Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Willa Cather's O Pioneers!: Violence And Modernist Aesthetics, Jordan F. Hobson

English Theses

Willa Cather's 1913 novel, O Pioneers! concludes with an unexpected moment of extreme violence as two young lovers, Emil Bergson and Marie Shabata, are murdered by Marie's husband in a mulberry orchard. Cather's novel is almost wholly devoted to the psychological interior of the protagonist, Alexandra Bergson, thereby rendering this violent interruption more dynamic as it essentially undercuts the generally lulling interiority of the narration. My interest here is to examine this strange moment of violence and Alexandra's subsequent forgiveness of Frank for the murder of her brother and his own wife through the theoretical paradigms of René Girard, Jacques …

“Don’T Trust Anybody, Not Even Us”: Kafka’S Realism As Anarchist Modernism, Jesse Cohn

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Franz Kafka’s personal interest in and contact with the anarchist movement have been fairly well documented, and many have pointed to affinities between his work and anarchist ideas. At the same time, a growing body of scholarship has documented the influence of anarchist politics on modernist aesthetics per se, primarily in terms of a shared resistance to representation—a project that Kafka appears not to share, or at least one he pursues in a very different way. This essay redescribes the strategies of representation found at work in novels such as The Trial and stories such as “The Refusal” in relation …

Life Among The Machines: James Joyce's Ulysses And Early Twentieth-Century Technology, Patrick Casey

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This project investigates the cultural impact of the various technological innovations that appeared around the turn of the twentieth century, and how modernism contends with the increasing presence of technology in everyday life. It focuses on the work of James Joyce, whose attitudes toward technology differ significantly from many of his contemporaries, and on his novel Ulysses, which takes place in metropolitan Dublin and features many of the everyday technologies of the early twentieth century.

The first chapter examines the relationship between technology and the vitalist theories of Henri Bergson and Hans Driesch, arguing that the popularity these theories …

Navigating The Fourth Dimension: Nonlinear Narratives In Film, Literature, And Television, Jason R. Boulanger

Senior Honors Projects

Time is often considered the fourth dimension due to the fact that nothing can exist outside the confines of time. Since time is so intrinsic to the very nature of being in the world, creators of film, literature, and television, which are reflective of life, must at least implicitly confront concepts of time and temporality within their work. The intangibility of time presents many difficulties but also a great number of opportunities in accurately portraying its true function within the world.

Many literary works, films, and television programs directly confront concepts of time. Each medium with its own benefits and …

Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms [Review], David Rando

English Faculty Research

It appears that the moderns are catching up to the Victorians at last. Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier’s edited volume, Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940, represents the most forceful statement to date about the possibilities and opportunities for print culture studies in the modernist period. While the study of print culture has flourished in Victorian studies for decades, particularly through the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals and its journal, Victorian Periodicals Review, modernist studies has been slower to embrace print culture studies. There are many historical and theoretical reasons for this, but even field nomenclature may make a difference. “Victorian studies” …

Ruth Crawford's "Spiritual Concept": The Sound-Ideals Of An Early American Modernist, 1924-1930, Judith Tick

Judith Tick

This article investigates the musical thought and stylistic evolution of the American modernist composer Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953) in her formative years. It shows the relationship of style and idea to what she termed "spiritual concept": the core of her transcendental modernism. The sources of Crawford's spiritual aesthetics are Theosophy, Eastern religious philosophy, nineteenth-century American Transcendentalism, and the imaginative tradition of Walt Whitman. Thus Crawford drew on an eclectic legacy of ideas that had been linked in American intellectual life since the turn of the century. Documentation of her thought is based on unpublished diaries, poems, and correspondence. The mediation …

Bad Blood: The Southern Family In The Work Of William Faulkner, Neil T. Phillips

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

This thesis concerns the Southern family in the work of William Faulkner, specifically The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses.

A Solution To “The Woman Question”: Envisioning The Japanese Woman In The Bijin-Ga Of Japan's Modern Print Designers, Amanda Tobin

Honors Papers

My essay addresses the portrayal of women in early 20th-century Japanese prints. I examine the "bijin-ga," or "pictures of beautiful women," of Shin-hanga (New Prints) and Sosaku-hanga (Creative Prints) artists, focusing on the "after the bath" trope. These artists claimed to create woodblock prints that were both Japanese and modern, updating aesthetics and techniques. Their chosen subject matter, however, represents a psychological anchor against the widespread social changes of the Taisho Period (1912-1926) in Japan, during which time "new women" and "modern girls" were crafting public roles for women based on political activism and liberated sexuality.

Modernism At Bowdoin: American Paintings From 1900 To 1940, Bowdoin College. Museum Of Art, Joachim Homann

Museum of Art Exhibition Catalogues

The catalog of the exhibition includes works drawn from the collection of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and selected paintings on loan from the Yale University Art Gallery.

Exhibition held in the Boyd Gallery, Jan. 12-June 26, 2011.

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

Torrington Articles

No abstract provided.

Altruism And The Administration Of The Universe: Kirtley Fletcher Mather On Science And Values, Edward B. Davis

Biology Educator Scholarship

Few American scientists have devoted as much attention to religion and science as Harvard geologist Kirtley Fletcher Mather (1888-1978). Responding to antievolutionism during the 1920s, he taught Sunday School classes, assisted in defending John Scopes, and wrote Science in Search of God (1928). Over the next 40 years, Mather explored the place of humanity in the universe and the presence of values in light of what he often called "the administration of the universe," a term and concept he borrowed from his former teacher, geologist Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin. Human values, including cooperation and altruism, had emerged in such a context: …

Poor Old Horse: Tragicomedy And The Good Soldier, Matthew Christian

Senior Projects Spring 2011

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Philosophical Hermeneutics And The Ethical Function Of Architecture, Paul Kidder

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Karsten Harries’ book, The Ethical Function of Architecture, raises the question of how architecture can be interpretive of and for our time. Part of Harries’ pursuit of this question is done in dialogue with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, whose evocatively expressed ontology of building and dwelling recovered, in philosophical and poetic terms, the power of buildings to symbolize and interpret the most fundamental truths of being and human existence. The present essay identifies contributions to this hermeneutic and ontological approach to architecture drawn from the philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, emphasizing Gadamer’s notions of play (Spiel), symbol, and the …

Interpreting With "All Possible Caution, On Mental Tiptoe": Nabakov's Post-Romantic Renewal Of Perception In Lolita, Curtis Donald Le Van

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Although presenting the concept of love in a form not accepted by societal conventions does indeed estrange the conception of love in Nabakov's Lolita, it does nothing to explain how readers accept Humbert's passion, without immediately and consistently disregarding it as lewd and inappropriate. I will argue that Nabakov estranges the romantic conceptions not by defamiliarizing the occasion of love (i.e. by making the romance a manifestation of pedophilia), but rather by defamiliarizing and complicating the acts of both reading and interpreting. First, I will make associations between the Romantics and Nabokov, regarding their shared desire to renew the habitual …

The Time Machine And Heart Of Darkness: H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, And The Fin De Siecle, Haili Ann Vinson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Much work has been done on the relationship between fin de siècle authors H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Ford Madox Ford. As Nicholas Delbanco explains, these writers lived closely to one another in Kent during the transition into the Twentieth Century. While scholars have stressed the collaboration between Conrad and Ford and the disagreements between Wells and James, fewer have treated the relationship of Wells and Conrad. Their most widely read works, The Time Machine and Heart of Darkness, share remarkable similarities that reveal common topical influences on both writers. Furthermore, I argue that Wells …

Writing The Love Of Boys: Origins Of Bishōnen Culture In Modernist Japanese Literature, Jeffrey Angles

Jeffrey Angles

Despite its centuries-long tradition of literary and artistic depictions of love between men, around late nineteenth-century Japan began to portray same-sex desire as immoral. This book looks at the response to this during the critical era of cultural ferment between the two world wars as a number of Japanese writers challenged the idea of love and desire between men as pathological. Angles focuses on key writers, examining how they experimented with new language, genres, and ideas to find fresh ways to represent love and desire between men. He traces the personal and literary relationships between contemporaries such as the poet …