This thesis looks at the writing of contemporary poets, translators, and publishers Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop, whose lives are so deeply invested in language, its production and its publication, that their literature reflects the sense that language, to use Ludwig Wittgenstein?s phrase, is ?a part of the human organism.? This thesis considers the expression of the self and the couple as discursively produced in the Waldrops? collaborative work, which splices together questions of the speech act and gender. Chapter 1, ??Paper-Authors,?? examines the autobiographical work Ceci n?est pas Keith / Ceci n?est pas Rosmarie to show how the Waldrops posit a notion of the self that isn?t singularly or definitively articulated. Chapter 2 examines Rosmarie?s Curves to the Apple, which wrestles with the gender binary in its intertextual dialogues with masculine-oriented source texts and dramatizes that wrestling in conversations on the page. Lastly, Chapter 3 looks at the collaborative works Flat With No Key and Light Travels in the context of critical work on collaboration to show how the Waldrops synthesize two voices, pleasurably and playfully.
"},{"label":"Degree","value":["Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors"]},{"label":"Administrative Note","value":"2018