Australian eco-pastoral poetry

Les Murray and Judith Wright are two Australian poets who are widely read as landscape poets. While this framing offers valuable insights into their work it often fails to bring the importance into a contemporary context or to recognise the long tradition Australia has had with , to use Leo Marx’ term, “the complex pastoral”. As Ruth Blair reminds us in her chapter “Hugging the Shore: The Green Mountains of South-East Queensland” in The Littoral Zone: Australian Contexts and their Writers it is accepted that North America has a tradition of the complex pastoral mode but it should be remembered that Australia also has a long history of this form. Both Judith Wright’s and Les Murray’s poetry encourages active campaigning for the environment .These Australian poets are eco-pastoral poets whose poetry encourages active reading rather than passive reflections. Their poetry speaks to the strong connection between the lived everyday landscape and the imagination of past, present and future. Their work is imbued with a strong sense of ecocritical awareness while at the same time drawing on pastoral conventions. These two Australian poets do not offer idealistic pastoral notions but rather reveal the complexities of lived human/nonhuman relationships. This paper will discuss these complexities and how poetry can be experienced as literature in action—ways for readers to connect with and negotiate with the land they inhabit. The research for this paper was, in part, drawn from the responses that local community library groups offered after reading the works of these poets. What became evident from this research was the way the poetry made the readers think not only of landscape as a place of refuge from the urban technological world but also as a contemporary place with connection to agency that motivates readers into active change.

Joy fear and poetry

Joy Fear and Poetry is an original performance work written, designed and directed by Natasha Budd in collaboration with 15 performers aged 7-12 years. It was performed in Brisbane as part of La Boite Theatre’s 2013 Indie Season. The production employs contemporary performance, postdramatic and constructivist methodologies to make an intervention into habituated patterns of positioning children in society. It embodies a model of practice that moves beyond participant empowerment toward a more nuanced process of co-artists creating intersubjective ‘composite texts’ (McCall 2011) for mainstream audiences. Joy Fear and Poetry experiments with techniques for performance making that create conditions conducive to authentic theatre making with children. These focus on dramaturgical, directorial and design strategies harnessed to maintain the performers’ focus, motivation and cognitive engagement within a reflexive, collaborative process.

Parasitoids with potential for the control of Hypsipyla grandella in Latin America

Hypsipyla grandella (Zeller) is the most important insect pest of the Meliaceae in the Neotropics. This paper reviews the information on H. grandella parasitoids in Latin America and the Caribbean. Preliminary data on the parasitoid complex in Turrialba, Costa Rica, are presented, where apparent parasitisation of H. grandella during 1995–1996 reached 36%. The lowest level of parasitisation occurred during the dry season. The parasitoid Apanteles sp. (= Hypomicrogaster hypsipylae de Santis?) (Hymenoptera: Braconidae) was the most abundant larval parasitoid with a mean of 22 parasitoids per parasitised larva and a sex ratio of 3:1 females to males. Brachymeria conica Ashmead (Hymenoptera: Chalcididae) was found parasitising pupae, but at low frequency

Fresh Cuttings: A Celebration of Fiction and Poetry from UQP's Black Writing Series

As the first anthology of UQP's indigenous-authored books, Fresh Cuttings represents the very best of fiction and poetry publishing from UQP's Black Australian Writing series. An introduction by the editors and a biography of each author is included.

Populations of models, experimental designs and coverage of parameter space by Latin Hypercube and Orthogonal Sampling

In this paper we have used simulations to make a conjecture about the coverage of a t-dimensional subspace of a d-dimensional parameter space of size n when performing k trials of Latin Hypercube sampling. This takes the form P(k,n,d,t) = 1 - e^(-k/n^(t-1)). We suggest that this coverage formula is independent of d and this allows us to make connections between building Populations of Models and Experimental Designs. We also show that Orthogonal sampling is superior to Latin Hypercube sampling in terms of allowing a more uniform coverage of the t-dimensional subspace at the sub-block size level. These ideas have particular relevance when attempting to perform uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analyses.

The non-literary Latin letters. A study of their syntax and pragmatics

This dissertation studies the language of Latin letters that were written in Egypt and Vindolanda (in northern Britain) during the period 1st century BC 3rd century AD on papyri, ostraca, and wooden tablets. The majority of the texts is, in one way or another, connected with the Roman army. The focus of the study is on syntax and pragmatics. Besides traditional philological methods, modern syntactic theory is used as well, especially in the pragmatic analysis. The study begins with a critical survey of certain concepts that are current in the research on the Latin language, most importantly the concept of vulgar Latin , which, it is argued, seems to be used as an abstract noun for variation and change in Latin . Further, it is necessary to treat even the non-literary material primarily as written texts and not as straightforward reflections of spoken language. An examination of letter phraseology shows that there is considerable variation between the two major geographical areas of provenance. Latin letter writing in Egypt was influenced by Greek. The study highlights the importance of seeing the letters as a text type, with recurring phraseological elements appearing in the body text as well. It is argued that recognising these elements is essential for the correct analysis of the syntax. Three areas of syntax are discussed in detail: sentence connection (mainly parataxis), syntactically incoherent structures and word order (the order of the object and the verb). For certain types of sentence connection we may plausibly posit an origin in spoken Latin, but for many other linguistic phenomena attested in this material the issue of spoken Latin is anything but simple. Concerning the study of historical syntax, the letters offer information about the changing status of the accusative case. Incoherent structures may reflect contaminations in spoken language but usually the reason for them is the inability of the writer to put his thoughts into writing, especially when there is something more complicated to be expressed. Many incoherent expressions reflect the need to start the predication with a thematic constituent. Latin word order is seen as resulting from an interaction of syntactic and pragmatic factors. The preference for an order where the topic is placed sentence-initially can be seen in word order more generally as well. Furthermore, there appears a difference between Egypt and Vindolanda. The letters from Vindolanda show the order O(bject) V(erb) clearly more often than the letters from Egypt. Interestingly, this difference correlates with another, namely the use of the anaphoric pronoun is. This is an interesting observation in view of the fact that both of these are traditional Latin features, as opposed to those that foreshadow the Romance development (VO order and use of the anaphoric ille). However, it is difficult to say whether this is an indication of social or regional variation.

The Phraseology and Structure of Latin Building Inscriptions in Roman North Africa

This study analyses the diction of Latin building inscriptions. Despite its importance, this topic has rarely been discussed before: the most substantial contribution on the subject is a short dissertation by Klaus Gast (1965) that focuses on 100 inscriptions dating mostly from the Republican period. Marietta Horster (2001) also touched upon this theme in her thesis on imperial building inscriptions. I have collected my source material in North Africa because more Latin building inscriptions dating from the Imperial period have survived there than in any other area of the Roman Empire. By means of a thorough and independent survey, I have assembled all relevant African Latin building inscriptions datable to the Roman period (between 146 BC and AD 425), 1002 texts, into a corpus. These inscriptions are all fully edited in Appendix 1; Appendix 2 contains references to earlier editions. To facilitate search operations, both are also available in electronic form. They are downloadable from the address http://www.helsinki.fi/hum/kla/htm/jatkoopinnot.htm. Chapter one is an introduction dealing with the nature of building inscriptions as source material. Chapter two offers a statistical overview of the material. The following main section of the work falls into five chapters, each of which analyses one main part of a building inscription. An average building inscription can be divided into five parts: the starting phrase opens the inscription (a dedication to gods, for example), the subject part identifies the builder, the object part describes the constructed or repaired building, the predicate part records the building activity and the supplement part offers additional information on the project (it can specify the funding, for instance). These chapters are systematic and chronological and their purpose is to register and interpret the phrases used, to analyse reasons for their use and for their popularity among the different groups of builders. Chapter eight, which follows the main section of the work, creates a typology of building inscriptions based on their structure. It also presents the most frequently attested types of building inscriptions. The conclusion describes, on a general level, how the diction of building inscriptions developed during the period of study and how this striking development resulted from socio-economic changes that took place in Romano-African society during Antiquity. This study shows that the phraseology of building inscriptions had a clear correlation both with the type of builder and with the date of carving. Private builders tended to accentuate their participation (especially its financial side) in the project; honouring the emperor received more emphasis in the building inscriptions set up by communities; the texts produced by the army were concise. The chronological development is so clear that it enables stylistic dating. At the beginning of the imperial period the phrases were clear, concrete, formal and stereotyped but by Late Antiquity they have become vague, subjective, flexible, varied and even rhetorically or poetically coloured.

Drops That Open Worlds : Image of Water in the Poetry of Euphrase Kezilahabi

Euphrase Kezilahabi on tansanialainen kirjailija, joka ensimmäisenä julkaisi swahilinkielisen vapaalla mitalla kirjoitetun runokokoelman. Perinteisessä swahilirunoudessa tiukat muotosäännöt ovat tärkeitä, ja teos synnytti kiivasta keskustelua. Runoteokset Kichomi ( Viilto , Kipu , 1974) ja Karibu Ndani ( Tervetuloa sisään , 1988) sekä Kezilahabin muu tuotanto voidaan nähdä uuden sukupolven taiteena. Kezilahabi on arvostettu runoilija, mutta hänen runojaan ei aiemmin ole käännetty englanniksi (yksittäisiä säkeitä lukuunottamatta), eikä juurikaan tutkittu yksityiskohtaisesti. Yleiskuvaan pyrkivissä lausunnoissa Kezilahabin runouden on hyvin usein määritelty olevan poliittista. Monet Kezilahabin runoista ottavatkin kantaa yhteiskunnallisiin kysymyksiin, mutta niiden pohdinta on kuitenkin runoissa vain yksi taso. Sen lisäksi Kezilahabin lyriikassa on paljon muuta ennen kartoittamatonta tämä tutkimus keskittyy veden kuvaan (the image of water). Kezilahabi vietti lapsuutensa saarella Victoria-järven keskellä, ja hänen vesikuvastonsa on rikasta. Tutkimuskysymyksenä on, mitä veden kuva runoteoksissa Kichomi ja Karibu Ndani esittää. Runojen analysoinnissa ja tulkinnassa on tarkasteltu myös sitä, miten äänteellinen taso osallistuu kuvien luomiseen. Tutkimuksen määritelmä kuvasta pohjautuu osittain Hugh Kennerin näkemykseen, jonka mukaan oleellista kuvassa on kirjaimellinen taso. Kennerin lähtökohtaan on yhdistetty John Shoptawin teoriaa, joka korostaa runon äänteellisen puolen tärkeyttä merkityksen muodostumisessa. Foneemien analyysissä vaikutteena on ollut Reuven Tsurin teoria. Analyysiosio osoittaa, että veden kuva edustaa ja käsittelee teoksissa lukuisia teemoja: elämää, kuolemaa, fyysistä vetovoimaa, runoutta, mielikuvitusta ja (ali)tajuntaa sekä moraalia. Veden kuvan tutkimuksen pohjalta on nähtävissä, että Kezilahabin filosofia asettuu elävä/kuollut- ja elämä/kuolema dikotomioiden ulkopuolelle.

"Four Ways of Writing the City" : St. Petersburg-Leningrad as a Metaphor in the Poetry of Joseph Brodsky

The present study discusses the theme of St. Petersburg-Leningrad in Joseph Brodsky's verse works. The chosen approach to the evolving im-age of the city in Brodsky's poetry is through four metaphors: St. Petersburg as "the common place" of the Petersburg Text, St. Petersburg as "Paradise and/or Hell", St. Petersburg as "a Utopian City" and St. Petersburg as "a Void". This examination of the city-image focusses on the aspects of space and time as basic categories underlying the poet's poetic world view. The method used is close reading, with an emphasis on semantical interpretation. The material consists of eighteen poems dating from 1958 to 1994. Apart from investigating the spatio-temporal features, the study focusses on exposing and analysing the allusions in the scrutinised works to other texts from Russian and Western belles lettres. Terminology (introduced by Bakhtin and Yury Lotman, among others) concerning the poetics of space in literature is employed in the present study. Conceptions originating from the paradigm of possible worlds are also used in elucidating the position of fictional and actual chronotopes and heroes in Brodsky's poetry. Brodsky's image of his native city is imbued with intertextual linkings. Through reminiscences of the "Divine Comedy" and Russian modernists, the city is paralleled with Dante's "lost and accursed" Florence, as well as with the lost St. Petersburg of Mandel'shtam and Akhmatova. His city-image is related to the Petersburg myth in Russian literature through their common themes of death and separation as well as through the merging of actual realia with the fictional worlds of the Petersburg Text. In his later poems, when his view of the city is that of an exiled poet, the city begins to lose its actual world referents, turning into a mental realm which is no longer connected to any particular geographical location or historical time. It is placed outside time. The native city as the homeland in its entirety is replaced by another existence created in language.

Patterns of Transcendence : Classical Myth in Marina Tsvetaeva's Poetry of the 1920s

This study examines the position and meaning of Classical mythological plots, themes and characters in the oeuvre of the Russian Modernist poet Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941). The material consists of lyric poems from the collection Posle Rossii (1928) and two longer lyrical tragedies, Ariadna (1924) and Fedra (1927). These works are examined in the context of Russian Modernism and Tsvetaeva s own poetic development, also taking into account the author s biography, namely, her correspondence with Boris Pasternak. Tsvetaeva s appropriations of the myths enter into a dialogue with the Classical tradition and with the earlier Russian and Western literary manifestations of the source material. Her Classical texts are inextricably linked with her own authorial myth, they are used to project both her ideas about poetry as well as the authored self of her poems. An important context for Tsvetaeva s application of the Classical myths is the concept of the Platonic ladder of Eros. This plot evokes the process of transcendence of the mortal subject into the immaterial realm and is applied by the author as an extended metaphor of the poet s birth. Emphasizing the dialectical movement between the earthly and the divine, Tsvetaeva s Classical personae foreground various positions of the individual between these two realms. By means of kaleidoscopic reformulations of similar metaphors and concepts, Tsvetaeva s mythological poems illustrate the poet s position between the material and the immaterial and the various consequences of this dichotomy on the creative mission. At the heart of Tsvetaeva s appropriation of the Sibyl, Phaedra, Eurydice and Ariadne is the tension between the body and disembodiment. The two lyrical tragedies develop the dichotomous worldview further, nevertheless emphasizing the dual perspective of the divine and the earthly realms: immaterial existence is often evaluated from a material perspective and vice versa. The Platonic subtext is central for Ariadna, focussing on Theseus development from an earthly hero to a spiritual one. Fedra concentrates on Phaedra s divinely induced physical passion, which is nevertheless evoked in a creative light.

Non-finite constructions in Old English : with special reference to syntactic borrowing from Latin

My dissertation is a corpus-based study of non-finite constructions in Old English (OE). It revisits the question of Latin influence on the OE syntax, offering a new evaluation of syntactic interference between Latin and OE, and, more generally, of the contact situation in the OE period, drawing on methods used in studying grammaticalization and language contact. I address three non-finite constructions: absolute participial construction, accusative-and-infinitive construction, and nominative-and-infinitive construction, exemplified respectively in present-day English as - She looked like a pixie sometimes, her eyes darting here and there, forever watchful (BNC CCM 98); - My first acquaintance with her was when I heard her sing (BNC CFY 2215); - Charles the Bald was said to resemble his grandfather physically (BNC HPT 175). This study compares data from translated texts against the background of original OE writings, establishing dependencies and differences between the two. Although the contrastive analysis of source and target texts is one of the major methods employed in the study, translation and translation strategies as such are only my secondary foci. The emphasis is rather on what source/target comparison can tell us about the OE non-finite syntax and the typological differences between Latin and OE in this domain, and on whether contact-induced change can originate in translation. In terms of theoretical framework, I have adopted functional-typological approach, which rests on the principles of iconicity and event integration, and to the best of my knowledge, has not been applied systematically to OE non-finite constructions. Therefore one more aim of the dissertation is to test this framework and to see how OE fits into the cross-linguistic picture of non-finites. My research corpus consists of two samples: 1) written OE closely dependent on the Latin originals, based on editions of two gloss texts, five translations, and Latin originals of these texts, representing four text types: hymns, religious regulations, homily/life narrative, and biblical narrative (180,622 words); and 2) written OE as far independent from Latin as possible, based on a selection from the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE) and representing five text types: laws, charters, correspondence, chronicle narrative, and homily/life narrative (274,757 words).

Counter-figures : An Essay on Antimetaphoric Resistance: Paul Celan's Poetry and Poetics at the Limits of Figurality

Titled "An Essay on Antimetaphoric Resistance", the dissertation investigates what is here being called "Counter-figures": a term which has in this context a certain variety of applications. Any other-than-image or other-than-figure, anything that cannot be exhausted by figuration (and that is, more or less, anything at all, except perhaps the reproducible images and figures themselves) can be considered "counter-figurative" with regard to the formation of images and figures, ideas and schemas, "any graven image, or any likeness of any thing". Singularity and radical alterity, as well as temporality and its peculiar mode of uniqueness are key issues here, and an ethical dimension is implied by, or intertwined with, the aesthetic. In terms borrowed from Paul Celan's "Meridian" speech, poetry may "allow the most idiosyncratic quality of the Other, its time, to participate in the dialogue". This connection between singularity, alterity and temporality is one of the reasons why Celan so strongly objects to the application of the traditional concept of metaphor to poetry. As Celan says, "carrying over [übertragen]" by metaphor may imply an unwillingness to "bear with [mittragen]" and to "endure [ertragen]" the poem. The thesis is divided into two main parts. The first consists of five distinct prolegomena which all address the mentioned variety of applications of the term "counter-figures", and especially the rejection or critique of either metaphor (by Aristotle, for instance) or the concept of metaphor (defined by Aristotle, and sometimes deemed "anti-poetic" by both theorists and poets). Even if we restrict ourselves to the traditional rhetorico-poetical terms, we may see how, for instance, metonymy can be a counter-figure for metaphor, allegory for symbol, and irony for any single trope or for any piece of discourse at all. The limits of figurality may indeed be located at these points of intersection between different types of tropes or figures, and even between figures or tropes and the "non-figurative trope" or "pseudo-figure" called catachresis. The second part, following on from the open-ended prolegomena, concentrates on Paul Celan's poetry and poetics. According to Celan, true poetry is "essentially anti-metaphoric". I argue that inasmuch as we are willing to pay attention to the "will" of the poetic images themselves (the tropes and metaphors in a poem) to be "carried ad absurdum", as Celan invites us to do, we may find alternative ways of reading poetry and approaching its "secret of the encounter", precisely when the traditional rhetorical instruments, and especially the notion of metaphor, become inapplicable or suspicious — and even where they still seem to impose themselves.

War and Revolution in St. Petersburg : Modernist Links in the Poetry of Edith Södergran and Anna Andreevna Akhmatova

Important modernists in their own countries, Anna Akhmatova and Edith Södergran are compared in this dissertation as poets whose poetry reflects the climactic events of the early twentieth century in Finland and Russia. A comparatist, biographical and historical approach is used to uncover the circumstances surrounding these events. First the poets’ early works are reviewed and their contemporaries are mentioned to provide a poetic context. Then a brief review of Finnish and Russian history situates them historically. Next, the rich literary diversity of St. Petersburg’s Silver Age is presented and the work of the poets is viewed in context before their poetry is compared, as the First World War, October Revolution and subsequent Finnish Civil War impact their writing. While biography is not the primary focus, it becomes important as inevitably the writers’ lives are changed by cataclysmic events and the textual analysis of the poems in Swedish, Russian and English shows the impact of war on their poetry. These two poets have not been compared before in a critical review in English and this work contributes to needed work in English. They share certain common modernist traits: attention to the word, an intimate, unconventional voice, and a concern with audience. In addition, they both reject formal traditions while they adopt new forms and use modern, outside influences such as art, architecture and philosophy as subject matter and a lens through which to focus their poetry. While it may seem that Anna Akhmatova was the most socially aware poet, because of the censorship she endured under Stalin, my research has revealed that actually Edith Södergran showed the most social consciousness. Thus, a contrast of the poets’ themes reveals these differences in their approaches. Both poets articulated a vibrant response to war and revolution becoming modernists in the process. In their final works created in the years before their deaths, they reveal the solace they found in nature as well as final mentions of the violent events of their youth. Keywords: St. Petersburg, Modernism, Symbolism, Acmeism, Silver Age, Finland-Swedish literature