The Struggle To Re-Establish Anglo Superiority In American Modernism And Its Collapse Into American Tragedy, Jeff Brelvi

Dissertations and Theses

A study of the impact Anglo race assertion had on American Modernism through the work of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and T.S. Eliot shaping the discourse on American cultural identity. Arthur Miller and his "Tragedy and the Common Man" put an end to Modernism's Anglo stronghold and brought about the next period of American literature, ushering it into the era of American tragedy.

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 …

Waking Dreams: Modernist Intoxications And The Poetics Of Altered States, Jason Ciaccio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Intoxication as a poetic principle is often identified with the romantic imagination. The literature of the intoxicated reverie is commonly thought of as synonymous with works such as Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” DeQuincey’s accounts of numerous nightmares and reveries, a number of Keats’ odes, Novalis’ hymns, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s stories, and Poe’s oneiric Gothic tales. Each of these, in part through their opiation or the incorporation of various other draughts, evokes a realm of dreams and visions of various sorts that are commonly associated with romantic poetic practices. The ecstatic trance, the sense of passing into another domain that is …

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 …

Masks And Performance As Representations Of Gender Oppression And Repression In Edith Wharton’S The House Of Mirth And Nella Larsen’S Passing, Carrie A. Wilson

SEWSA 2016 Intersectionality in the New Millennium: An Assessment of Culture, Power, and Society

Edith Wharton and Nella Larsen’s literature focus on metaphorically representing gender oppression and repression as masked social performances that result in death being the ultimate release from the drama. Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth depicts the heroine Lily Bart who, in the public social realm, attempts to mask herself as a disturbingly superficial character. Wharton’s masquerade imagery demonstrates the extent to which Lily socially capitalizes her beauty. Lily fixates on "clearness" and "lucidity" in events leading up to her death, which shows how dying releases her from the dishonest social masquerade (260). Nella Larsen’s heroine Irene Redfield similarly uses …

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 …

Southern Transfiguration: Competing Cultural Narratives Of (Ec)Centric Religion In The Works Of Faulkner, O’Connor, And Hurston, Craig D. Slaven

Theses and Dissertations--English

This project explores the ways in which key literary texts reproduce, undermine, or otherwise engage with cultural narratives of the so-called Bible Belt. Noting that the evangelicalism that dominated the South by the turn of the twentieth century was, for much of the antebellum period, a relatively marginal and sometimes subversive movement in a comparatively irreligious region, I argue that widely disseminated images and narratives instilled a false sense of nostalgia for an incomplete version of the South’s religious heritage. My introductory chapter demonstrates how the South’s commemorated “Old Time” religion was not especially old, and how this modernist construct …

At Home In Exile: Ezra Pound And The Poetics Of Banishment, Andy Kay Trevathan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Ezra Pound is one of the most important poets, critics, and writers of the 20th century. Through his literary efforts, and his work on behalf of many other writers, Pound changed the way we read and write poetry today. His cultivation and support of other writers and poets like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, etc. created the basis for what we refer to as Imagism, Modernism, and other important literary movements of the early 20th century. Pound’s use of fragmentation, pastiche, and bricolage laid the foundation for post-modern writers of the latter half of the 20th century, …

The Flight From Despair: A Translation And Critical Exploration Of Hagiwara Sakutarō'S Zetsubō No Tōsō, Samik N. Sikand

Masters Theses

The text that I have translated below, and for which the paper that precedes it is a critical introduction, is Hagiwara Sakutarō's Zetsubō no Tōsō, a collection of 204 aphorisms which I have translated as The Flight from Despair. My introduction concentrates on Sakutarō's use of the aphoristic form in order to show how he both follows and subverts the genre's conventions. First, I concentrate on the author's goal to tackle the "everyday" matters of life through his text rather than intellectual abstractions. I also bring attention to the concision of Sakutarō's style and the protean nature of …

Kenneth Koch's Postmodern Comedy Revisited, John Campbell Nichols

Masters Theses

This thesis describes and analyzes the postmodern comedy of New York School poet, Kenneth Koch and discusses the changes this comedy underwent throughout his lengthy career. The thesis is divided into four chapters. Chapter I explains the aesthetic of the New York School of poets as contrasted to the dominant New Critical compositional aesthetic embodied by poets such as Robert Lowell in the mid-century United States. Chapter II develops Koch’s comedy as expressing an emergent postmodernism. Chapter III discusses the various aspects of Koch’s comedy, sampling poems from across his career. Chapter IV traces the development and maturity of Koch’s …

Death Defied: James Joyce's Naturalistic Evolution, Cody D. Jarman

Butler Journal of Undergraduate Research

Death, as a thematic and narrative motif, is of particular import to the Naturalistic literary approach. This is extremely evident in the work of James Joyce, on whom the Naturalist movement had a notable influence. Throughout his career Joyce utilized the subtext surrounding death in the father-son relationship to criticize Irish culture as it appears in his works. However, Joyce was not content to simply recreate a textbook interpretation of Naturalism. Joyce developed the core principles of the Naturalistic approach, starting with a basic and purely Naturalistic approach in his early writing; Joyce eventually managed to subvert and reinterpret 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.

Gayle Rogers. Modernism And The New Spain. Oxford/New York: Oxford Up, 2012. Xvi + 283 Pp., Juan Francisco Maura

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Gayle Rogers. Modernism and the New Spain. Oxford/New York: Oxford UP, 2012. xvi + 283 pp.

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 …

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 …

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 …

Dirk Van Hulle. Modern Manuscripts: The Extended Mind And Creative Undoing From Darwin To Beckett And Beyond. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Xiii + 271 Pp., Anna E. Hiller

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Dirk van Hulle. Modern Manuscripts: The Extended Mind and Creative Undoing from Darwin to Beckett and Beyond. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. xiii + 271 pp.

Larson Powell. The Technological Unconscious In German Modernist Literature: Nature In Rilke, Benn, Brecht, And Döblin. Rochester: Camden House, 2008. 256 Pp., Christa Spreizer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Larson Powell. The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature: Nature in Rilke, Benn, Brecht, and Döblin. Rochester: Camden House, 2008. 256 pp.

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 …

An Uncommon Splice: Seeking Mutations In The Life-Writing And Short Fiction Of Mary Butts And Djuna Barnes, Susan George

Theses and Dissertations

Immersed in a web of short stories, poetry, and supporting biographical and life-writing sources, I investigate the narrative significance beneath and beyond two British and American modernist women authors. I evaluate sisterly connectedness between their literary production, publishing histories and life writings present in a specific cultural-temporal moment and genre: the short story. By looking on these unique, forgotten fictions through a new materialist lens, I argue for their short fiction's greater inclusion in the canon of women's modernism. Chapter I tests correlations between two authors undergoing the same stresses, alienations, joys and desires by taking up tenants of material …

Metaphor And Metanoia: Linguistic Transfer And Cognitive Transformation In British And Irish Modernism, Andrew C. Wenaus

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation contributes to the critical expansions that Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz identify as New Modernist Studies. This expansion is temporal, spatial, and vertical. I engage with the effects Modernist texts have “above” the page: lived experience. I examine the structural similarity of linguistic metaphor and the mind as considered by cognitive scientists. Identifying the human mind as linguistic and language as an artifact of the human mind, my research extrapolates upon what I call the “psycho-ecology” of reading, a self-representational knot between text and mind that constitutes lived experience. Far from being an abstraction, psycho-ecology is concrete: …

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 …

Lifting Belly: The Language Of (In)Visibility, Christine Scanlon

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

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.

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 …

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.