Arts and Humanities Commons^™

“Truth Systematised" : The Changing Debate Over Slavery And Abolition, 1761-1916, Robert Forbes

Robert P Forbes

No abstract provided.

Archiving Joyce & Joyce's Archive: Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, And Copyright, Jessica Michelle Lucero

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

"Archiving Joyce and Joyce's Archive: Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, and Copyright" investigates the ways in which James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake incorporate archival institutions and archival modes such as gossip into its composition. For example, this work explores how both works, at times, present institutions such as the National Library of Ireland, and, at other times, enact archiving in its collection and preservation of historical personages relevant to Irish literature and history. Additionally, Joyce was involved in the construction of his own archive, and thereby becomes the curator of his own history as well as that of Ireland.

Importantly, this …

'I Am Rooted, But I Flow': Virginia Woolf And 20th Century Thought, Emily Lauren Hanna

Scripps Senior Theses

My thesis is about Virginia Woolf’s novels, Mrs. Dalloway, The Waves, and To the Lighthouse. I examine these novels in relation to the theories of Henri Bergson, William James, and Sigmund Freud, and the groundwork of Modernism. I relate Woolf's use of water imagery and stream of consciousness technique to Bergson’s theory of “la durée,” or psychological, subjective time, James’ “stream of consciousness” theory in psychology, and Freud’s theory of the “oceanic” feeling of religious experience.

Buñuel’S Impure Modernism (1929-1950), Sebastiaan Faber

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Agustín Sánchez Vidal has argued that Los olvidados almost perfectly blends the three principal strands of Buñuel’s cinematic career: modernism, commercialism, and a politically committed (documentary) realism. My argument here will be double. First, that this three-way mix can be traced back to the 1930s; and second, that Buñuel’s work invites us to reconsider not only the significance of Spanish cultural production and the Spanish Civil War in the history of modernism, but more generally the importance for its development of the interaction and integration of aesthetics (the identification of cultural value with formal innovation and artistic integrity), politics (the …

Gothic Modernism: Revising And Representing The Narratives Of History And Romance, Taryn Louise Norman

Doctoral Dissertations

Gothic Modernism: Revising and Representing the Narratives of History and Romance analyzes the surprising frequency of the tones, tropes, language, and conventions of the classic Gothic that oppose the realist impulses of Modernism. In a letter F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about The Great Gatsby, he explains that he “selected the stuff to fit a given mood or ‘hauntedness’” (Letters 551). This “stuff” constitutes the “subtler means” that Virginia Woolf wrote about when she observed that the conventions of the classic Gothic no longer evoked fear: “The skull-headed lady, the vampire gentleman, the whole troop of monks and monsters …

A Comparison Of H. D. And Marianne Moore’S Poetry In The 1910s And 1920s, Yoko Ueno

Masters Theses

Although both H. D. and Marianne Moore created distinctive voices, we cannot ignore their close relationship with poetic modernism. These two poets had common characteristics which were fit for the ideas of modernism, such as exact descriptions, clear images, concision, objectivity, and repression of personal emotions. H. D.’s poems were regarded as an ideal model of Imagism, and Moore generally tried to follow the style although her poems contained her own unique features. Their choice of the modernistic hard style caused them to face complicated situations because of their gender. Both poets had affinities with Romantic aesthetics such as excessive …

Evoking Unity: Toward A Communal Phenomenology In Virginia Woolf And William Faulkner, Phillip Douglas Bandy

Masters Theses

Contemporary readings of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf typically situate these canonical authors within their historical contexts as exponents of the material conditions of modernity or as the literary precursors of postmodernism, as writers of indeterminacy and linguistic play. In this thesis, I argue for a mode of reading Woolf and Faulkner grounded not in history or language, but in consciousness as the irreducible basis of human experience. That is, by invoking the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, I claim that both authors attempted to engage more fully with not simply a historical moment called “modernity,” but a human reality characterized …

Post-War Europe: The Waste Land As A Metaphor, Semy Rhee

Senior Honors Theses

This thesis analyzes the mindset of twentieth-century Europe through the perspective of a modern individual that T. S. Eliot creates in his poem The Waste Land. Although The Waste Land is the greatest modernist poem, it is often criticized for its esoteric nature. A thorough examination of the poem is useful in understanding and appreciating Eliot’s masterful demonstration of the modernist philosophy. This study analyzes the poem in light of the definition of modernism and the poem’s metaphorical nature. It also aims to reconcile the two most confusing elements of the poem—its allusive content and fragmented structure—to the design …

In The Colonies, Nicolas A. Sansone

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

In the Colonies is a work of fiction. It tells the story of a young German harpist, C––, who is seduced into a life of luxury by a venal American, Sansone. She is invited to spend a year at his artists’ colony, where she works on composing a transcendent work of music and, in the process, realizes that she has lost sight of the material realities around her. Ultimately, she comes to realize that her single-minded pursuit of an ideal Beauty has driven her away from the very ideals she aspired to in the first place.

Modernism En Vogue: Popular Periodicals And Their Engagement With Modernist Culture, Natalie Kalich

Dissertations

My project investigates commercial magazines from the 1920s, including, The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies' Home Journal, Vogue, and Vanity Fair to reveal the frequency with which modernist writers contributed to these periodicals and the extent to which editors of these magazines found modernist discourse marketable to larger audiences, thereby undermining the assumption that modernists only spoke to a coterie audience. Furthermore, by investigating the similarities present in discourse on modernism and developments in popular culture such as jazz and film in a commercial context, I expand and complicate constructions of modernist and popular culture from both sides of the cultural …

New Visions And Re-Visions In 20th And 21st Century French Literature, Eileen Angelini

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In the twentieth century, the “death of the author” was proclaimed by literary critics. Since then, there has been a shift in focus from text to reader. This reorientation called forth changing critical paradigms, taking us from modernism to postmodernism and beyond...

Tristan Tzara’S Poetical Visions: Ironic, Oneiric, Heroic, Ruth Caldwell

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Tristan Tzara is most often associated with Dada, a movement whose influence has often been overlooked. However, Tzara stands out among his peers because of his extensive production of poetical works associated not only with Dada but surrealism and beyond. In all of these texts we see a constant refusal to be complacent about artistic endeavor or the world around us. His Dada texts launch an attack on language by the use of irony and a tension of the text against itself. This internal tension becomes the struggle depicted in his surrealistic epic, L’Homme approximatif, an unfulfilled search for …

Kafka On Trial: Polysemy And Epistemological Enactment In Modern Literature, Michael Chew

Senior Projects Spring 2012

Examination of shortcoming and merits of polysemic language in Modern Literature (Fishhouse)

Spectacular Shadows: Djuna Barnes's Styles Of Estrangement In Nightwood, Erica Nicole Bellman

CMC Senior Theses

This paper examines Djuna Barnes's Modernist masterpiece, Nightwood, by exploring the author's particular styles of writing. As an ironist, a master of spectacle, and a visual artist, Barnes's distinct stylistic roles allow the writer to construct a strange fictional world that transcends simple categorization and demands close reading. Through textual analysis, consideration of how Barnes's characterization, and engagement with key critical interpretations lead to the conclusion that Nightwood's primary aim is to present the reader with an image of his or her own individual estrangement.

T.S. Eliot's Anti-Modernism: Poetry And Tradition In The European Waste Land, John Bedecarré

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis hopes to contribute to a reconciliation of the apparent conflict between Eliot's conservative outlook and his formally innovative poetry. I do not advocate stripping Eliot of his modernist label. I would rather amend the term "modernism." This qualification is important because the modernist label carries connotations that simply do not do justice to Eliot. For example, the label implies that modernists wanted to move forward, away from the past. Eliot wanted to move backwards, partly because he felt other artists had left the past behind. In an essay introducing the early twentieth-century modernists, the Norton Anthology of British …

American Modern Aphonic "Virtuality" Beyond Western Metaphysics : Eliot, Stevens, Hughes, And Bishop, Cheol-U Jang

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This project examines how a general idea of time is revealed in American modernists' works and why its relationship to the term, "the virtual," prompts a critical revaluation of the literary period of "Modernism." This idea of relating time to virtuality illustrates how American modernists seek an alternative power of the poetic imagination. I explore this through the works of four exemplary American modernists: T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, and Elizabeth Bishop, each of whom makes an attempt to reflect the reality of the rapidly changing modern world by showing us in their works the fleeting nature of …

My Higher Self: Elizabeth Bishop And The Endurance Of Emerson, Joshua Andrew Mayo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While there exists some scholarship affirming the aesthetic and intellectual connections between transcendentalism and the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, there is to date no substantial study of what role Ralph Waldo Emerson singularly played in the inheritance of that tradition. This essay seeks to validate Emerson as Bishop's literary parentage, an influence that, though not immediately identifiable, greatly shaped her creative process. In so doing, it addresses the critical mistakes which have prevented a thorough discussion of Emerson's relevance and, moreover, negatively dominated the imagination of Bishop scholarship. As an exploration of the writers' shared iconography, their mutual metaphors, the …

Two Trains Running: Capture And Escape In The Racialized Train Cars Of The Jim Crow South, 1893-1930, Raleigh Mixon Robinson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The role of the railroad in the modern American experience—and its role in making that experience modern—cannot be overstated. This thesis proposes to tell one of many possible railroad stories. By focusing on the historical and cultural relevance of a series of bodies in transit, I examine the implementation of railroad segregation law and the response by African-American performers. The thesis begins at the end of the nineteenth century with the Homer Plessy test case and continues across three decades, meeting along the way novelists Charles Chesnutt and James Weldon Johnson and musicians W. C. Handy, Henry "Ragtime Texas" Thomas, …

Lola Ridge : Poet And Renegade Modernist, Anna Hueppauff

Theses : Honours

This thesis examines the poetry of Lola Ridge as a form of alternative Modernism. Poet, editor, anarchist, Lola Ridge is largely an unknown identity in Modernist discourses. Primarily recognised as a social justice poet, her work has been viewed through a traditional Modernist lens and excluded to the periphery as ‘sentimental’. This thesis argues that Ridge personally and professionally exceeds these categories. She modelled a practice of engagement in her personal life by actively participating in rallies and protests against injustice, and living in poverty in solidarity with the poor, giving her work an authenticity worth investigating. Her poetry provides …

Awakening Between Science, Art & Ethics: Variations On Japanese Buddhist Modernism, 1890–1945, James Shields

Faculty Contributions to Books

The half-century between the publication of the Imperial Rescript on Education (kyōiku chokugo 教育勅語, 1890) and the bombing of Pearl Harbor (1941) was one of tremendous institutional and intellectual tumult in the world of Japanese Buddhism. Buddhist sects and scholars were not immune to the changing political and cultural winds. While it is true that by the late 1930s, the majority of Buddhist leaders and institutions had capitulated to the status quo, preaching, in the words of Joseph Kitagawa “the virtues of peace, harmony, and loyalty to the throne,” the previous decades show anything but a continuous progression towards …

"Wallace Stevens And The New York School", Alan Filreis

Alan Filreis

The essay explores cross-influences between Wallace Stevens and the New York School aesthetic.