Modern Literature Commons^™

Investigating The "Party Consciousness": Gender Normativity & Affect In Woolf’S Party Scenes In “To The Lighthouse” & “Mrs. Dalloway”, Chelsea Goodman

English

In 1925, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, “…I should like to investigate the party consciousness…where people secrete an envelope which connects them and protects them from others, like myself, who am outside the envelope” (DIII 13). Woolf’s metaphor of the “envelope” reflects how parties have the potential to be places of community and, conversely, of alienation. In literary criticism, Woolf’s parties are often simplified and read as sites of communion. I argue that instead of a suspension of normativity across all characters, which one might expect in a party scene, Woolf’s domestic party scenes solidify, reflect, and enforce …

"Ostracized As We Are With God": Mina Loy's Anti-Career And The Search For Originality, Peyton L. Phillips

Master's Theses

Among many modernist artists, Mina Loy remains one of the most complex and allusive. Recent posthumous exposure of Loy's life and work adds to this precarity. A significant piece of Loy's life that is especially complex to contemporaries is her time spent writing. By establishing Loy's subjective relationship with her Victorian upbringing, this paper seeks to show examples of its influence on her search for originality. Mainly, the paper examines Loy's concept of originality, where that concept may have come from, and how it is reflected in her literature. The paper analyzes three of Loy's literary works, her poems "Virgins …

The Making Of Jewish-American Progress In Gertrude Stein’S, The Making Of Americans: Being A History Of A Family’S Progress, Rochel L. Gasson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation provides a comprehensive reading of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (TMOA), situating the novel at the intersection of literary modernism, Jewish American identity, and feminist thought. It argues that Stein reconceives American progress not as linear advancement but as a recursive, relational, and culturally grounded process. Through experimental form, repetitive syntax, and a sustained present tense, TMOA dramatizes the psychological and social complexities of immigrant families navigating assimilation while maintaining heritage. Characters such as the Old Man, his son, and the Dehning and Herland families reveal generational tensions, moral labor, and the ambivalences of upward …

Evolving Expressions Of Trauma In James Joyce, Jean Rhys, And Caryl Phillips, Sean M. Mccray

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Evolving Expressions of Trauma articulates ways that dynamic, changing theories of trauma can provide a language and conceptual space to examine innovative modes and means of expression in Modernist novels and in later, post-colonial and experimental novels. This dissertation asserts that as trauma theory has expanded to encompass and describe different types of traumata, including the mundane, the insidious, and empathetic, it has provided a scaffolding for studying difficult, even impenetrable works from the Modernist period and beyond. The works examined here are strategically selected to demonstrate scope and particularity in the growth of trauma theories and their potential applications …

Virginia Woolf & Ecologies: Selected Papers From The 32nd Annual International Conference On Virginia Woolf - Table Of Contents, Shilo Mcgiff, Laci Mattison

Virginia Woolf: Selected Papers

No abstract provided.

“What Do Any Of Us Really Know About Love:” A Discussion Of Irony Within Raymond Carver’S Short Story Cycle What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Niyonna Johnson

Honors College Theses

With minimalist technique, Raymond Carver manages to accurately depict a depressed working-class America. Current contemporary criticism has focused on the main themes of Carver’s work such as the struggle with identity, alcoholism, disconnection, and domesticity hardships; the one ideal that has seemed to be missing is the irony that lies within the lives of the characters. This paper will analyze, in depth, short stories from a short story cycle of Raymond Carver and detail how their current situations are directly juxtaposed by their occupations and how this benefits the currently discussed themes of his work.

Virginia Woolf: The Bookbinder And The Bibliophile, Geoffrey Bridgman

Dissertations and Theses

The triumph of Virginia Woolf’s career as a novelist is one of the most famous stories of the 20th century. Her career as a publisher of her home-grown Hogarth Press is a little less widely acknowledged. But Virginia Woolf is known to have engaged herself for many hours folding, stapling, sewing and gluing the publications which she and her husband Leonard had tried printing (at least to start) with the small platen press they had set up in their home. What is even less acknowledged is that Virginia Woolf maintained a private practice re-wrapping the books in her own library …

To The Lighthouse Or To Mrs. Ramsay? A Study Of Materialization Through The Symbolism Of The Lighthouse In Virginia Woolf’S To The Lighthouse, Virginia Moscetti

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In this paper, I argue that the “lighthouse” in Virginia Woolf’s novel To The Lighthouse operates as a symbol for Mrs. Ramsay’s “self-hood” and for Mr. Ramsay’s obscure desire for sanctuary and domesticity in Mrs. Ramsay. Through this symbolism I further contend that Woolf renders the ambiguous processes associated with self-hood and desire materially legible and, in doing so, demonstrates how metaphor and symbolism reconstitute our material world into representation. Moreover, I argue that we can conceptualize the lighthouse symbolism revolving around and centered in Mrs. Ramsay in terms of T.J. Clark’s “dual figure”; a figure with two symbolic connotations …

Primitivism, Performance Studies, And Modernist Time: Tracing An Alternative Genealogy Of Performance Studies Through Case Studies In Modernist Cultural Appropriation, Stephanie Vella

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces a genealogy of research methodologies for documenting, transmitting, and analyzing embodied, non-textual performance practices from the late-nineteenth through early-twentieth centuries. I uncover intersections between these methods and the conflations of race and temporality that are ubiquitously threaded through modernist cultural practices during this time in the form of primitivism. The researchers whose work I analyze all saw European modernity as fundamentally detached from physical culture, while viewing other cultures—especially those of the people most directly threatened by colonial and capitalist expansion during this time—as having access to a “lost” corporeal knowledge. I argue that primitivism is not …

Femininity Reclaiming Chivalry In The Harry Potter Series, Ashley M. Watson

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This paper focuses on the reclaiming of chivalric values by female characters in the Harry Potter series by comparing them to Arthurian characters. Scholars have extensively compared the narrative of the Knights of the Round Table to the global phenomenon of the Harry Potter series, but in this paper I explore, through a feminist lens, a character comparison of the Harry Potter novels and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. I will show how female characters in modern literature reclaim chivalry. This is important because it exemplifies a shift in the position of women into a more active role. I …

The Spooky Vein: The Reparative Gothic-Modern In The Works Of Richard A.W. Hughes, Corwin R. Baden

English Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation explores the dual nature of Richard A.W. Hughes as a marginalized Gothicist and modernist. This duality facilitated the development of the author’s reparative vision for a 20th-century world traumatized by planetary war. The present study utilizes close readings—both surface and symptomatic—combined with archival research to assert that Hughes fashions this reparative imperative consistently across his corpus: in his short stories, poems, novels, stage plays, and screenplays. In his short stories, this vision includes an embrace of the Stranger, a shadowy Gothic figure whose possessions, power, difference, and familiarity lead the human subject from contestation, through representation, and toward …

T.S Eliot And The Impersonal Theory Of Poetry, Brahim Houban

Dirassat

Literary theories and movements have different phases and characteristics. Modernism as a literary movement has been seen as a remarkable one that shaped the English literature as a whole. Thanks to T.S. Eliot and many others, modernism has become a unique phenomenon and abackbone in English literature especially when it comes to the poetic diction and the role of the poet in society. In the Romantic Era, the poet is attached to his poem and the productions are merely spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. For modernism in general and T.S. Eliot I particular, the poet should be detached from any …

Shared Tensions: High Modernist Poetry As The Precursor Of Extreme Metal Artists’ Cultural Engagement And Critique, Jacob Mensinger

West Chester University Master’s Theses

The first half of the 20^th century is one characterized by the fatigue of war, as World War I came to a close, the rising tension that would eventually explode into World War II overwhelmed the aesthetics of art and culture. Poets and musicians have responded to this anxiety through their art. Where modernist poets’ work responded to the stresses of living through such trying times, musicians across the genre of heavy metal have responded to a continuing atmosphere of western conflict, from nuclear proliferation and the civilization ending threat of the Cold War, to the Vietnam and Korean …

Reading Ethics: Modernism, Narrative, Violence, Katie Dyson

Dissertations

Reading Ethics hinges on the relationship between its two central terms, tracing how modernist narrative innovations reimagined reading as an ethical practice. To ask how we read is to return to a core question for the discipline. Building on recent reevaluations of reading methodologies by Rita Felski, Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best, and other scholars, I argue that modernist narrative forms foreground the ethical dynamics between text, reader, and world, asking readers to rethink how we understand the world even as they work to build new ones. Focusing on British and American modernist and meta-modernist fiction from writers such as …

To Reach The Unreachable Stars: Reexamining The Shared Arthurian Vision Of C. S. Lewis's Science Fiction Trilogy And Raymond Chandler's Marlowe Novels, Hollis Thompson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although Raymond Chandler and C. S. Lewis seem to be a rather strange pairing, the ways in which they both borrow from Arthurian literature and use the myth to speak to their cultural moment are strikingly similar. Following T. S. Eliot’s use of the Grail quest in The Waste Land (which set a standard for the use of such material in Modern literature), these authors use Arthurian elements as a means of exposing hidden connections between the fragments of the literary past and the present within Chandler’s Marlowe novels and Lewis’s science fiction trilogy. Both men present Western identity as …

Audience And Narrative In Female-Authored Diaries Of The Twentieth Century: Analyzing Diaries As Modernist Texts, Rose Grosskopf

College Honors Program

During the early twentieth century the literary modernists reacted to a changing world by pioneering new literary forms that could depict the subjective experience of thought. Their new forms eschewed tradition, convention, and narrative and experimented with literary techniques that could depict the mind in an expanded moment of time.

In her modernist essay “A Diary,” Gertrude Stein reveals the similarities between diaries and her own experimental modernist literature. “A Diary,” which is both modernist literature and a diary, provides a critical lens by which to examine other diaries as modernist texts. An analysis of the diaries of Anne Frank, …

The Gendering Of Death Personifications In Literary Modernism: The Femme Fatale Symbol From Baudelaire To Barnes, Amanda Mcnally

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The time of modernity, defined here as 1850-1940, contributed to massive changes in the representation of the feminine in literature. Societal paradigm shifts due to industrialism, advances in science, psychology, and a newfound push for gender equality brought transformation to the Western World. As a result of this, male frustrations revived the ancient trope of the femme fatale, but the modern woman—already hungry for agency, tired of maligned representation in heinous portrayals of skeletons, sirens, and beasts—saw a symbol begging for redemption rather than the intended insult. Women of the nineteenth century infused texture to a two-dimensional accusation that argued …

You Can Go Home Again: The Misunderstood Memories Of Captain Charles Ryder, Monica M. Krason

ETD Archive

Critics have frequently commented on the nostalgic tone of Brideshead Revisited. Their assessment has been largely negative, with most considering Brideshead too sentimental about England’s aristocratic past. This current characterization fails to recognize Waugh’s critiques of such thinking in Brideshead, wherein he upends the nostalgic tropes of popular Oxford novels, illustrates the dangers of both insulated upper class living and thoughtless presentism through his depictions of various characters, and proposes a greater metaphysical drama through memory is at play in the novel. Brideshead offers nostalgia as an enlivening force which allows Charles Ryder to maintain a vibrant understanding for who …

The Revolt Against Mourning: Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner, And Beyond, Andrew Leo Beutel

Theses and Dissertations--English

The Revolt against Mourning calls into question the widespread critical alignment of literary modernism with Freudian melancholia. Focusing instead on “mourning,” through close readings of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, I demonstrate how their depictions of this notion overturn both its traditional and contemporary understandings. Whereas Freud conceives mourning as a psychic labor that the subject slowly and painfully carries out, Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner convey it as a destabilizing, subversive, and transformative force to which the subject is radically passive. For Freud, mourning is a matter …

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 …

The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism And The Posthumous By Erin E. Edwards, A. Irene Mangoutas

The Goose

Review of Erin E. Edwards' The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism and the Posthumous.

Modern American Cover Art: The Great Gatsby Through Time, Jessica Harrell

Senior Theses

Book jackets and cover art are, more than anything, an advertising tool used to attract consumers, promote book sales, and establish company identity. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a staple in the canon of American literature whose cover art has drastically transformed in the ninety years since its original publication. This thesis traces these changes over time, focusing specifically on publishing history, art history, American culture, and thematic interpretations. In doing so, I found that the most substantial influences on these covers were publishing house identity, design trends, and available artistic techniques. Ultimately, The Great Gatsby’s cover …

Pirandello Proto-Modern: A New Reading Of L’Esclusa, Bradford Masoni

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Luigi Pirandello’s first novel, L’Esclusa, written in 1893, but not published in its definitive edition until 1927, straddles two literary worlds: that of the realistic style of the Italian veristi, and something new, a style and approach to narrative that anticipates the theory of writing Pirandello lays out in his long essay L’Umorismo, as well as the kinds of experimental writing that one associates with early-20^th-century modernism in general, and with Pirandello’s later work in particular. The novel’s living in both worlds, however, makes it an interesting and problematic text. First, it gives readers insight into …

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 …

Metamodernism In Liksom’S Compartment No. 6, Kasimir Sandbacka

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper "Metamodernism in Liksom's Compartment no. 6" Kasimir Sandbacka examines Rosa Liksom's latest novel Compartment No. 6 (2011). Liksom is considered to be one of the most prominent Finnish postmodernists. However, Compartment No. 6 has been seen by critics as a shift or return towards modernism or even realism. Sandbacka concurs with this observation but maintains that this is an insufficient analysis of the change in Liksom's writing. He argues that the change is related to the transformation of the cultural dominant, namely postmodernism. In dialogue with Jameson's theory of postmodernism, Sandbacka discusses recent theories of post-postmodernism and …

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