Mutatas formas: Metamorphosis, absence, and desire in Ovid, Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Montale.

Mutatas formas focuses on the distinctive fashion in which Ovid, William Shakespeare, Francis Petrarch, and Eugenio Montale conceive of the moral/psychological universe of metamorphosis created by the narratives embedded in their poetry and set forth in their individually characteristic rhetorical styles. Metamorphosis is the phenomenal change of material form as expressed in rhetorical embellishment, which at once indicates and creates psychological reactions in the poetic subjects, characters, and readers alike. Transformation by metamorphosis entails not only temporal and physical change, but also the speaker's psychological reaction to the perception of such change. In each of the poets under discussion, the psychological effect of metamorphosis takes on a special cast. In every instance, however, whether the process of transformation involves the speaking subject of the poetry or its object, one consistently absent element is the longed-for stability of the poetic I in relation to the desired beloved. Instead of causing the cessation of poetic discourse, this perception of instability feeds back into the production of poetry. The fact of the speaker's tormented desire and the absence of its object are therefore not merely coincidental, but rather the necessary conditions which give rise to the poet's song. Desire is found everywhere in these poets' oeuvres and never quite fulfilled except, perhaps, in poetic triumph, fame, and immortality. Read within the poetics of absence and desire, the metamorphic and redemptive nature of poetry can thus be construed as a strategy of compensation, when erotic desire's satisfaction is irrevocably beyond reach. Although to a lesser extent in Montale, this strategy enables each of the poets to substitute for one form of passion---erotic love---another---creative inspiration---instead of renouncing his desire altogether.Ph.D.Classical literatureCommunication and the ArtsComparative literatureEnglish literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsRomance literatureTheaterUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/131925/2/9938468.pd