Browsing by Subject "Virginia Woolf"
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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 Neither poppy not Mandragora : the memorialization of grief and grievance in the British literature of the Great War(2012-05) Cannon, Jean M.; Friedman, Alan Warren; Sherry, Vincent; Graham, Don; Cullingford, Liz; Kornhaber, DavidThis dissertation examines the modes of individual and cultural grieving that characterize the British literature of the Great War and its aftermath, 1914-30. Combining archival research, cultural history, and genre theory, I identify the war literature’s expression of a poetics of grief and grievance: one that is melancholic, in that it resists redemptive mourning, and accusatory, in that it frequently assigns blame for war and suffering on civilian spectators or the writer himself. In order to trace the development of the anti-elegiac in the literature of the Great War, my dissertation provides: (a) a publication history of the war poems of Wilfred Owen, (b) a comparison of the manipulation of the pathetic fallacy and pastoral mode in the works of combatant poets and Virginia Woolf, and (c) a detailed assessment of the reception of the controversial war memoirs and novels of the late 1920s. My findings challenge the widely held assumption that the pervasive irony and disenchantment of the literature of the Great War is primarily a product of the historical rupture of the event. I emphasize that the ironic mode developed during the war- and inter-war periods is an expression of personal and social anxiety attached by writers to the subject of individual mortality. Additionally, I argue that the literature of the Great War focuses on the limits of language that addresses atrocity, and the instability of the idea of consolation in an era of mass, industrialized death.Item Perceptions of an erotic maker(2016-05) Miller, Ann Benjamin; Reynolds, Ann Morris; Hubbard, Teresa, 1965-This report is a summary of my work and research during my three years at University of Texas at Austin. The first section of the report begins with the presentation of a mode of perception that comes from Parker Tyler’s essay “The Erotic Spectator: an Essay on the Eye of the Libido”. The second part of the report is a narrative that puts into practice the tools presented by Tyler- a set of tools that I use to allow boundaries of life and studio to fluidly shift and coalesce into paintings and back into life experiences.Item Publishing short stories : British modernist fiction and the literary marketplace(2012-08) Zacks, Aaron Shanohn; Winship, Michael, 1950-; Nadel, Ira; Friedman, Alan; Carter, Mia; Lesser, WayneThe short story was the most profitable literary form for most fiction-writers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries because it was quick to write, relative to novels, marketable to a wide variety of periodicals, and able to be re-sold, in groups, for book collections. While the majority of writers composed short fiction within conventional modes and genres and published collections rarely exhibiting more than a superficial coherence of setting or character, modernist authors found in the form’s brevity helpful restrictions on their stylistic and narrative experiments, and, in the short story collection, an opportunity to create book-length works exhibiting new, modern kinds of coherence. This dissertation examines four modernists' experiences writing short stories and publishing them in periodicals and books: Henry James in The Yellow Book and Terminations (Heinemann, 1895); Joseph Conrad in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories (Blackwood, 1902); James Joyce in The Irish Homestead and Dubliners (Grant Richards, 1914); and Virginia Woolf in Monday or Tuesday (Hogarth, 1921). For these writers, the production of short fiction within the literary marketplace had definite and important consequences on their texts as well as the formation of their mature authorial identities. (With the exception of James, I focus on the early, most impressionable periods of the writers’ careers.) In bucking the commercial trend of miscellaneous collections, the unified book of stories came to represent, for such artists, something of a bibliographic rebellion, which, because of its inherent formal fragmentation, proved a compelling and fruitful site for their exploration of modernist themes and styles. The conclusion explores some of the consequences of these experiences on the writers’ subsequent, longer texts—Lord Jim, Ulysses, and Jacob's Room—arguing that such so-called “novels” can be understood better if studied within the literary and professional contexts created by their authors’ engagements with the short story. The same is true of the “short story cycle,” “sequence,” and “composite,” as strongly-coherent books of stories have been termed variously by scholars. This dissertation, particularly its introduction, sets out to provide historical, material background for scholarship on this too-long neglected literary genre.Item “Quality is everything” : rhetoric of the transatlantic birth control movement in interwar women’s literature of England, Ireland and the United States(2009-12) Craig, Allison Layne; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne); Cullingford, Elizabeth; Cloud, Dana; Carter, Mia; Roberts-Miller, Patricia; Wilks, Jennifer MThis dissertation suggests that burgeoning public discourse on contraception in Britain and the United States between 1915 and 1940 created a paradigm shift in perceptions of women’s sexuality that altered the ways that women could be represented in literary texts. It offers readings of texts by women on both sides of the Atlantic who responded to birth control discourse not only by referencing contraceptive techniques, but also by incorporating arguments and dilemmas used by birth control advocates into their writing. The introductory chapter, which frames the later literary analysis chapters, examines similarities in the tropes Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes, the British and American “Mothers of Birth Control” used in their advocacy. These include images such as mothers dying in childbirth, younger children in large families weakened by their mothers’ ill-health, and sexual dysfunction in traditional marriages. In addition to this chapter on birth control advocates’ texts, the dissertation includes four chapters meant to demonstrate how literary authors used and adapted the tropes and language of the birth control movement to their own narratives and perspectives. The first of these chapters focuses on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, a 1915 political allegory about a nation populated only by women who have gained the ability to reproduce asexually. Gilman adopted pro-birth control language, but rejected the politically radical ideas of the early birth control movement. In addition to radical politics, the birth control movement was associated with racist eugenicist ideas, an association that the third chapter, on Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand examines in detail by comparing birth control and African-American racial uplift rhetoric. Crossing the Atlantic, the fourth chapter looks at the influence of the English birth control movement on Irish novelist Kate O’Brien’s 1931 Without My Cloak, a novel that challenges Catholic narratives as well as the heteronormative assumptions of birth control discourse itself. The final chapter analyzes Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Three Guineas (1938), illuminating Woolf’s connections between feminist reproductive politics and conservative pro-eugenics agendas. Acknowledging the complexity of these writers’ engagements with the birth control movement, the project explores not simply the effects of the movement’s discourse on writers’ depictions of sexuality, reproduction, and race, but also the dialogue between literary writers and the birth control establishment, which comprises a previously overlooked part of the formation of both the reproductive rights movement and the Modernist political project.Item The Making of Beauty: Aesthetic Spaces in the Fiction of D. H. Lawrence, Muriel Spark, and Virginia Woolf(2013-08-01) Lee, JooriThis dissertation rethinks textual images of the other?s beauty, depicted in works by D. H. Lawrence, Muriel Spark, and Virginia Woolf, whose fascination with the other, called by this dissertation the beloved, urged them to inscribe the beloved?s original beauty in texts. Their works make perceptible the singularity of the beloved, while revealing the writers? predicament in translating the beloved?s ineffability in texts. Taking the untranslatability of the beloved into consideration, this dissertation traces the ways in which these writers? texts capture the beloved?s original beauty at moments of revelation, related to epiphanies entering the terrain of literary modernism. My study thereby scrutinizes the dynamics of images of beauty and their impacts on art and politics in the context of modernism. In doing so, I argue that the texts I consider express the beloved?s singularity in challenge of the beautified images that many other artists invented for self-directed purposes in the early and mid-twentieth century. First, I explore Lawrence?s creation of aesthetic spaces in Lady Chatterley?s Lover (1928) in keeping with his desire for making palpable visual spectacles through the text. Analyzing how this ambition helped to create the novel?s aesthetic scenes, I would like to define Lawrence as an aesthete whose aspiration lay in expressing the beauty of things. Then, I discuss Spark?s affection for her characters and her desire to visualize the figure?s originality in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and The Girls of Slender Means (1963). Considering Spark in relation to both modernists and Fascists, I propose that her making of the image of her character breaks away from Fascism?s aestheticization of human figures. Finally, I investigate Woolf?s love for words by focusing on ?The Duchess and the Jeweller? (1938), a short story written for expressing various modes of beauty in words. Drawing to the represented link between words and smell, considered the most ?wasteful? sense, I examine how the sensory medium makes perceptible intrinsic qualities of words, and argues that her depiction of words, linked to smell, reveals the anti-utilitarian nature of words, unconstrained by a craftsman?s manipulation of words.Item The Modernist Imagination: Education of the Senses in Woolf, Mann and Joyce(2012-07-16) Lee, SunJooThis dissertation examines literary modernism as foremost an endeavor that concerns the imagination. Gaston Bachelard, whose studies on material and dynamic imagination provide the theoretical underpinning for the dissertation, defined the imagination as "nothing other than the subject transported inside the things." Reformulation of subject-object relations, clearly suggested in that definition, is indeed an important element in the aesthetics of Bachelard and that of Adorno, another thinker whose thought informs the dissertation. As the principle behind modernist responses to the crisis of the modern world, the crisis Georg Luk?cs captured in the phrase "transcendental homelessness," reformulation of subject-object relations impels the mobilization of creative energies in the way that may very well be called "the modernist imagination." I first state the premise for the dissertation and situates it in the present landscape of modernist scholarship. Then I examine Adorno and Bachelard at the intersections of their thoughts, in preparation for a theory of the modernist imagination. Next I consider Mrs. Dalloway as a modernist probing of the sensual, in which familiar dualisms ? subject vs. object, the external vs. internal, life vs. death, mind vs. body ? collapse. Following this, I examine The Magic Mountain as an attempt at what Adorno calls materialist metaphysics. The novel's preoccupation with death in all its aspects, its problematizing of the human body and the imagination of cold are examined in light of Adorno's view on reviving metaphysics in modernity. Then I read in Ulysses water's lyricism, a lyricism learned from water, into which important modernist themes (not least the ones considered previously in the dissertation) converge. Lastly I look at a film ? Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris ? and a science fiction novel from the 1950s ? Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 ? in light of what may be called the "philosophy" of modernism. The spirit of modernism ? the primacy of the object as a modernist dictum, modernism?s resistance to identity thinking and its dismantling of dualisms ? is shown to continue in genres other than literature and in the period now called "post"-modern.