Arts and Humanities Commons^™

1981: One Or Several Aesthetics?, Jacob Norris

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Gilles Deleuze’s monograph on Francis Bacon, The Logic of Sensation (1981), proposes a theory of aesthetic experience that prioritizes the material depths of sensation over stable, identifiable forms. Deleuze’s key references in The Logic of Sensation to playwright Antonin Artaud arouse the suspicion that Artaud’s schizophrenic experience of language, wherein words are reduced to phonetic ramblings, illuminates how Deleuze interprets this chaos of sensation in Bacon’s art. My work therefore calls back to The Logic of Sense (1969) and the first section of his book on Masochism (1967) to explore the waves of consistency between Deleuze’s understanding of language and …

Un Buenos Aires Ibérico: Cultura Impresa Y Modernidades Divergentes En El Exilio (1936-1959), Pablo Garcia Martinez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation, Un Buenos Aires ibérico: Cultura impresa y modernidades divergentes en el exilio (1936-1959) –Iberian Buenos Aires: Print Culture and Diverging Modernity in Exile (1939-1959)–, analyzes print culture as a site of interaction between the intellectuals and artists exiled from the Spanish Civil War and the Argentinian Cultural Field. This doctoral research uses previously unpublished materials –with texts written in Spanish, Galician and Catalan, ranging from journalism and private correspondence to literary prose and drama; as well as graphic design, illustration and canvases– to engage with current conversations and debates in both the humanities and the …

Agnotologies Of Modernism: Knowing The Unknown In Lewis, Woolf, Pound, And Joyce, Jeremy Colangelo

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Agnotologies of Modernism examines the productive role of ignorance in the work of several key modernist authors. Borrowing concepts from speculative realist philosophers like Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, and Jane Bennett, as well as such thinkers as Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida, the dissertation endeavors to read modernism epistemologically, and treats ignorance as an active and creative force that often plays a key structuring role in the imaginative world of the text. Drawing from Bruno Latour’s notion of a “black box,” the study shows how ignorance can be transposed into an ontological entity which can then be attributed positive traits …

The Nature Of Influence: Fu'ad Rifqa's Wilderness Poetry At The Intersection Of Nation And Modernity, Delilah Clark

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Fundamental changes in the form and content of Arabic poetry occurred rapidly in the first half of the twentieth century, resulting in the development of free verse and prose poetry as well as the jettison of traditional requirements including end-stopped two-hemistich long lines, strict adherence to meter, and monorhyme. These changes draw from innovation within Arabic poetry, competing nationalist agendas, increased translation of European texts into Arabic, and the productive engagement of Arab poets with Western literatures. In 1957, Syrian poet Fu’ād Rifqa embarks upon a five-decade poetic project of intentional intertextuality that acknowledges these sometimes collaborative, sometimes competing narratives. …

Women Of The Future: The Performative Personhood Of Elizabeth Robins, Djuna Barnes, And The Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven, Michelle Feda

Theses and Dissertations

The New Woman is the term used to describe the changing social norms around women's involvement in public life during the fin-de-siècle. New Women were bold and brash, educated and independent, and, importantly young; the term encapsulated any particular woman who stepped outside of her mother's Victorian social norms. The New Woman was as much a construct of the time as it was a description. The playwright and suffragette Elizabeth Robins performs "new womanhood" on the stage, and her play Votes for Women! enacts this struggle between New Women and the older generation. Djuna Barnes started her career as a …

Sigrid Undset's Sacramental Realism: The Body In Kristin Lavransdatter, Annesley Moore-Jumonville

Honors Projects

Though literary modernism has been historically characterized as atheistic and anti-traditional, new critical voices are emerging that argue for the presence of the sacred in modernist texts. This paper joins those voices by proposing, along with the reexamination of the sacred in nonreligious writers like Woolf and Joyce, a reexamination of specifically religious work and on its own terms. The modern Catholic novel, in particular, with its focus on the eternal significance of humanity, deserves this attention. The paper offers Sigrid Undset’s 1920, Nobel Prize wining, Catholic trilogy, Kristin Lavransdatter, as a significant (and unjustly overlooked) text of the period, …

Women’S Erotic Desires And Perspectives On Marriage In Sappho’S Epithalamia And H.D.’S Hymen, Amanda Kubic

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In her collection Hymen (1921), the modernist poet H.D. engages in a collaborative, composite reception of the archaic Greek lyric poet Sappho. H.D. draws on Sappho as a source of lyric power and lesbian erotic authority, and brings together the various women’s voices and perspectives represented in Sappho’s poems—especially those that have to do with marriage—into her own present poetic moment. As the title Hymen suggests, of particular significance to H.D.’s Sapphic reception work is the genre of the epithalamium, or “wedding song.” Sappho, in her epithalamia, constructs a woman-centered and woman-identified thiasos that is centered on the bride, her …

The Bird That Flew Backwards, Robin Gow

English Honors Papers

The Bird that Flew Backwards examines women poets from literary Modernism in the 1910s and Beat culture in the 1950s. Analyzing these eras in tandem reveals contrasting historical constructions of American womanhood and how sociocultural trends influenced how the “poetess” constructed herself and her work and illustrates the retrograde nature of women’s rights in the 1950s. Through close reading, digital mapping, and historical background, The Bird that Flew Backwards establishes a new critical perspective by linking the more well-known Modernists with lesser-known women in 1910s Greenwich Village Bohemia. This linkage between eras branches off to explore themes of formation of …

Modern American Cover Art: The Great Gatsby Through Time, Jessica Harrell

Senior Theses

Book jackets and cover art are, more than anything, an advertising tool used to attract consumers, promote book sales, and establish company identity. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a staple in the canon of American literature whose cover art has drastically transformed in the ninety years since its original publication. This thesis traces these changes over time, focusing specifically on publishing history, art history, American culture, and thematic interpretations. In doing so, I found that the most substantial influences on these covers were publishing house identity, design trends, and available artistic techniques. Ultimately, The Great Gatsby’s cover …

A Lifetime Of Suffering And Survival: Eugene O’Neill And The Progressive Symbol Of Fog, Kelsey Shewbridge

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

A Discord To Be Listened For In Gertrude Stein And Virginia Woolf, Sophie Prince

Senior Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

“While The Imagination Strains / After Deer”: William Carlos Williams’S Interrogations Of The American Transcendental Imagination And The Proto-Suburban Scene, Tyler Wagner

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Oftentimes the American suburbs are considered through the lens of architecture, economics, fiction, and visual media. And, typically, the conversation centers on their cultural zenith in the 1950s. One literary form is neglected in this conversation: poetry. This omission is peculiar, as a fascination with the vastness of the continent’s landscape—and its significance—pervades the history of the American verse. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, the apparently endless expanses of space and rejuvenative qualities of the American landscape provide the poet’s ideal inspiration, and Walt Whitman, in perhaps the most important collection of poetry of the nineteenth century, Leaves of Grass, is …

Walter Gropius, Mies Van Der Rohe And Marcel Breuer: Designing For America, Shiri Chapman-Daniel

MA Projects

Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer: Designing for America examines interior and furniture projects by the three European modern designer after emigrating to the U.S. in 1938. Many of these projects are not very well known, or are commonly discussed solely in terms of architecture, yet the interiors in fact reveal interesting and significant developments in Gropius, Mies and Breuer's work. The exhibition highlights the evolution of their designs, as well as the extent to which they were affected by American tendencies and innovations and their lasting impact.

Gestural Ekphrasis: Toward A Phenomenology Of The Moving Body In Joyce And Woolf, Lauren Nicole Benke

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This theoretical project seeks to introduce a new critical methodology for evaluating gesture - both represented in text and paratextual - in the works of Virginia Woolf - specifically The Voyage Out (1915), Orlando (1928), The Waves (1931), and Between the Acts (1941) - and James Joyce - particularly Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). Though gesture studies has developed significantly as an interdisciplinary field in recent decades and performance studies has elaborated on the moving body's significance to both text and performance, literary scholarship itself has not yet adequately incorporated possibilities for specific critical attention to gesture. Gesture is …

Frank Zappa And His Conception Of Civilization Phaze Iii, Jeffrey Daniel Jones

Theses and Dissertations--Music

When Frank Zappa died in 1993, he left Civilization Phaze III as a last testament to both his musical and thematic purpose. The work received a handful of reviews in the popular music press, and has subsequently been ignored by both the popular press and, with few exceptions, academia.

Many are the composers whose careers have been thought describe a mid-period mastery, followed by later decline. This presumption seems to have fallen upon Frank Zappa, apparently due to his retirement from the concert stage, and final years writing music on the Synclavier. This thesis seeks to demonstrate that Zappa's compositional …

Border Ends: Anti-Imperialism, Settler Colonialism, And The Mexican Revolution In U.S. Modernism, Bradley Flis

Wayne State University Dissertations

From 1910-1920, the Mexican Revolution became a source of anxiety, interest, and inspiration to those who paid attention to its political turmoil as reported in the popular press. It would lead to the reinvigorating of a debate about U.S. intervention in the political affairs of Mexico, indeed, for some, the question was one of annexation. Responding to a growing imperialist culture in the U.S., William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, John Reed and Max Eastman of The Masses were among those who looked to modernist aesthetic practice to critique military and economic expansionism in Mexico.

This dissertation explores that discursive interplay …

'No Home Here': Female Space And The Modernist Aesthetic In Nella Larsen's Quicksand And Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, Julianna N. Cherinka

Honors Undergraduate Theses

In her 1929 essay "A Room of One's Own," Virginia Woolf famously asserts that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction" (4). This concept places an immediate importance on the role of the Modernist female subject as an artist and as an architect, constructing the places and spaces that she exists within. With Woolf's argument as its point of departure, this thesis investigates the theme of female space in two Modernist texts: Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963). The respective protagonists of Quicksand and …

The Significance Of The Game Of Pool In Ernest Hemingway’S “Soldier’S Home”, Molly J. Donehoo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In his 1929 A Farewell to Arms, American Author Ernest Hemingway provides the thesis for all of American Modernism when he writes, “the world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places” (216). If the world breaks everyone Hemingway’s focus becomes not in the breaking but in the solutions for becoming strong at the broken places. Throughout his canon Hemingway presents the healing rituals and therapeutic patterns that govern sports and game as a solution to becoming strong at the broken places. While critics have closely analyzed and scrutinized some of his most recognized short-stories, stories …