The Toilette of Venus by François Boucher, 1751, depicts the mythical goddess, Venus. The painting was commissioned by Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, better known as Madame de Pompadour, chief mistress to King Louis XV of France and Boucher’s best patron. Featuring a nude woman perched on a luxurious sofa, surrounded by winged putti and exotic metal ornament, Boucher’s Venus turned heads in the eighteenth-century and her popularity persists in the twenty-first. She inhabits the apex of fantasy — sensual, available, and just out of reach.Upon first glance The Toilette of Venus appears to be in a setting appropriate to its mythological origin. However, when observed more closely it is evident that something new is happening. Boucher’s Venus broke with the canonical representation of a mythological nude by integrating the popular style of turquerie, then the height of fashion due to shifting cultural and economic conditions. By applying twentieth-century visual theory to the image it is clear that Boucher took layers of both genres and wove them together into a new type of fantasy image, appropriate only for Madame de Pompadour’s new space in the Château de Bellevue. In order to understand why Boucher employed these techniques and their intended effect we must detangle the layers of objects and style by exploring the cultural, economic, and sociological conditions in which Boucher produced The Toilette of Venus.

Microbial nitrogen cycling in hot desert soils is dominated by bursts of biogeochemical metabolic activity during short periods of water availability. Both edaphic traits of the soil ecosystem and the functional traits of the soil microbiome influence the transformation of nitrogen during this process. The aim of this research is to determine how soil bacteri and fungi transform mineral N and how air pollution in the form of atmospheric nitrogen deposition (N-dep) impacts nitrogen cycling. I used a set of desert field sites across a nitrogen deposition gradient in order to investigate soil microbiomes with increasing exposure to chronic atmospheric N-dep. In Chapter 1, I track bacterial and fungal communities over time in response to N addition to show patterns of community change corresponding to NO emissions. In Chapter 2, dry soils were taken from across the N-dep gradient and incubated with 15NH4 in the lab in order to stimulate nitrogen assimilation by soil bacteria. Using this heavy isotope substrate enriched nitrogen assimilating bacterial DNA with 15N, allowing me to determine the degree of growth using DNA-quantitative stable isotope probing (DNA-qSIP). I then sequenced the bacterial 16S ribosomal gene from this qSIP-processed DNA and analyzed the sequence data to calculate isotope incorporation by each bacterial species. I found that with increasing exposure to N-dep, there was a more phylogenetically diverse group of assimilators. Furthermore, assimilation of NH4 across the N-dep gradient was dominated by 5 bacterial orders: Rhizobiales, Burkholderiales, Frankiales, Cytophagales, and Sphingomonadales. In Chapter 3, rewetting experiments were performed at 4 desert field sites with increasing annual loads of N-dep in order to stimulate bacterial metabolic activity. Metagenomes were sequenced in order to determine which nitrogen cycling functional genes were present in the soil, and which genes increase in abundance during rewetting. I found that N-dep significantly altered the composition of genes related to denitrification and organic matter decomposition, although I did not find any significant patterns of gene abundance before and after rewetting. Overall, these experiments demonstrate that nitrogen deposition alters several aspects of the desert nitrogen cycle by changing the composition and gene inventory of soil bacteria.

This dissertation considers poetic responses to the Shoah: the critical and cultural consequences of the genre in relation to this catastrophe have been largely neglected or discussed primarily in light of Theodor Adorno's narrow statement questioning the possibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz. I maintain, however, that it is vital to engage the transnational and multi-lingual breadth of poetry, which lays claim to the problems as well as the significance of its endurance, as it confronts attempts to regulate creative impulses on the one hand and to mandate forms of testimony and commemoration on the other hand. In what I term a "poetics of survival," the works I examine employ intertextuality to question the ethical implications of situating poetic voice and address. These works explore the limits of poetic form, in order to foreground poetry as a literary mode that is involved in critical discourse and ethical critique rather than invested only in aesthetic or historical representation. Thus, the poets insist upon their dialogues and disputes across genres ranging from correspondence to philosophy, as they confront cultural and textual traditions that seek to mourn and commemorate devastating loss.

In the Introduction, I focus on theoretical and critical conceptions of survival, illustrating the ways in which a poetics of survival problematizes literary forms that attempt to make sense of individual and communal suffering, both through authoring and through reading. Chapter One investigates Rachel Blau DuPlessis' long poem "Draft 52: Midrash," which argues with Adorno's famous declaration that "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." Through elaborating and responding to her interpretation of Adorno's claim, DuPlessis' poem urges us to reconsider the categorical understanding of his pronouncement, which has shaped critical discourse. I take up DuPlessis' poetic challenge to Adorno's critical authority at the same time that I investigate the manifold ways in which he himself modulated this argument throughout his oeuvre. Chapter Two reflects on the intertextual resonances in both the poetry and the correspondence between Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs: I examine their figurations of breath, which I read as the critical boundary that simultaneously separates and binds together life and death, and as the mutual foundation and limit of poetry and existence after the Shoah. Chapter Three offers readings of the Yiddish poet Malka Heifetz Tussman, whose work confronts, refutes, and reimagines the viability of a poetics of survival in a language whose very existence has been called into question through the annihilation of so many of its speakers.

Ultimately, I postulate that a poetics of survival both institutes and explores a crucial tension between experience and expression. This tension takes shape as a limit-space, where the urgency and difficulty of the poetic emerge with particular force, since poetry is the genre most intimately and consciously bound up with the consequence of voice and address in the context of an exploration of form. By looking at the complicated relationship between body and text - particularly through the ways in which the writers figure survival as a condition that entangles life and language - I illuminate the intertwined pressures of ethics and memory, while questioning implicit hierarchies that seek to regulate the connections between the literal and the figural, the critical and the poetic, the historical and the aesthetic.

Self-regulation requires bringing one’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior in line with one’s goals. Although this capacity is essential for social functioning, most studies have focused on processes within individuals. However, emerging theory and evidence indicate that self-regulation shapes the quality of people’s relationships, and conversely, people’s relationships affect the way they self-regulate. Across two studies, this dissertation investigated this reciprocal interplay. In addition, recent theories suggest that high-frequency heart rate variability (HF-HRV) may index self-regulation capacity and effort. In both studies, I assessed associations between HF-HRV and self-regulation, in order to test this biological marker. Study 1 tested how a self-control challenge affected the quality and consequences of couples’ interactions. Undergraduate couples (N = 148 individuals) were randomly assigned to sit with a bowl of cookies (or radishes, in the control condition), and not eat any. Afterwards, they discussed points of disagreement and appreciation in their relationship. The self-control challenge worsened couples’ interactions, as reflected in observer ratings of their behavior, self-reports of affect and attitudes, and a behavioral measure of aggression. Many of these effects were stronger for couples with lower relationship quality. Study 2 tested whether thinking of a supportive relationship (or an acquaintance, in the control condition) affected participants’ negative emotional responses, and their emotion regulation. Although we had a large sample (N = 206) and excellent statistical power, we found no evidence that prompting participants to think of a supportive relationship affected their emotional responses, or self-regulation. In both studies, we found little support for the hypothesized associations between HF-HRV and self-regulation.