Date of Award
2016
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelors
Department
Humanities
First Advisor
Konkol, Margaret
Area of Concentration
English
Abstract
This portfolio thesis presents two essays. The first essay examines how Elizabethan poets Samuel Daniel and Ben Jonson deploy the trope of childbirth in order to reframe their relationships with female patrons. A close analysis of this trope shows the different conceptions of authorship and the sociality of poetry between Daniel and Jonson. The second essay explores what I refer to as “open relations” in the American modernist poet William Carlos Williams’ poem “Romance Moderne.” I examine how Williams uses poetic form to democratically revolutionize the local, resulting in open-ended, nonhierarchical subject/object relations. The two essays in this portfolio thesis are tied together by an interest in the different ways poets have historically determined and been determined by the social.
Recommended Citation
Schlag, Andrew, "SOCIAL SUBJECTS: ESSAYS ON ELIZABETHAN AND MODERNIST SOCIAL POETICS" (2016). Theses & ETDs. 5276.
https://digitalcommons.ncf.edu/theses_etds/5276