperialism was very much a part of the cultural and material landscape of London until 1939, when German bombs erased the landscape of empire, clearing the ground for the construction of a new landscape of nation.
Genial Thinking: Stevens, Frost, Ashbery
(2013-09-16) Klein, Andrew; Wolfe, Cary; Doody, Terrence A.; Wood, Philip
This dissertation explores how Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery have responded to the problem of philosophical skepticism that they inherit from Emerson: that while things do in fact exist, direct knowledge of them is beyond our ken. Traditionally read within the framework of an evolving Romanticism that finds them attempting to resolve this problem through some form of synthesis or transcendence, I argue instead that these poets accept the intractability of the problem so as to develop forms of thinking from within its conditions. Chapter One explains why poetry is particularly suited to this sort of thinking and what it can achieve that philosophy (or at least a certain understanding of it) cannot. Chapter Two focuses on the act of listening in Stevens’s poetry as a way to show how Stevens is not, as is typically thought, interested in “the thing itself,” but in "the less legible meaning of sounds," the slight, keen indecision that resonates in between sense and understanding. Chapter Three focuses on those moments in Frost’s poetry when, instead of attempting to comprehend, seize, grasp, and represent reality through the use of metaphor, he chooses to regard its inappropriability or otherness. And Chapter Four focuses on how Ashbery’s constant shifts of focus are not just the wanderings of his mind, but a technique for disrupting our absorption in a single plane of attention so as to achieve new economies of engagement. Overall, though, the goal of this project is to move the discussion about this line of poets out of the epistemological register within which they are usually read and into an ethical one.
Grace and apocalypse in the novels of Cormac McCarthy (Appalachia)
(1989) Sullivan, Martha Nell; Doody, Terrence A.
McCarthy's novels articulate a vision of man's state of grace as a trajectory. Outer Dark, representative of McCarthy's early career, reveals a world filled with overwhelming evil, a vision of terra damnata mitigated only by the grace suggested in the narrative tenderness toward the heroine, Rinthy. Suttree affirms grace as the titular hero "pulls himself together" to overcome "dementia praecox," a form of madness combining the primitive implications of schizophrenia (represented by Suttree's dead twin) and the Manichean split between good and evil that paradoxically issues in Knoxville's "good-naturedly violent" demimonde. Blood Meridian, McCarthy's apocalyptic Western, reverses the vision of Suttree. The novel's ambiguous silences--moments of ineffability--either condemn "the kid" for his senseless brutalities or confirm the meaningless of life which the desecrating bloodshed suggests. Both possibilities leave mankind poised uncomfortably at his blood meridian, McCarthy's version of an apocalyptic foreclosure on the possibility of grace.
Poet in a hard hat: Stevie Smith and gender construction
(1995) Sims, Julie Ann; Doody, Terrence A.
Stevie Smith's work not only prefigures a key debate in contemporary feminism between essentialists and social constructionists, but also the more current debates that have developed as the constructionist position continues to be explored. She takes an anti-essentialist position as her inaugural point and explores the limits of agency in redefining gender identities against established cultural signification. Novel on Yellow Paper is best understood in the context of autobiographical fiction, a genre which maintains that identities are always to some extent fictional and, therefore, subject to self-invention. Smith challenges the notion of a fixed, female essence by utilizing a strategy of multivocality. Pompey, the protagonist, adopts a variety of voices which situate her as a product of literary and social discourses and prevent her cooption into a stable subject suitable for matrimony. In Over the Frontier, however, self-construction seems less ideal. It carries the potential for self-destruction. Smith reveals the failure of androgyny as a solution to the woes of femininity and shows that a woman impersonating a man exposes the category "man" as a subject-position inhabitable by either sex. Smith's hat poems serve as clear examples of the risks and possibilities involved in refashioning gender. Hats serve as vestimentary signs that either reify or reformulate traditional gender identities. Beneath Smith's hats are bodies, not The Body, capitalized, abstracted, and theorized solely as a text inscribed by history and culture, but particular bodies which, in their differences, bear the marks of socialization. In her poetry, she most often tropes female bodies as prisons; in order to escape essentialist definitions associated with those bodies, she revises fairy tales to imagine physical transformations that transport women into other bodies and alternative sexualities. Similarly, the drawings that accompany her poems subvert poetic statements which appear to endorse "proper" feminine concerns and traditional, masculine literary values.
Prismatic Color: Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts
(1986) Leavell, Linda; Spears, Monroe K.; Doody, Terrence A.; Camfield, William A.
Within the context of Pound/Eliot modernism Moore necessarily becomes eccentric and even inscrutable, for Symbolism, Imagism and the "mythical method" fail to explain her syllabic verse, her fervent morality and her predilection for exotic animals. Moore'
The aesthetic evolution of Melvin B. Tolson : a thematic study of his poetry
(1991) Pinson, Hermine D.; Doody, Terrence A.
Within the context of Euro-American and Afro-American modernism Tolson is an enigmatic figure. Only in recent years have critics and students begun to reappraise the works of a poet whose body of work reveals the varied influences of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, the Symbolists, and the Euro-American modernists. Tolson shares with Afro-American modernists, from Langston Hughes to Ralph Ellison, an indebtedness to Afro-American music and culture, from the blues to black vernacular speech to the tradition of "signifying," whether in the service of citing or "righting history." On the other hand, he shares with Euro-American modernists, from Ezra Pound to T. S. Eliot to W. B. Yeats, a predilection for symbolism, imagism, obscure allusions, and a preoccupation with confronting the chimeras of history and consciousness. To understand how Tolson manages to incorporate elements of aesthetic approaches that are often politically and stylistically antithetical, this study traces the poet's developing aesthetic, from his first manuscript, Portraits in a Harlem Gallery, to his last work, Harlem Gallery. The poet's subtle shift in emphasis on his staple themes--race, class, the role of the artist, and the nature of art--from one work to the next evidence the poet's struggle to clarify and sharpen a developing aesthetic that culminates in his final and best work, Harlem Gallery. Tolson's final solution to the psycho-historical phenomenon of double consciousness is a delicate synthesis of the most salient elements of both aesthetic approaches--Afro-American and Euro-American modernism. The result is neither derivative of Langston Hughes or T. S. Eliot, but a strong, individualistic Melvin B. Tolson.

Browsing by Author "Doody, Terrence A."

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