Browsing by Subject "Modernism"
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Item Air-borne bards : Anglo-Irish writers and the BBC, 1931-1968(2012-08) Bloom, Emily Catherine; Cullingford, Elizabeth; Carter, Mia; Friedman, Alan W; Hutchison, Coleman; Savage, Robert JThis dissertation defines and explores “radiogenic aesthetics” in late modernism that emerged alongside radio broadcasting, World War II era propaganda, censorship, and paper shortages, and the transnational networks forming in the shadow of British imperial collapse. The Anglo-Irish writers in this study—W.B. Yeats, Louis MacNeice, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett—addressed a changing media environment that mapped on to the socio-cultural flux of the period following Irish Independence. Transcending the newly minted national boundaries between Ireland and England, the British Broadcasting Corporation became a locus for shaping transnational literary networks, this in spite of the nationalist rhetoric surrounding broadcasting. By analyzing broadcasts alongside print literature, I identify a circuit of influence coursing between modernism and broadcasting, rather than a unidirectional flow. This body of work, which includes drama (radio and stage), feature broadcasts, poetry, and fiction, offers a counter-narrative to literary historical theories that position modernist aesthetics as a reaction against popular mass media. Motifs of uncanny repetition—returns, echoes, and hauntings—are typical of these radiogenic aesthetics and reveal tensions between orality and literacy, embodiment and disembodiment, communalism and individualism, ephemerality and permanence, and tradition and “the now.” These tensions become definitive features of late modernism as the self-assurance of modernism’s first practitioners gives way to troubling questions about the future of literature in the unstable media environments surrounding World War II. Adapting traditional literary forms from the novel, poem, and play for the broadcast medium and incorporating radio’s epistemologies into their literary theories, Yeats, MacNeice, Bowen, and Beckett draw attention to fundamental questions about mediation itself. In so doing, they anticipate the hypermediacy of postmodernism without, however, relinquishing the modernist pursuit of authenticity or the quest for forms capable of transcending the widening distance between author and audience.Item An American mythology: William Carlos Williams and the poetics of modernism(Texas Tech University, 2005-08) Jasmin, James B.; Conrad, Bryce D.; Samson, John; Wenthe, WilliamThe modernist period (1920 to 1960) in America was a time of diverse and complex cultural upheaval. Modern poets both at home and abroad attempted to track and record the events of the time, but the modernist approach to both history and poetics was different in America than in England and Europe. William Carlos Williams, and, to some extent, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane, defined what was “American” in their verse. To do so, a distancing from traditional notions of history, literature and other disciplines became one of the central themes of their work. This dissertation is a study of the American modernists and their approach to a new system of national letters. For this work’s purpose, “myth” is defined as the practices, beliefs, customs, philosophy and ideology of American culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using the approach of the poet as the “writer of culture,” I examine how Williams and the other modernist poets redefined American culture through the reification of values, ideals and social practices. While I take the position that culture is responsible for the “break” from European tradition, I argue that the poet is responsible for mapping, defining and cataloguing the development and evolution of this break. The “myth” of America is thus separate from its constructed history; it is a more authentic portrait of American culture.Item Authorial Anxiety in a Mass Media World: Four Modernists Respond(2013-10-15) Stamant, James MarcelThis project explores the anxieties authors of the early twentieth century experienced in relation to mass media, particularly newspapers and the movies, focusing on the selected works of four modernist authors: Sherwood Anderson, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. The works I examine span a twenty-year period, from the late 1910s to 1940, when both the newspaper and movie industries were firmly established as ?mass? media. I submit that these authors sustained very complicated relationships with the media they were in contact with. While all four of these authors worked for a time in one of these media, they maintained a negative attitude toward these same media when writing about them in their fiction. All four of these authors depicted perceived flaws in the very media they participated in. Anderson and Joyce, critiquing the newspaper world, suggest that newspapers fail to fulfill expectations regarding ?real? and accurate representations of the world. Anderson?s portrayal offers different reasons for the medium?s inabilities than Joyce?s, but both authors? fiction comes to comparable conclusions of the newspaper business? inadequacy to compete with the representations that could be found in literary fiction. Fitzgerald and Hemingway, writing about the movie business, highlight what they see as that medium?s shortcomings, and though both Fitzgerald and Hemingway personally held great optimism in the potential of movies they ultimately suggest otherwise in the fiction I examine. For these authors, the anxieties they felt were quite real. Some of the worries that these four authors held existed long before their time and continue to persist in the media saturated world of the early twenty-first century. Whatever reservations these authors had, though, they did not preclude them from envisioning the possibilities of different media, participating in those media, and utilizing their experiences (both real and imagined) in their own literary fiction. The connections between media and authorship in the early twentieth century were extremely complex, and the blurred lines between different modes of communication?as well as the definitions of ?art??created concerns that these four authors expressed in the best way they knew how: in their literary works.Item Beyond English : translating modernism in the global south(2014-12) Tiwari, Bhavya; Richmond-Garza, Elizabeth M. (Elizabeth Merle),1964-My title echoes Agha Shahid Ali’s sentiment of needing to move beyond the linguistic nationalism of “English” toward a more varied understanding of Anglophone writing within multiple contexts in the world. In three theoretical case studies from four linguistic and literary traditions (English, Bengali, Spanish, and Hindi-Urdu), I explore the dimensions and definitions of comparative Anglophone and world literature, comparative poetics, and a comparative study of novels – in the global postcolonial world. I focus on moments of translatability and untranslatability to question traditional models for studies in English and comparative literature that do not account for translation. Each of my chapters shows how texts in the “original” or “translation” do not always circulate from a homogenized metropolitan center to a marginalized periphery, and unlike in the elite North American and Parisian world where untranslatability often inspires terror and loss of language, translations can act as connecting forces that create organic dialogue in the global south on modernism and postcolonial discourses that go beyond Europe and AmericaItem Blackness and rural modernity in the 1920s(2011-12) Elliott, Chiyuma; Thompson, Shirley Elizabeth; Green, Laurie; Hoelscher, Steven D; Jones, Meta D; Meikle, Jeffrey LThe New Negro Movement (often called the Harlem Renaissance) made black creative production visible to an extent unprecedented in American History. Complex representations of African Americans started to infiltrate a popular culture previously dominated by stereotypes; people from all walks of life were confronted for the first time with art made by African Americans that asked them to think in new ways about the meaning of race in America. The term Harlem Renaissance conjures up images of urban America, but the creative energies of many New Negro figures were actually focused elsewhere—on rural America. Urbanite Jean Toomer spent time teaching in an agricultural college in the rural South, and wrote award-winning poetry and prose about that experience. Langston Hughes wrote blues lyrics about the struggles of rural migrants in New York that highlighted the complex interconnections of rural and urban experience. And the pioneer black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux incorporated numerous fictionalized accounts of his own experiences as a homesteader in South Dakota into his race movies and novels. New Negro writers asserted that their art shaped how people understood themselves and were understood by others. Accordingly, this project examines both literary representations, and how literary works related to the real lives and struggles of rural African Americans. My research combines archival, literary, and biographical materials to analyze the aesthetic choices of three New Negro authors (Hughes, Micheaux, and Toomer), and explain the interrelated literary and cultural contexts that shaped their depictions of African American rural life. Houston Baker, in his influential 1987 book Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, defined black modernism as an awareness of radical uncertainty in human life. My central contention is that one of the most radical uncertainties in interwar-period America was the changing rural landscape. I revisit the largely-forgotten (though large-scale) social movement to fight rural outmigration by modernizing rural life. And I argue that, rather than accepting the simple binary that took the urban to be modern and the rural backward, African Americans in the 1920s created and experienced complicated formulations of the rural and its connections to modern blackness.Item Capturing "the living light of other worlds" : Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater's Thought forms in Victorian context(2007-12) Casson, Bonnie Colleen; Henderson, Linda Dalrymple, 1948-The tumultuous Victorian period in Britain produced a society seeking answers to the unknown and unseen in the universe. Victorians were forced to display a faith in science, and sought a spirituality that would allow for a belief in these discoveries as well as retain their idea of a higher power. Melding the scientific with the spiritual, Theosophy was a major force in late nineteenth century society. Promoted by the likes of Madame Blavatsky, Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, Theosophy and Theosophical beliefs symbolized the dramatic shift in religious thinking amongst bourgeois British culture. Under the Theosophical umbrella, science and spirituality became intertwined and interdependent. Besant and Leadbeater sought to educate British society on the unfettered powers of the mind. In their research for Thought Forms, they pursued visualizations (both figurative and abstract) and emanations achieved through thought transference. Besant and Leadbeater intercepted the thoughts of a third party and verbally communicated their interpreted images to a specific artist. One of these artists, John Varley, painted the images described by Besant and Leadbeater. These explorations into the unknown endeavored to do more than make the invisible universe visible. In a society where the individual seemed to be lost in industrialization, Besant and Leadbeater sought to educate the public on Theosophical ideas and their version of morality. Through Besant and Leadbeater’s Thought Forms, my thesis seeks to explore the position of this highly influential yet generally ignored book as a bridge between the past and present. In other words, the authors clearly tie themselves to their scientific, visual and spiritual pasts but the book’s influence on the modernist movement, especially in the writing and paintings of Wassily Kandinsky, makes Thought Forms a permanent fixture in modern history. As a synthesis of art, science and religion, Thought Forms presents a world of cooperation and possibility, illustrating that with any kind of faith the unbelievable can become reality.Item Cloak and mirror: postmodern eclecticism in the appropriation of modern hermeneutics as prefigured in nineteenth century aesthetics(Texas Tech University, 1995-05) Inman, R. CameronNot availableItem A culture of dissonance : Wassily Kandinsky, atonality, and abstraction(2014-05) Boland, Lynn; Henderson, Linda Dalrymple, 1948-A Culture of Dissonance: Wassily Kandinsky, Atonality, and Abstraction by Lynn Edward Boland, Ph.D. Supervisor: Linda D. Henderson Wassily Kandinsky's interest in music as a source for abstraction in painting has often been noted in the scholarship on his art. However, no studies have sufficiently explained how the artist employed musical strategies, especially as he was developing his abstract style in the first decade of the twentieth century. Kandinsky's looked primarily to Arnold Schoenberg's new musical idioms and theories, and he was deeply inspired by highly dissonant music, but his ideas were set within a much broader context that further suggested and encouraged the expressive and transformative power of dissonance. By the late nineteenth century, extended passages of dissonance were common in musical compositions. At the same time, the concept of dissonance as a positive force was suggested in a wide range of late nineteenth-century literature, including the writings of Friedrich [should be this spelling throughout] Nietzsche, occult authors, popular texts on physics and experimental psychology, as well as within music and art theory. Close readings of Kandinsky's theoretical texts and selected works of art provide insights into how he might have understood and employed these concepts in his formation of an abstract style. Kandinsky's paintings Impression III (Concert) of 1911 and Composition VII of 1913 are the primary artistic foci of this study, along with his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art and the anthology Der Blaue Reiter, which he co-edited. This dissertation will seek to restore the concept of musical dissonance and its application in the visual arts to its historical context for Kandinsky. This will facilitate more informed formal analyses of Schoenberg's music and Kandinsky's paintings, which, in turn, suggest strategies of atonal musical composition applied to abstract painting. Additionally, this dissertation will establish an artistic context of visual dissonance that goes beyond Kandinsky, including artistic movements in France and Russia, allowing additional comparisons and a consideration of the larger impact of these ideas.Item Daphne in the twentieth century: the grotesque in modern poetry(2009-05-15) Martin, Thomas HenryThis dissertation seeks to expose the importance of the grotesque in the poetry and writings of Trans-Atlantic poets of the early twentieth century, particularly Ezra Pound, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore and T.S. Eliot. Prior scholarship on the poets minimizes the effect of the grotesque in favor of the more objective elements found in such movements as Imagism. This text argues that these poets re-established the grotesque in their writing after World War I mainly through Hellenic myths, especially myths concerning the motif of the tree. The myths of Daphne and Apollo, Baucis and Philemon, and others use the tree motif as an example of complete metamorphosis into a new identity. This is an example of what Mikhail Bakhtin entitles grotesque realism, a type of grotesque not acknowledged in art since the French Revolution. Since the revolution, the grotesque involved an image trapped between two established forms of identity, or what Bakhtin refers to as the Romantic grotesque. This grotesque traps the image in stasis and does not provide a dynamic change of identity in the same way as grotesque realism. Therefore, these poets introduce the subversive act of change of identity in Western literature that had been absent for the most part for nearly a century. The modern poets pick up the use of the complete metamorphosis found in Hellenic myth in order to identify with a constantly changing urban environment that alienated its inhabitants. The modern city is a form of the grotesque in that it has transformed its environment from a natural state to a manmade state that is constantly in a state of transformation, itself. The modern poets use Hellenic myths and the tree motif to create an identity for themselves that would be as dynamic in transformation as the environment they inhabited.Item Faits divers : national culture and modernism in Third World literary magazines(2010-08) Micklethwait, Christopher Dwight; Wettlaufer, Alexandra; Rossman, Charles; Ali, Samer; Salgado, Cesar; Wilks, Jennifer; Wolitz, SethCommitments to cosmopolitanism and indigenism complicate the Modernist literature of the Third World. This study investigates the rhetorical and aesthetic responses of Third World "little magazines"--short-running, self-financed cultural magazines--to these two notions. These little magazine evolved with the daily newspaper as a tool favored by avant-garde movements for critiquing the social structures that produced it and for codifying their aesthetic and political principles. Comparing the Stridentist little magazine Horizonte (1926-1927) to D. H. Lawrence's novel The Plumed Serpent (1925), I argue that the Mexican Revolution created a climate of nationalism that reoriented the Stridentist movement away from a version of cosmopolitanism influenced by European modernist movements and toward a deeper interest in the Mexican folk and indigenous culture. Following form there, I consider the concept of cosmopolitanism in the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier's El Reino de este mundo (1949) in comparison to two Haitian magazines: La Revue Indigène (1927-1928) and Les Griots (1938-1940). Here I find that, while Carpentier stages a relatively global critique of primitivism as a false cosmopolitanism, the magazines La Revue Indigène and Les Griots reflect a turn from such a cosmopolitanism that values the primitive for its own sake toward a cultural nationalism invested in the real and imagined recuperation of Haiti's African origins through the study of folklore, Vodou, the Kreyòl language and poetic images of Africa. Finally, I compare Futurist F. T. Marinetti's Mafarka le futuriste: roman africain (1909) to the Egyptian literary magazine Al-Kātib Al-Miṣrī (1945-1948) in order to demonstrate the distance between Egyptian modernity in the European imagination and the self-conceived notions of Egyptian modernity. In Al-Kātib Al-Miṣrī, I find that these writers value cosmopolitanism, arguing that it is in fact indigenous to Egyptian culture itself and constructing their notion of Egyptian modernity around the maintenance of continuity with this indigenous cosmopolitanism. My examinations of these magazines suggests that, though the European avant-gardes and Third World literary Modernists may wield the little magazine similarly against hegemonic cultures, their purposes are divided over the roles cosmopolitanism and indigeneity play in the formation of national culture.Item The hyper Americans! : Modern architecture in Venezuela during the 1950s(2014-05) Villota Peña, Jorge; Lara, Fernando Luiz; Cleary, Richard LouisDuring the 1950s, Venezuela embarked in an architectural venture marked by aesthetic, programmatic, and technological explorations. Politically framed by the international tension of the Cold War, this period was distinguished by multiple commercial exchanges between Venezuela and the United States, specially based on the oil industry. Many cultural aspects of the Venezuelan life, including its urban and architectural production, changed because of this interrelationship. Yet the conventional view is that architecture in Venezuela was torn between the repetition of U.S. models and the purest creativity of its local designers. Based on periodical publications of that time, and methodologically framed by the contemporary notion of transculturation and Gianni Vattimo’s weak though, this research demonstrates that modern architecture in Venezuela, produced by both locals and Americans, went beyond a unilateral center-periphery influence, and ended up being the hyperrealization (intensified version) of U.S. ideals. In this sense, the research analyzes an aspect not studied yet in depth: the connection between the long-term geographical profile of Venezuela and a unique geopolitical situation, as the basis for an outstanding architecture. The dissertation examines how the Edificio Creole in Caracas, designed by American architect Lathrop Douglass for Standard Oil, and completed in 1955, was not the subsequent version but the advanced prototype of the Esso office buildings both in Louisiana and New Jersey. It shows as well how the Electricity Building in Caracas (1955), also designed by Douglass, and whose authorship has remained unknown until now, represented a unique opportunity both to explore the insertion of an “horizontal skyscraper” in downtown, and to reveal a complex network of professional and political relations. By examining Higuerote Beach Resort, a vacation and residential complex located near Caracas, the dissertation also demonstrates how American magazines were used by Venezuelans as the basis for an architecture that became original without the inspiration of a genius designer. Finally, this research analyzes the production of a supernatural architecture through the Helicoid Shopping Center in Caracas (designed by Arquitectura y Urbanismo C.A. in 1955), one of the most paradigmatic examples of modern Venezuelan creativity, and probably the utmost realization of the American Utopia.Item Infatuation with the West : the case of Ja'far Khan(2011-05) Shariati, Maryam; Ghanoonparvar, M. R. (Mohammad R.)With no doubt, staging Hassan Moghaddam’s play Ja’far Khan Returns from the West in 1922 contributed a lot to improving the modern theater movement in Iran. Before this drama, the Iranian theater was pressing for a compelling pattern to free this old genre from the old structures of theater and provide it with the opportunity to explore novel areas. In traditional Iranian theatre, the dramatic expression was mostly in the form of dance and mime; puppetry, and Islamic religious epic drama (ta`ziyeh-khvani). Ja’far Khan Returns from the West opens up a new window to the traditional Iranian theatre and helps with establishing the fundamental principles of modern theatre in Iran. Moghaddam does not focus on the stories of kings as in the old comic theatre; nor narrates elegies or reenacts the martyrdom of Imam Hossein. The author, on the other hand, rather than depicting stories about old Persia, tries to address and criticize one of the major issues of his own time: the infatuation of the majority of young Iranians with the West; their alienation from their own culture; their devotion to assimilation with the West and taking it as a model; their belief in surrendering to the Western civilization totally and unconditionally. Unfortunately although the play became one of the most celebrated pieces at the time, after its author’s early death, Moghaddam’s works and influence gradually diminished. Even in landmarks of theatre history in Iran, little effort is devoted to introducing the late author to the new generation of theatre enthusiasts. This paper seeks to bring the significance of Hassan Moghaddam and his works, especially Ja’far Khan Returns from the West, into attention and discuss the importance of the play in general and its relation to westernization in particular.Item The intimate pulse of reality : sciences of description in fiction and philosophy, 1870-1920(2014-08) Brilmyer, Sarah Pearl; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-; Matysik, Tracie; Mackay, Carol H; Baker, Samuel; Wojciehowski, Hannah; Hoad, NevilleThis dissertation tracks a series of literary interventions into scientific debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, showing how the realist novel generated new techniques of description in response to pressing philosophical problems about agency, materiality, and embodiment. In close conversation with developments in the sciences, writers such as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner portrayed human agency as contiguous with rather than opposed to the pulsations of the physical world. The human, for these authors, was not a privileged or even an autonomous entity but a node in a web of interactive and co-constitutive materialities. Focused on works of English fiction published between 1870-1920, I argue that the historical convergence of a British materialist science and a vitalistic Continental natural philosophy led to the rise of a dynamic realism attentive to material forces productive of “character.” Through the literary figure of character and the novelistic practice of description, I show, turn-of-the-century realists explored what it meant to be an embodied subject, how qualities in organisms emerge and develop, and the relationship between nature and culture more broadly.Item Life and art in Paris : Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps(2014-05) Troyer, Mallory Maria; Antokoletz, ElliottAt the turn of the twentieth century, Paris was an international center for music, art, and fashion. It fostered the creation of a variety of innovative artistic developments and is widely considered to be the birthplace of Modernism. Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps, the epitome of modernist innovation, could only have happened in this unique cultural climate in the context of the Franco-Russian alliance. Stravinsky's early musical development reached its peak in his early ballets, most notably Le Sacre du printemps. This work is a culmination of the multiplicity of cultural activities that include art, scenario, choreography, and music that came together in Paris. In this essay, I will explore the various ways in which the city of Paris in the beginning of the twentieth century influenced Stravinsky's musical voice. My discussion moves from an overview of the city to Stravinsky, exploring the ways in which the Parisian environment shaped his compositional style. To this end, Le Sacre du printemps is viewed as a kind of lightning rod, bringing together many of the fundamental artistic developments of the early twentieth century and reflecting the diverse and modern city in which it was premiered.Item Literacy and its discontents: modernist anxiety and the literacy fiction of Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley(Texas A&M University, 2008-10-10) DuPlessis, Nicole MaraLiteracy theory, a multi-disciplinary, late-twentieth century endeavor, examines the acts of reading and writing as cognitive and social processes, seeking to define the relationship between reading and writing and other social and cognitive - especially linguistic - acts. As such, literacy theory intersects with discussions of public and individual education and reading habits that surface with the rise of the mass reading public. This dissertation analyzes scenes of reading and writing in the fiction of Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley as implicit authorial discourses on the function of literacy, including properties of written language and the social consequences of literate acts. It argues that reading and writing form important thematic concerns in Modernist fiction, defines fiction that theorizes about reading and writing as "literacy fiction," and proposes fictional dramatizations of literate activity as subjects for literacy theory. Chapter I argues that early twentieth-century Britain is an important historical site for intellectual consideration of literacy because near-universal access to education across social classes influences an increase in middle and working class readers. Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway provides a test case for the analysis of scenes of reading because her democratic concern with education is well established in the scholarly literature. Chapter II argues that in "The Celestial Omnibus" and "Other Kingdom," Forster critiques use of literacy as cultural capital. Chapter III argues that Forster's A Room with a View and Howards End portray the dangers of naive reading and the difficulties of autodidacticism for the working class, respectively. Chapter IV argues that Lawrence's "Shades of Spring" and Sons and Lovers introduce the theoretically unexplored topic of literacy's influence on intimate relationships. Chapter V argues that Huxley's Brave New World responds to the Modernist discourse on literacy by addressing the restriction of individual literacy by the State and elite intellectuals. The conclusion summarizes Modernist representation of literacy, states the significance of the methodology and its further applications, and refines the definition of literacy fiction. Because Modernist writers scrutinize the relationship between external forces and the individual psyche, their anxiety-tinged portraits treat both cognitive and social functions of literate acts.Item Looking forward together : three studies of artistic practice in the South, 1920-1940(2012-12) Lindenberger, Laura Augusta; Reynolds, Ann Morris; Bremen, Brian; Chambers, Eddie; Hake, Sabine; Smith, CheriseIn this dissertation, I provide three studies of artistic practice in the era of the Great Depression. In each chapter, I write about a different set of artists working in the southeastern United States: I write about Walker Evans and the artistic and literary community located in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana (1926-1941); Edwin and Elise Harleston and their portrait studio in Charleston, South Carolina (1922-1931); and Bill Traylor and the artists who founded the New South Gallery and Art School in Montgomery, Alabama (1939-1940). Drawing from public and private archival collections, I consider how these artists made works that represented the South while they also made connections with artists and visual communities elsewhere; these connections placed them in dialogue with artists of the Harlem Renaissance, of American Regionalism, and of the Mexican Mural Movement. Although the artists in each chapter were from different Southern cities, they shared similar interests in the importance of developing and participating in artistic community. I situate each study in this dissertation in relation to a type of artistic practice. These types of artistic practice—documentary, portraiture, and exhibition—served as loci for Southern artists’ ideas about time and place. Southern studies have been haunted by the idea that the South always looks backward, to the past. In these three studies, I consider how Southern artists and their contemporaries in other places took different approaches to referencing the past and imagining a future for the South. The works made by these Southern artists—which are linked by their complicated relationships to race, history, and place—are largely absent from histories of American and 20th century art. Their absence tells us much about the stakes behind history writing. By bringing these studies into dialogue with other, existing, art historical contexts and communities, I trace how historical absence is constructed and why such absences are important to consider. The works in this dissertation are also linked by their difference from a kind of Modernism; in their multiple and discrepant modernisms, the artists in this dissertation made work which was both modern and not-modern, which looked backward while pushing forward.Item The lost meaning of things : Edith Wharton, materiality, and modernity(2010-05) Miller, Ashley Elizabeth; Barrish, Phillip; Cohen, MattCritics of Edith Wharton frequently discuss the material culture that pervades her work, but the trend in doing so has been to rush past the things themselves and engage in abstracted conversations of theory. I would like to suggest that a closer scrutiny of the individual objects being presented in Wharton’s novels can highlight Wharton’s own theoretical approaches to material culture. Working from Bill Brown's distinction between objects and things, I want to argue that Wharton firmly situates the material culture in The Age of Innocence in the background of her characters' lives as objects which they utilize as extensions of the self; but she brings the thingness of material culture to the forefront in Twilight Sleep, where the material culture in the novel alternately stands out and malfunctions, as characters attempt—and fail—to construct coherent and livable identities for themselves in the face of a 1920s New York that Wharton depicts as a paradoxically over-furnished wasteland. I will ultimately argue that things, problematic as they are, become a matter of survival strategy for her characters in Twilight Sleep when they utilize them to reconstruct the social relations that have become increasingly threatened from the world of The Age of Innocence.Item A model of anti-modernism : an introduction to Nietzsche’s rationalistic rejection of liberal democracy(2010-12) Fortier, Jeremy; Pangle, Thomas L.; Stauffer, DevinThe thought of Friedrich Nietzsche is often taught, but seldom sufficiently understood, and thus what ought to be most challenging to us about Nietzsche – that is, the rationalistic basis of his rejection of liberal democracy – is not squarely confronted. I propose to lay the ground for such a confrontation.Item Modernism and the classical tradition(2010-12) Wood, Dafydd Gwilym; Comparative Literature; Wolitz, Seth L.; Cable, Thomas M.; Arens, Katherine M.; Whitbread, Thomas B.; Cooper, Andrew M.; Blevins, JacobThis dissertation seeks to abolish the inherited cliché that the Modernist writers and artists rejected earlier art and literature, particularly that of the classical tradition. In fact, both literature and art of the early 20th century made widespread use of the inherited Greco-Roman tradition in a myriad of ways. Moreover, beginning after the First World War and maturing in the 1920s, a demonstrative Neoclassical “movement” appeared across different types of art and different nations. A neoclassical or classicizing style or form is inherently malleable, an empty signifier that can, through an artist or writer’s emphasis, point towards any number of meanings. This allowed a classical style to become widespread along with its seeming resiliency as the ordered, traditional bedrock of the West. In the 1930s, however, the fascist parties of Germany, France, and Italy began to appropriate the neoclassical as a state- or party-style because of the ease with which politics could be incorporated into a relatively vacant form. Their systematic use of the classical tradition in large part “tainted” classical subjects and styles, which allowed for the post-World War II institutionalization of the avant garde. I argue that texts which used the classical tradition could do so in four distinct manners—four types of classicism. Symbolic Classicism controls its classical material by using it only at the level of hollow icon which pregnantly gestures towards antiquity. Traditional Classicism, like an adaptation of a classical narrative particularly in drama, becomes completely dependent on its borrowings. Formal Classicism borrows an inherited, vacant form which can then be injected with Modernity. Finally, Synthetic Classicism necessitates a careful balancing of the classical material, not reducing it to symbolic meaning, but producing a novel narrative or mirroring-effect, that controls its various elements designed into a modern theme or objective.Item My history, finally invented : Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and its readers(2012-05) Wallace, Laura Knowles; Bremen, Brian A.In this report, I examine the reception of Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood (1936) from contemporary reviews in periodicals to twenty-first century online reviews. I am interested in how the novel has been situated in both historical and personal canons. I focus on how Nightwood has been read through the lenses of experimental modernism, lesbian feminism and postmodern queer theory, and how my own readings of it have changed over the years.