Arts and Humanities Commons^™

To Reach The Unreachable Stars: Reexamining The Shared Arthurian Vision Of C. S. Lewis's Science Fiction Trilogy And Raymond Chandler's Marlowe Novels, Hollis Thompson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although Raymond Chandler and C. S. Lewis seem to be a rather strange pairing, the ways in which they both borrow from Arthurian literature and use the myth to speak to their cultural moment are strikingly similar. Following T. S. Eliot’s use of the Grail quest in The Waste Land (which set a standard for the use of such material in Modern literature), these authors use Arthurian elements as a means of exposing hidden connections between the fragments of the literary past and the present within Chandler’s Marlowe novels and Lewis’s science fiction trilogy. Both men present Western identity as …

Samuel Daniel’S Lyric Reception: The Role Of Poet-Critics From Wordsworth To Winters, Caleb Mcghee

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Elizabethan poet Samuel Daniel was popular in his day, producing lyric, dramatic, and narrative poems. Contemporary anthologies, however, memorialize him primarily as a lyric poet, one that usually gets few entries. My thesis shows how Daniel had a minor reputation as a lyric poet by the 1960’s, despite having high-profile admirers. These well-known poet-critics who engaged with his work are essential to analyzing his lyric reputation: owing to the Romantic emphasis on the lyric, I begin with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s reception of his lyrics in the 19th century. I then analyze the turn of the century …

Plein-Air Drawing And Embodied Vision: Hans Hofmann's Landscapes, 1928-1935, Anna H. Tome

Theses and Dissertations

Hans Hofmann (1888-1966) produced over one thousand black and white drawings during his early and mid-career before becoming known as a master of color and abstraction. This text examines landscape drawings made from 1928-1935 that evidence the role of nature, new perceptual theories, and embodied vision in his artistic development.

Making Room For One's Own: Literal And Literary Feminine Space In The Works Of Virginia Woolf, Annika Hawkinson

Honors Projects

In this project I explore Virginia Woolf’s modernist preoccupation with representing ordinary, female life in her fiction. Reading her novel Mrs. Dalloway alongside some of her more explicitly feminist essays, I analyze the way that her female protagonist, Clarissa, navigates the physical world around her, and why the spaces she occupies are so crucial to her character. Because I am primarily interested in the question of feminine space, this project is divided in two parts that respectively explore Clarissa’s relationship with the “outside” world of the city and the “inside” world of her home. It is my belief that by …

Design Without Borders: Universalism In The Architecture Of Rabindranath Tagore’S “World Nest” At Santiniketan, Melanie R. Clark

Theses and Dissertations

Rabindranath Tagore, Nobel Prize winning Bengali poet and polymath, is an eminent figure in the history and culture of modern India. As the Indian Independence Movement grew in the early twentieth century, Tagore used his renown to establish a university in the rural community of Santiniketan: Visva-Bharati, “where the world meets in a single nest.” All of Tagore’s efforts — artistic, educational, and social — were informed by a universalist philosophy that he developed based on the Upanishads. Tagore’s philosophy facilitated unity between all creation, including harmony between the peoples of humanity and between humanity and the natural world. The …

Brasilidade In Built Form: Tracing National Identity In Modernist Architecture In Brazil, 1922–1968, Angela Starita

Dissertations

The conceptual framework of Brazilian national identity in built form changed drastically between the 1930s and the 1960s, from the Baroque of colonial-era Brazil to the improvised constructions of the poor. The advocates of these architectural imaginaries were not suggesting that these styles be copied. Instead, they used them as a type of hermeneutic for explicating how Modernism should be deployed in order for it to be authentically Brazilian. The transition from the colonial model to an aesthetics of poverty was a result of a confluence of factors. These included the country’s relatively new struggle to define itself away from …

Writing Against History: Feminist Baroque Narratives In Interwar Atlantic Modernism, Annaliese Hoehling

Doctoral Dissertations

In the decades following the end of the Great War, paranoia and panic about survival and sovereign control were driven by unprecedented death tolls from war, disease, and economic disaster as well as by revolutionary agitation around the globe. This fear was channeled into policing gender, sexuality, and race; and the parameters of white, middle-class womanhood were weaponized for social control in the transatlantic imaginary. In this study, I identify two rhetorical-political figures that helped to shape this imagination: Surplus Women and Trafficked Women. In my analysis of the literature, these figures help to contrast domestic scenes, on one hand, …

The Unlimited Absorbs The Limits: Analyzing The Religious And Mystical Aspects Of Virginia Woolf's Work Through The Lens Of William James, Zachary J. Beck

MSU Graduate Theses

Commentators on the work of modernist author Virginia Woolf have frequently remarked upon the “religious” and “mystical” aspects that appear throughout Woolf’s oeuvre, but have found it difficult to reconcile these aspects of Woolf’s work with her self-expressed atheistic beliefs. For those who have sought to resolve the tension between the “religious” and “mystical” features of Woolf’s work and Woolf’s (lack of) personal religious beliefs, the work of American psychologist and philosopher William James has proven to be a starting point for investigations into selections of Woolf’s oeuvre that seem to exhibit “religious” and “mystical” characteristics. There continues to exist, …

Audience And Narrative In Female-Authored Diaries Of The Twentieth Century: Analyzing Diaries As Modernist Texts, Rose Grosskopf

College Honors Program

During the early twentieth century the literary modernists reacted to a changing world by pioneering new literary forms that could depict the subjective experience of thought. Their new forms eschewed tradition, convention, and narrative and experimented with literary techniques that could depict the mind in an expanded moment of time.

In her modernist essay “A Diary,” Gertrude Stein reveals the similarities between diaries and her own experimental modernist literature. “A Diary,” which is both modernist literature and a diary, provides a critical lens by which to examine other diaries as modernist texts. An analysis of the diaries of Anne Frank, …

When The Foreign Became Familiar: Modernism, Expatriation, And Spatial Identities In The Twentieth Century, Danielle Kristene Clapham

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation uses the life writing and fiction of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce to challenge the mythic construction of the autonomous modernist subject through the lens of expatriation. I use the expatriate as a paradigmatic figure of modernism to scrutinize common perceptions of modernist expatriation as a dissociation with tradition and national politics. Instead, this project positions modernism as a movement deeply enmeshed in celebrity culture and the cooptation of foreign spaces. I employ a spatial mode of reading expatriate fiction through which the physical sites of expatriation become symbols of expatriate values and identity in conflict …

The Leap And The Gap: Writing Suicide In Modernist Britain, Aaron Botwick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Suicide is integral to the history of British literature, and yet the subject has yielded scant scholarly attention. This study attempts to partially rectify the absence by identifying a transformation in English suicide discourse between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I argue that, informed by both rationalism and cause-and-effect reasoning, Victorian literature—including poems, triple-decker novels, broadsheets, and sermons—largely conceived of suicide as a public phenomenon. The action, rather than the actor, is the object of study, and as a result what Andrew Bennett calls “the phenomenology, the lived experience … of suicide” is abandoned in favor of social …

Disrupting An(Other): Sexuality As Political Resistance, Emma C. Downey

Master’s Theses

If sexual knowledge can threaten social and political institutions and their control, how do the contents and subjects of literature and publications in the interwar period make that legible? Moreover, if female sexuality–represented or real–was seen as something disruptive to the normal functioning of society, did sexuality offer a useful entry point for social, political, or ideological critiques of the interwar period? My project responds to these questions by analyzing the lives and writings of two female authors of the interwar period: Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) and Katharine Burdekin (1896-1963). In my analysis, I focus on two major points of connection. …

The Future Regained: Toward A Modernist Ethics Of Time, Jack Rodgers

Honors Projects

This project explores the convergence of futurity and ethics through an examination of key figures in modernist literature. It studies works by Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce in order to conceptualize an encounter with the future which goes beyond a traditionally linear and teleological model of time, setting out to reimagine the role of both temporality and ethics in novels including Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway, In Search of Lost Time, and Ulysses. Key facets of this exploration, which is metaphorized and guided by the image of a window, include temporal otherness, transgression and fracturing of the self (primarily understood …

Foster Rhodes Jackson And The Visual Conquest Of The West, Eve Kaufman

Scripps Senior Theses

Colonizers settled the Los Angeles and the Southern California region in part by using Modernism’s visual rhetoric and propagandic implications during the time of suburban sprawl. Suburban sprawl refers to the mass single family home development which took place from the 1920^[1]s until now but peaked from the 1970s to the 1990s. Los Angeles sprawl grew particularly in the 1950^[2]s as soldiers returned from WWII. It was a way for middle class white families to accrue generational wealth and follow through on the American Dream^[3].

The primary result however disenfranchised already marginalized groups. This …

“How Difficult Not To Go Making ‘Reality’ This And That”: Virginia Woolf’S Record Of Representation, Julia E. Eifert

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Virginia Woolf writes in her journal in March 1929 that:

[...]Life is very solid, or very shifting? I am haunted by the two contradictions. This has gone on for ever: will last forever; goes down to the bottom of the world- this moment I stand on. Also it is transitory, flying, diaphanous. I shall pass like a cloud on the waves. Perhaps it may be that though we change; one flying after another, so quick so quick, yet we are somehow successive and continuous- we human beings; and show the light through.

Woolf obsessively journaled her anxieties concerning the linearity …

Ignoring The Harlem Renaissance: The Failure Of Modernist Scholarship, Emily Elvoid

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

Waking Sleep: The Uncanny In Modernist Literary Aesthetics, Delmar R. Reffett Jr.

Theses and Dissertations--English

With the dawning of the twentieth century, writers and critics found themselves facing a social world undergoing massive change, the forces of capitalist modernity leaving the individual increasingly disaffected and disconnected from her surroundings. This social world, rent as it was by alienation, offered a hostile environment for the sort of coherence that had traditionally been prized by Western aesthetics since the Enlightenment. How could a literary work attain a degree of coherence while reflecting a deeply dissonant modernity? Navigating this contradiction between literature’s inherited values and literature’s possibilities in alienated society can be seen as central to the project …