Dirty Modernism: Ecological Objects In American Poetry, Michael D. Sloane

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines how early-to-mid twentieth century American poetry is preoccupied with objects that unsettle the divide between nature and culture. Given the entanglement of these two domains, I argue that American modernism is “dirty.” This designation leads me to sketch what I call “dirty modernism,” which includes the registers of waste, energy, animality, raciality, and the sensual. Reading these registers, I turn to what I call “ecological objects,” or representations of how nature and culture come together, which includes trash, natural resources, inanimals, and tools. Through an ecocritical mode of analysis, I introduce dirty modernism with the Baroness Elsa …

The Cubist's View Of Montmartre: A Stylistic And Contextual Analysis Of Juan Gris' Cityscape Imagery, 1911-1912, Geoffrey David Schwartz

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the stylistic and contextual significance of five Cubist cityscape pictures by Juan Gris from 1911 to 1912. These drawn and painted cityscapes depict specific views near Gris' Bateau-Lavoir residence in Place Ravignan. Place Ravignan was a small square located off of rue Ravignan that became a central gathering space for local artists and laborers living in neighboring tenements. In these early Cubist cityscapes, Gris attempted to reinterpret Montmartre's architectural landscape in abstracted geometric forms. My stylistic analyses establish several contextual readings for Gris' cityscapes that first address his profound interest in earlier Cubist landscapes painted by Pablo …

Archives Of Transnational Modernism: Lost Networks Of Art And Activism, Anne Donlon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Archives Of Transnational Modernism: Lost Networks Of Art And Activism considers the work of several intersecting figures in transnational modernism, in order to reassess the contours of race and gender in anglophone literature of the interwar period in the U.S. and Europe. Writers and organizers experimented with literary form and print culture to build and maintain networks of internationalism. This dissertation begins to suggest some of these maps of connection, paying particular attention to people who played key roles as hubs within networks. British radical Sylvia Pankhurst's 1920s publications, which have not been much considered in terms of literary contribution, …

Literature In The Archive Of Terror: Badiou, Blanchot, Beckett, Christopher Langlois

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation conjoins the two most dominant trends in the secondary criticism of Samuel Beckett today: the philosophical and historicist approaches to his work. It explores how the Reign of Terror that erupted during the French Revolution acts as a traumatic catalyst for key developments in modernist literature and continental philosophy of which the philosophical writing of Alain Badiou, the literary-critical writing of Maurice Blanchot, and the literary-narrative writing of Beckett are perhaps the most exemplary expressions. The overarching thesis that this dissertation defends is that Beckett’s post-war prose work in The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing is overshadowed by …

Toward A Postmodern Avant-Garde: Labour, Virtuosity, And Aesthetics In An American New Music Ensemble, John R. Pippen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the aesthetic beliefs and labour practices of the American new music ensemble eighth blackbird (lower-case intentional). Drawing on ethnographic research conducted with the ensemble for the past six years, I show how the ensemble responds to specific cultural pressures endemic to the classical music scene, its new music vanguard, and to the contemporary United States. eighth blackbird, I argue, has created an ensemble identity and performance style designed to satisfy numerous audience positions, from experts well-versed in the intricacies of musical techniques to lay-persons unacquainted with the values and practices of new or classical music. This attempt …

From Pastorals To Paterson: Ecology In The Poetry And Poetics Of William Carlos Williams, Daniel Edmund Burke

Dissertations (1934 -)

Modernist poet William Carlos Williams died in 1962 - a landmark year in the history of the modern environmentalist movement. He did not live to see contemporary culture come to the deeper appreciation of humanity's place in the world which we now know as ecology. This dissertation will argue, however, that supporting his entire oeuvre of poetry are philosophical and poetic underpinnings which resonate strongly with - and usefully anticipate - our modern understanding of the interpenetrative relationship between natural and culture, human and nonhuman. I begin by tracing the roots of Williams's "ecopoetics" back to the father of Williams's …

At The Threshold: Edgard Varese, Modernism, And The Experience Of Modernity, Robert Jackson Wood

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The writings of composer Edgard Varese have long been celebrated for their often ecstatic, optimistic proclamations about the future of music. With manifesto-like brio, they put forth a vision of radically new instruments and sounds, delineate the parameters for spatially oriented composition, and initiate the discourse of what would become electronic music. Yet just as important for understanding Varese is the other side of the coin: a thematics of failure concerning the music of the present--a failure of old instruments to transcend their limitations, a failure of technique to achieve certain compositional ideals, and a failure of music to connect …

Reclaiming Space: Buildings In Modernist Literature And Film, Sreenjaya Ria Banerjee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that modernists like Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and Alain Resnais construct literary and filmic works that rely on interruptions and elliptical narration to gesture towards an aesthetics of modernity that counters the interest in monoliths concurrently shown by architectural modernism. This is particularly evident in the context of the war memorial, where regimented public memory is countered by the artistic works discussed through their emphasis on private memorials that are changeable, contingent, and mutable. This is a fundamentally altered vision of twentieth century modernity than that embraced by the architectural mode.

Agreeable Despair: Modernism And Melancholy, Derrick James Gentry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study considers a group of distinctly modernist philosophers for whom aesthetic and reflective practices represented a way out of the paralysis of a culture dominated by narrowly conceived philosophical values. These modernist philosophers, I argue, helped to give birth to mode of experimental writing that Robert Musil called "essayism." I begin in Chapter One with an account of Walter Benjamin's experimental concept of melancholy and its intersection with the avant-garde practices of French Surrealism. Chapter One begins to contrast Benjamin's concept of melancholy with Friedrich Nietzsche's therapeutic efforts to transform and overcome melancholy on both a personal and a …

Flapper Fashion In The Context Of Cultural Changes Of America In The 1920s, Soo Hyun Park

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study aimed to analyze the key characteristics of flapper fashion, which shaped the American fashion scene in the 1920s, and to review how this trend reflected the society at that time, which was changing fast in terms of the society, economy, and culture. Towards this end, comprehensive scanning of flapper-related images found in a variety of media at the time was done, and it was revealed that flapper fashion indeed reflected the prominent changes in women's role in the society in compliance with the early-20th-century modernity, which was a far cry from the traditions, while at the same time …

Revisiting Modernism And The Ballets Russes: What Contemporary Choreography Can Learn From Diaghilev, Kelly Oden

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In order to discover some of the features of what contemporary choreographers, dancers, artists, and musicians can learn from the Ballets Russes and the defining artistic movement of which they were a part-modernism-we must first take a journey back to Paris in the early twentieth century and work to unravel modernism's meaning in relation to different artistic media. We must ask complicated questions: What is modernism? What defines artistic success? What does it take to make something truly new? By asking such questions we can come to a deeper understanding of the conditions necessary to create a thriving artistic environment …

Tragedy, Ecstasy, Doom: Modernist Moods Of "West Side Story", Andrew M. Falcao

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis looks to reposition West Side Story (Jerome Robbins/Robert Wise, 1961) as an example of (neo-)modernist art. Placing the film within its context of Hollywood musicals, I see West Side Story as a particularly rich locus in which to study the genre’s modernist impulses. Using the theories of Miriam Hansen’s vernacular modernism and John Orr’s neo-modernism primarily, I examine the film’s formal aspects, especially that of colour. Seeing the cinematic screen as analogous to a painter’s canvas, I draw comparisons with modern art of the period, particularly the Abstract Expressionists of the New York School. The film’s precarious blending …

‘Longest Way Round Is The Shortest Way Home:’ Escapism In The Fictions Of James Joyce And Wyndham Lewis, Justin R. Noble

Honors Theses

In the early 20th century many ideas existed about the figure of the artist, and what the artist should do. There arose the idea that the artist should be removed from society so that he may more effectively critique and effect it in his art—that the artist should be an escapist figure. The development of the idea of escapism can be seen in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, and Wyndham Lewis’s Enemy of the Stars. These texts show the development of the artist as escapism, the limits of escapism as an artist, …

A Modernism Against Maestros: Horacio Quiroga And The Transnational Automaton, Jacqueline Fetzer

All Theses

In this paper I will explore the possibility that Horacio Quiroga's regional treatment of modernist themes is more than a creole adaptation or mimicry of the European maestros, instead placing Quiroga in dialogue with an international framework of contemporary texts that explore conflicting attitudes towards modernity through dark portrayals of science and technology. I focus on Quiroga's 1910 novella El hombre artificial (The Artificial Man), a text with an amalgamation of themes and plot devices that have caused the work itself to be dismissed for being of 'poor quality.' Yet these themes and formal features integrally connect Quiroga's novella to …

"The Last Of The Great Bohemians": Film Poetry, Myth, And Sexuality In Greenwich Village And The Atlantic, 1930-1975, Thomas Winfield Hafer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In Greenwich Village, a final generation of bohemians contested the rise and trajectory of gay liberation. During the 1930s, this generation blended modernist poetry and sexuality to develop a new manifestation of bohemia. In the postwar period, they transformed modern poetry into the new artistic medium of film that was critical to shaping postwar American art and culture. This wave of bohemia was built on certain modernist principles, including a universalist understanding of sexuality and identity that was different from, and incompatible with, the growth of identity politics in the 1960s. This dissertation argues that this was a last gasp …

Uneven Ground: Figurations Of The Rural Modern In The U.S. South, 1890-1945, Benjamin S. Child

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

New modernist studies has opened wide the discussion about what modernism means, when it begins, and, compellingly for the purposes of this project, where it occurs. Exploring intersections between modernization, modernism, labor, and segregation in the agricultural South, this dissertation demonstrates how the effects of nascent industrialization, emergent technologies, and "modern" thought are animated by figures and spaces associated with--or performing--versions of rurality. The project is divided into three major sections. In the first, I suggest that the contradictions of African American life in the post-Reconstruction world are parsed in the period's literature through the presence of a veiled georgic …

Critique Is Not Enough : The Empirical Imperatives Of Innovative American Poetry, Christopher Rizzo

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Critique is Not Enough: The Empirical Imperatives of Innovative American Poetryproposes that innovative modern and early contemporary American poetries redefine the relation of knowledge, consciousness, and poetic performance to lived experience. This study demonstrates how the radically different poetic projects of Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Charles Olson not only equally insist upon empirically investigative poetics, but also endeavor, each to each, to individualize their poetic methodologies, which thus challenges the generalized Enlightenment myth of rationality. In that each of these writers undertakes to redefine the relation of knowledge, consciousness, and poetic performance to lived experience, they also …

Fordism & Modernist Forms : The Transformation Of Work And Style, William Jeffrey Casto

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Fordism and Modernist Forms argues that Fordism is an American manifestation of a global tendency towards concentration and rationalization that we know as "monopoly capitalism." Fordism, as part of the historical transition from competitive to monopoly capitalism, reshapes and reorganizes the structures of modern life - accentuating repetitive habits and efficient behavior, replacing craftsmanship with deskilled labor, and integrating consumer culture into identity formation. These socio-economic transformations obfuscate the actually existing structures that produce their uneven societies and the monotonies of modern, everyday "life" and, therefore, create an artistic crisis of representation as the individual increasingly relies on the prisms …

Australia’S Microtonal Modernist: The Life And Works Of Elsie Hamilton (1880-1965), Talisha Goh

Theses : Honours

This dissertation represents the most complete account to date of the life and works of Australian composer Elsie Hamilton (1880-1965). Through examining the theories of the Anthroposophical movement, I demonstrate how her music feeds from this belief system, and also demonstrate how Hamilton’s stance is congruent with the modernists of her generation. In addition, I position Hamilton’s modal system within the complex mathematics of Greek musical theory (as conceived by her collaborator, Kathleen Schlessinger). Finally, I provide modern editions and electronically manipulated sound files to all of Hamilton’s surviving compositions. Elsie Hamilton’s story is fascinating. This dissertation welcomes her into …