Arts and Humanities Commons^™

“Decorate The Dungeon With Flowers And Air-Cushions:” Virginia Woolf And War, Claire Dumont

Scripps Senior Theses

Virginia Woolf was particularly interested throughout her career in writing about war, ranging from the perspective of a depressed World War I veteran and his wife in Mrs. Dalloway, a dinner party held during an air raid in 1917 in The Years, an argument for the connections between patriarchal society and war in Three Guineas, and a pageant of British history held before World War II in Between the Acts. Woolf specifically writes of war as it impacts spheres away from the battlefield, in a way that is inherently gendered to her experience as a woman …

Intimacy, Unity, And Shared Consciousness In The Novels Of Virginia Woolf, Meghan Rose Condas

Scripps Senior Theses

In the novels of Virginia Woolf, the difficulties of deep intimacy are troubled by the limitations of language and the fear of shame and vulnerability. What can characters express, and do words have the ability to appropriately describe their feelings of love and desire? Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves grapple with the penetrability of the mind and the potential for shared thought between characters. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf utilizes Clarissa and her relationship with men to highlight how eroticism and affection are inhibited by shame. To evade the anxieties of articulating romantic feelings and …

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 …

The Role Of Cognitive Dissonance In Fin De Siècle Jamesian Narratives, Mona Moin Syed

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Henry James once described emergent self—awareness of individual consciousness as an “illimitable power” that enables personal survival within a world that is, by default, unpredictable and volatile. Subsequent analyses of narrative subtleties and character evolution in James’s major works of fiction have often been considered through constructs of psychological realism. One particular aspect of the majority of early Jamesian criticism highlights the connections between stringent Victorian social mores and contemporaneously shifting perceptions of life in England toward the end of the 19th century. In the decades that followed, correlations between the Jamesian narrative and psychoanalytical theory became more prominent within …

Poetic Labor: Meaning And Matter In Robert Frost's Poetry., Lina Pan

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines Frost’s conception of poetry as the labor of human value. It investigates how Frost consciously shaped his notions of “sound of sense” and metaphor, which he deemed fundamental elements of poetic labor, in contradistinction to the Modernist poetics of Eliot and Pound. The author closely examines a representative sample of Frost’s poetry and prose as critiques of Modernist poetic theory and its implications for what Frost deemed the essential human function of poetry. The thesis will interest scholars studying strains of English poetic thought that developed concurrently with and against Modernist poetic thought. More broadly, it will …

Voices In Crisis: An Exploration Of Masculine Identity In Modernist Narratives, Amy Cannistraro

Scripps Senior Theses

The period following World War I can be characterized in literature by the trauma and changes that promoted crises of masculinity. These crises, however, are not discussed between the men that suffer similar feelings of insecurity and anxiety; not approached as a tension in need of resolution. Exploring the narrative voices of Nick, Jake, Darl and Anse in The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and As I Lay Dying, this thesis addresses the ways in which this unspoken phenomenon is essential to the modernist male narrative. I propose that, despite the widespread nature of this phenomenon, …

'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.

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 …

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.