Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Visionaries Of The Road, Storm A. Wright

English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

What is space? It is a personal concept that people develop while on journeys toward discovery. Through means both intentional and not, that space can be shared with the world and make the knowledge gained on the journey available to anyone with the same curiosities. By looking into the travels of Ezra Meeker on the Oregon Trail, Horatio Nelson Jackson across country, and William Least Heat-Moon on the blue highway, space can be conceptualized and understood as these three men allow us to understand them through their own words and experiences.

Tourism And Nationalism In America, Derick J. Knox

English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

Travel has been regarded as not only a vacation but also a learning experience and for many Americans a process of familiarizing oneself with the history of their country. Technological advancements introduced means of mobility that allowed people to indulge in America’s culture and history. The 20th Century was a turbulent era accompanied by industrialization and an increase in nationalism. Tourist marketing had strategically mapped routes to showcase the highest points in American culture while ignoring some controversial narratives. Once travel became mediated by tourism in the 20th century it lost some elements of freedom and adventure, instead becoming the …

Prototyping Mina Loy's Alphabet, Margaret Konkol

English Faculty Publications

An important branch of digital humanities involves prototyping the past. This entails approaching material forms of knowledge as sites within which epistemological and ontological problems may be evaluated as physical embodied practices. This essay discusses the interpretive and methodological implications of using 3D printing technologies to prototype the archival diagrams of a proposed but never constructed plastic segmental alphabet letter kit – a game designed by Mina Loy for F.A.O. Schwarz. Although it is intended as a toy for young children, “The Alphabet that Builds Itself,” is also a work of object typography which articulates a theory of language as …

French Women In Art: Reclaiming The Body Through Creation/Les Femmes Artistes Françaises : La Réclamation Du Corps À Travers La Création, Liatris Hethcoat

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The research I have conducted for my French Major Senior Thesis is a culmination of my passion for and studies of both French language and culture and the history and practice of Visual Arts. I have examined, across the history of art, the representation of women, and concluded that until the 20^th century, these representations have been tools employed by the makers of history and those at the top of the patriarchal system, used to control women’s images and thus women themselves. I survey these representations, which are largely created by men—until the 20^th century. I discuss pre-historical …

Think, Pig! Beckett At The Limit Of The Human [Table Of Contents], Jean-Michel Rabate

Literature

“Very few critics have all the qualities and competencies required to engage fully with the entirety of Beckett’s work in all genres: a detailed familiarity with Beckett’s texts in both English and French; a sensitivity to his linguistic, stylistic, and thematic maneuvers; an encyclopedic knowledge of his intellectual context; an awareness of the range and detail of Beckett studies; and an ability to write with refinement and wit. It is clear from this remarkable book that Jean-Michel Rabaté is one of those few.” —Derek Attridge, University of York

The Symphony Of State: São Paulo's Department Of Culture, 1922-1938, Micah J. Oelze

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In 1920s-30s São Paulo, Brazil, leaders of the vanguard artistic movement known as “modernism” began to argue that national identity came not from shared values or even cultural practices but rather by a shared way of thinking, which they variously designated as Brazil’s “racial psychology,” “folkloric unconscious,” and “national psychology.” Building on turn-of-the-century psychological and anthropological theories, the group diagnosed Brazil’s national mind as characterized by “primitivity” and in need of a program of psychological development. The group rose to political power in the 1930s, placing the artists in a position to undertake such a project. The Symphony of State …

For The Progress Of “Faustus And Helen”: Crane, Whitman, And The Metropolitan Progress Poem, Jeremy Colangelo

Department of English Publications

This essay is meant to invigorate a critical discussion of the progress poem—a genre that, while prevalent in American literature, has been virtually ignored by critics and scholars. In lieu of tackling the genre in its entirety, a project too large for just one article, the author focuses the argument through the well-known alignment between Walt Whitman and Hart Crane on the subject of the modern city. It is through the progress poem genre that Crane and Whitman’s peculiar place in metropolitan poetics can best be understood, and it is through their poetry that scholars can begin to approach the …

The World In Singing Made: David Markson's "Wittgenstein's Mistress", Tiffany L. Fajardo

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In line with Wittgenstein's axiom that "what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest," this thesis aims to demonstrate how the gulf between analytic and continental philosophy can best be bridged through the mediation of art. The present thesis brings attention to Markson's work, lauded in the tradition of Faulkner, Joyce, and Lowry, as exemplary of the shift from modernity to postmodernity, wherein the human heart is not only in conflict with itself, but with the language out of which it is necessarily constituted. Markson limns the paradoxical condition of the subject …

A "Digital Wasteland": Modernist Periodical Studies, Digital Remediation, And Copyright, Roxanne Shirazi

Graduate Student Publications and Research

The nonlinearity of magazine reading is an important consideration in the emerging field of modernist periodical studies, one that deserves greater attention in the development of digital collections. As modernist scholars begin to generate a theoretical foundation for periodical studies it becomes evident that digital technologies must go beyond reproducing the printed page. This paper reviews recent scholarship and digital projects in modernist periodical studies and introduces non-consumptive research methods as a partial solution to the post-1923 copyright conundrum.

The Enchanter's Spell: J.R.R. Tolkien's Mythopoetic Response To Modernism, Adam D. Gorelick

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

J.R.R. Tolkien was not only an author of fantasy but also a philologist who theorized about myth. Theorists have employed various methods of analyzing myth, and this thesis integrates several analyses, including Tolkien’s. I address the roles of doctrine, ritual, cross-cultural patterns, mythic expressions in literature, the literary effect of myth, evolution of language and consciousness, and individual invention over inheritance and diffusion. Beyond Tolkien’s English and Catholic background, I argue for eclectic influence on Tolkien, including resonance with Buddhism.

Tolkien views mythopoeia, literary mythmaking, in terms of sub-creation, human invention in the image of God as creator. Key mythopoetic …

Modernist Manipulation: Virginia Woolf's Effort To Distort Time In Three Novels, Carly Fischbeck

Antonian Scholars Honors Program

This paper explores three works by Virginia Woolf, studying her evolution as a modernist writer through Woolf’s experimentations with manipulating time in each novel. Woolf’s techniques are analyzed in the context of the modernist movement, including artistic and scientific influences, as well as being analyzed within the three works to note their development over time. Focusing on one aspect of Woolf’s work, the depiction of time, allows for an understanding of both the modernist techniques used to manipulate time and the author’s developing ability to manipulate those techniques. The seeds of modernism found in Woolf’s early works, particularly The Voyage …

Nostalgia And Modernist Anxiety, Elizabeth Outka

English Faculty Publications

Here at the end of the collection I want to propose going back to the beginning—not to the beginning of nostalgic desire in the modernist era, but to the start of the anxiety over nostalgia in the modernist era. The discomfort has, I want to argue, two distinct periods: the early twentieth-century anxiety that various modernists had toward nostalgia, and the later uneasiness modernist critics have with nostalgia within the modernist period. Most eras, of course, experience at least some form of nostalgic longing, along with a corresponding distrust and uneasiness about such longing. The apprehension that nostalgia may provoke …

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.

The Mother Tongues Of Modernity: Modernism, Transnationalism, Translation, Roland K. Végső

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The relation of modernism to immigrant literatures should not be conceived in terms of an opposition between universalistic and particularistic discourses. Rather, we should explore what can be called a modernist transnationalism based on a general universalist argument. Two examples of this transnationalism are explored side by side: Ezra Pound’s and Anzia Yezierska’s definitions of the aesthetic act in terms of translation. The readings show that the critical discourses of these two authors are structured by a belief in universalism while showing opposite possibilities, both generated by modernist transnationalism. The essay concludes that we now need to interpret the cultures …

The Late Modernism Of Cormac Mccarthy (Review), Peter Lurie, Mark A. Eaton

English Faculty Publications

David Holloway's titular phrasing "late modernism" has an effective ring. It captures the theoretical underpinnings of his recent book, The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy, evoking Fredric Jameson's work, on which Holloway heavily relies, while also situating McCarthy precisely where he wants him to be, historically and culturally. According to Holloway, McCarthy's fiction constitutes an important redoubt against the diminishing of modernism's once-valorous stance by forging a productive opposition to what he sees as a final stage in capitalist expansion. At the heart of Holloway's project is his concern to restore an oppositional vitality to literary production, or what …

William Lescaze And Hart Crane: A Bridge Between Architecture And Poetry, Lindsay Stamm Shapiro

The Courier

This article expounds upon the unique relationship between the architect William Lescaze and poet Hart Crane after Lescaze's emigration to the United States during the early twentieth century. Lescaze's knowledge of European modernism influenced Crane's poems, which sought to counteract the pessimism of modern poets (for example T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland"), and provide affirmation of the Machine Age.