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Dissertation Information for Gary Burnett

NAME:
- Gary Burnett
- (Alias) Gary Dean Burnett
- (Alias) Gary D. Burnett

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Literature

SCHOOL:
- Princeton University (USA) (1988)

ADVISORS:
- None

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- None

MPACT Status: Complete - Except Indecipherables

Title: The mysteries between image and epic: H.D.'s poetry and poetics in transition

Abstract: "Considering the stature of some of her work and her connection to the major developments of modernism, the history of criticism of H.D.'s poetry has been remarkably spotty, particularly in the attention paid to the poems following the 1916 publication of Sea Garden and preceding the Trilogy of the Second World War. The purpose of my dissertation is to begin to fill this gap.

I attempt to find a way of reading the poems of H.D.'s middle period without falling prey to the limitations of a narrowly conceived a priori understanding of Imagism. Other concerns--details of H.D.'s life, the fact of war, a serious investigation of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the work of her contemporaries--all merge to form the context within which her writing takes place, and all push her writing well beyond the confines of Imagism. This dissertation traces the development of these concerns and uses this context as a way into the poems themselves.

Though H.D. has never been known as a critic or theorist of poetry, her work is full of meditations on her art, about what it is and about what it can and cannot do. Her novels, short stories, essays, and memoirs are all exploratory studies in poetics in which she reflects on the significance and possibilities of her art. Any reading of H.D.'s poems must turn to this other work as a source. This dissertation, growing out of such a necessity, alternates chapters devoted to Hymen, Heliodora, Red Roses For Bronze, and A Dead Priestess Speaks with chapters which focus on H.D.'s other work, particularly exploring her use of the Eleusinian Mysteries as a structural paradigm for a modern prophetic art of ""constatation."" The development of such an art requires a conception of creative power untainted by the destructive powers of war. The history of this development is also a history or H.D.'s relationship to the literary avant-garde of the teens, twenties, and thirties and to the writing of the major modernists, particularly Pound, Eliot, Williams, and Lawrence."

MPACT Scores for Gary Burnett

A = 8
C = 18
A+C = 26
T = 8
G = 1
W = 8
TD = 8
TA = 0
calculated 2014-01-28 10:15:30

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