WRITING UTOPIA NOW: Utopian Poetics In The Work Of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

This thesis examines Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE (1982), Audience Distant Relative (1977) and Reveillé dans la Brume (Awakened in the Mist) (1977). The premise of the thesis is an exploration of the various ways in which these works both perform and gesture toward the possibility of a ‘utopian’ experience of nonalienation. In Cha’s vocabulary, this takes the form of ‘interfusion’ and is related to the role of the artist as alchemist. Cha employs formal and linguistic innovations in her text, mail art and performance works to invite active participation from her readers and audience in a gesture toward embodied intersubjectivity. Her grappling with the challenges relating to the articulation of subjectivity place her work at the centre of contemporary critical debates around subjectivity and innovative poetics. In particular, recent scholarship on race and the poetic avant-garde has called for cross-disciplinary approaches to reading DICTEE as a text that explores the intersections of subjectivity and its performance in contemporary innovative poetics. Developing a theory of Utopian Poetics from my reading of Ernst Bloch’s utopian philosophy, I explore the ways in which DICTEE and Cha’s other works perform a yearning for non-alienated subjectivity that remains necessarily open and incomplete. My reading of DICTEE, in particular, is primarily informed by my own practices of yoga and meditation, and these practices form the basis of both my scholarly and creative engagements with this research. This scholarly thesis comprises Part 1 of a two-part submission. Part 2 comprises my own creative experiments with UtopianPoetics

A Study of Accomodation of Prosodic and Temporal Features in Spoken Dialogues in View of Speech Technology Applications

Inter-speaker accommodation is a well-known property of human speech and human interaction in general. Broadly it refers to the behavioural patterns of two (or more) interactants and the effect of the (verbal and non-verbal) behaviour of each to that of the other(s). Implementation of thisbehavior in spoken dialogue systems is desirable as an improvement on the naturalness of humanmachine interaction. However, traditional qualitative descriptions of accommodation phenomena do not provide sufficient information for such an implementation. Therefore, a quantitativedescription of inter-speaker accommodation is required. This thesis proposes a methodology of monitoring accommodation during a human or humancomputer dialogue, which utilizes a moving average filter over sequential frames for each speaker. These frames are time-aligned across the speakers, hence the name Time Aligned Moving Average (TAMA). Analysis of spontaneous human dialogue recordings by means of the TAMA methodology reveals ubiquitous accommodation of prosodic features (pitch, intensity and speech rate) across interlocutors, and allows for statistical (time series) modeling of the behaviour, in a way which is meaningful for implementation in spoken dialogue system (SDS) environments.In addition, a novel dialogue representation is proposed that provides an additional point of view to that of TAMA in monitoring accommodation of temporal features (inter-speaker pause length and overlap frequency). This representation is a percentage turn distribution of individual speakercontributions in a dialogue frame which circumvents strict attribution of speaker-turns, by considering both interlocutors as synchronously active. Both TAMA and turn distribution metrics indicate that correlation of average pause length and overlap frequency between speakers can be attributed to accommodation (a debated issue), and point to possible improvements in SDS “turntaking” behaviour. Although the findings of the prosodic and temporal analyses can directly inform SDS implementations, further work is required in order to describe inter-speaker accommodation sufficiently, as well as to develop an adequate testing platform for evaluating the magnitude ofperceived improvement in human-machine interaction. Therefore, this thesis constitutes a first step towards a convincingly useful implementation of accommodation in spoken dialogue systems

An exploration of the rhythm of Malay

In recent years there has been a surge of interest in speech rhythm. However we still lack a clear understanding of the nature of rhythm and rhythmic differences across languages. Various metrics have been proposed as means for measuring rhythm on the phonetic level and making typological comparisons between languages (Ramus et al, 1999; Grabe & Low, 2002; Dellwo, 2006) but the debate is ongoing on the extent to which these metrics capture the rhythmic basis of speech (Arvaniti, 2009; Fletcher, in press). Furthermore, cross linguistic studies of rhythm have covered a relatively small number of languages and research on previously unclassified languages is necessary to fully develop the typology of rhythm. This study examines the rhythmic features of Malay, for which, to date, relatively little work has been carried out on aspects rhythm and timing. The material for the analysis comprised 10 sentences produced by 20 speakers of standard Malay (10 males and 10 females). The recordings were first analysed using rhythm metrics proposed by Ramus et. al (1999) and Grabe & Low (2002). These metrics (∆C, %V, rPVI, nPVI) are based on durational measurements of vocalic and consonantal intervals. The results indicated that Malay clustered with other so-called syllable-timed languages like French and Spanish on the basis of all metrics. However, underlying the overall findings for these metrics there was a large degree of variability in values across speakers and sentences, with some speakers having values in the range typical of stressed-timed languages like English. Further analysis has been carried out in light of Fletcher’s (in press) argument that measurements based on duration do not wholly reflect speech rhythm as there are many other factors that can influence values of consonantal and vocalic intervals, and Arvaniti’s (2009) suggestion that other features of speech should also be considered in description of rhythm to discover what contributes to listeners’ perception of regularity. Spectrographic analysis of the Malay recordings brought to light two parameters that displayed consistency and regularity for all speakers and sentences: the duration of individual vowels and the duration of intervals between intensity minima. This poster presents the results of these investigations and points to connections between the features which seem to be consistently regulated in the timing of Malay connected speech and aspects of Malay phonology. The results are discussed in light of current debate on the descriptions of rhythm

Acoustic correlates of encoded prosody in written conversation

This thesis presents an analysis of certain punctuation devices such as parenthesis, italics and emphatic spellings with respect to their acoustic correlates in read speech. The class of punctuation devices under investigation are referred to as prosodic markers. The thesis therefore presents an analysis of features of the spoken language which are represented symbolically in text. Hence it is a characterization of aspects of the spoken language which have been transcribed or symbolized in the written medium and then translated back into a spoken form by a reader. The thesis focuses in particular on the analysis of parenthesis, the examination of encoded prominence and emphasis, and also addresses the use of paralinguistic markers which signal attitude or emotion.In an effort to avoid the use of self constructed or artificial material containing arbitrary symbolic or prosodic encodings, all material used for empirical analysis was taken from examples of electronic written exchanges on the Internet, such as from electronic mail messages and from articles posted on electronic newsgroups and news bulletins. This medium of language, which is referred to here as written conversation, provides a rich source of material containing encoded prosodic markers. These occur in the form of 'smiley faces' expressing attitudes or feelings, words highlighted by a number of means such as capitalization, italics, underscore characters, or asterisks, and in the form of dashes or parentheses, which provide suggestions on how the information in a text or sentence may be structured with regard to its informational content.Chapter 2 investigates in detail the genre of written conversation with respect to its place in an emerging continuum between written and spoken language, concentrating on transcriptional devices and their function as indicators of prosody. The implications these symbolic representations bear on the task of reading, by humans as well as machines, are then examined.Chapters 3 and 4 turn to the acoustic analysis of parentheticals and emphasis markers respectively. The experimental work in this thesis is based on readings of a corpus of selected materials from written conversation with the acoustic analysis concentrating on the differences between readings of texts with prosodic markers and readings of the same texts from which prosodic markers have been removed. Finally, the effect of prosodic markers is tested in perception experiments involving both human and resynthesized utterances

Geoffrey Hill: poetry, criticism and philosophy

This thesis examines the role played by philosophy in the poetry and criticism of Geoffrey Hill. Despite countless references to philosophy throughout Hill’s critical authorship, there exists no study of any length on this vital aspect of his thought. Through close readings of his poetry, criticism, and archival material, I attempt to demonstrate that philosophy has played a more crucial role in Hill’s work than has hitherto been assumed. Hill’s sceptical attitude to philosophy is intimately connected with his understanding of poetry as a sensate form of cognition. My thesis examines the ways Hill’s poetry and criticism responds to the challenges imposed upon this scepticism by a tradition of philosophy that emphasises the importance of the aesthetic to its analyses of modernity’s contradictions. I argue that a tradition of Anglophone Idealist thinkers, from S.T. Coleridge, via T.H. Green and F.H. Bradley, to Gillian Rose, is of sustained relevance to Hill’s work, shaping the way he thinks about politics, ethics and literature. In particular, German Idealism’s attempts to negotiate universality and particularity via an emphasis on the aesthetic bases of critical thought lay the groundwork for an understanding of poetry as a mode of cognition. Reading Hill’s poetry from For the Unfallen to Oraclau/Oracles, I try to show the ways in which problems traditionally conceived of as philosophical can be cognised in prosody and syntax. In part a vindication of Hill’s elevation of poetry over philosophy, these readings also show the degree to which Hill’s ‘craft of vision’ is indebted to conceptual and aesthetic models supplied by philosophy