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The word "moment" - from the Latin movere (to move) - can be understood in various senses. It is a point of time, an instant; it connotes importance, or weight; in 1666, according to the OED, it could be used to suggest a "definite stage or turning point in a course of events"; in 1691 it came to mean a "cause or motive of action, a determining influence or consideration" ... This dissertation stems from the conviction that the importance and weight of Sigmund Freud's "discovery" and elaboration of psychoanalysis - its impact as a turning point for western modes of intellectual activity, and as a determining consideration for western culture as a whole - has been so profound that it would be impossible to seek from within it the precise measure of its influence. Across modern philosophy, the human sciences, and the arts - from surrealism to pop art, from advertising to social welfare policies - Freud's psychoanalysis permeates the ways in which we live, and is one of the key elements of that experience of modernity we can loosely call "modernism". The dissertation locates a number of moments ·of modernism in and around Freud's work - with attention to Freud's relation to the reading and interpretive practices of the twentieth century: Chapter One examines some of the ways in which psychoanalysis and literary studies have met, intersected and, at times, bypassed one another over the past few decades, in a flurry of encounters which have yet to settle into any definitive shape. Chapter Two responds to Stanley Fish's recent attack on Freud's scientific integrity in the "Wolf-man". The chapter focuses, in other words, on one particular strand of the critical tradition defined in the second section of Chapter One. Chapter Three - which concerns the famous case of "Dora" - attempts, first, to restore some sense of the theoretical moment in Freud's work represented by the case, and second, to re-introduce the question of history into what has become the critics' story of Freud's failure to get to the bottom of Dora's hysteria. The aim of this chapter is to suggest a way beyond the contradiction in which Freud is persistently invoked, in feminist criticism, as both liberator and oppressor, hero and villain. Chapter Four turns back to the interface between psychoanalysis and literature. Its focal point is a different permutation from that manifested in the "Dora" case history of Freud's life-long quest to solve the "riddle" of femininity. The chapter examines some of the problems Defoe's novel Moll Flanders has posed to a tradition of patriarchal literary criticism. These problems, it argues, are inseparable from questions of representation, female identity and the notion of ''femininity" itself - the same questions which proved so intrusive in Freud's narrative of the case of Dora. This dissertation is concerned not only with the apparent "logic" of the arguments it confronts, but also with the· deeper constitution of that logic in and through the complex textures of writing. It aims to demonstrate that one of the most powerful moments of modernism in Freud's work lies in the stimulus it provides to an art of interpretation constantly attentive to the complexity of these textures.

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Thesis advisor: Marjorie Howes / Epistolary Modernism reads British and Irish writing of the 1920s through the 1950s with a focus on the way authors use fictional letters and verse epistles to communicate a renewed sense of literature as public speech, even as they saw privacy curtailed and surveillance increased. Letters enable late modernist writers to call attention to the way literature straddles the gap between private experience and public declaration. Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen all use letters to reveal a late modernist belief in literature as an exchange between an author and a reader -- a bridge between times and perspectives -- even as they trouble the possibility of any clear communication or meaning. The implied exchange in letters requires a sense of correspondence: a letter demands both interpretation and a reply. But a letter is always already too late. Epistolary Modernism reads letters as a stand-in for the literary period of late modernism itself, an epoch of writing characterized by a sense of coming too late to history and to literary tradition. The project considers fiction and poetry published in the 1920s through the 1950s in relation to historical and cultural events of the period, arguing that the sense of belatedness and temporal disjuncture letters create fundamentally links the structure and materiality of the text to the social and political concerns of its author. These writers composed literature attuned to historical events and the simultaneously occurring ordinary moment, leading to an increasingly interconnected, and socially-responsible art borne from the historical impasse of the thirties, the Second World War and its political legacy. Letters enable these writers to continue aesthetic experiments while simultaneously addressing politics, society, and the purpose of literature itself. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

In the summer of 2008, my sculpture focused on conceptual ideas based in Modernism and Postmodernism. Fusion of different styles and the disjunction of old and new inspired the process and materials. Through the juxtaposition of my interpretation of both concepts and materials, I wanted the focus of my work to be on both form and process while bringing it into a Postmodernist context. Currently, my sculpture has evolved in regards to concept and content. This thesis is an in depth study of my creative, visual, and social process, and my growth as an artist.

The fine arts can be described as in a state of crisis, manifest in the tendency for style to fragment and pluralism in art criticism - the view that the work of art is a document and that there are no privileged criteria of artistic value. Following the example of the anti-art avant-garde, recent art critical and sociological theory has rejected the notion of artistic 'specialness', and undermined the category of aesthetic experience. In this context, it has been suggested that art is finished, that a new era of Post-modernity has begun. This thesis confronts these claims by raising the question of the nature of art. This thesis argues that:;- Theorisation about the nature of art can be located within a structural framework, itself a response to the existential reality of the socially mediated categories of art and aesthetic experience.;- The fine art tradition was historically constituted as a social category, with the theorisation of the special relationship between artist, art object and aesthetic object.;-Theorisation took two forms within the Classical tradition, each developing into distinct aesthetics in the Modernist period, the form of the aesthetic being related to the art style and its social conditions of production and consumption.;- The form of the aesthetic can be shown to be structurally related to the consciousness of freedom/oppression in society, providing an important component in the dynamics of style.;- Contemporary art remains Modernist. Claims concerning the end of art and Postmodernism have wrongly delimited Modernism, often narrowly confined to avant-gardism.;Nonetheless, since 1945, artists have pushed art to the limits of the structural framework that defines it as a special social practice, all but abandoning art's aesthetic core, but not erasing its public's expectation of 'meaning'. In this context, a more evaluative response to art is called for from a critical sociological discourse.

This thesis is presented as a written text and an exhibition. 1 Both parts result from interdisciplinary research in writing and visual art. Its problematic is the origin of meaning as addressed by recent textual theory, and how that represents an artist's experience of this. Here, 'recent theory' designates 'postmodernism', which includes 'poststructuralism' and refers, too, to 'modernism'. This is reviewed and compared to an artist's experience, using my empirical encounter with art, as an artist, as a possible example. As the comparison occurs in writing and visual art, the latter is, at once, the research data, and a site of its investigation. And writing is a site for exploring art practice (via a case study), and the source for further art. Finding that an artist experiences the origin of meaning as far more multifarious than it appears in recent theory, the comparison additionally proposes a role for the expressive self in art's meaning, in contradistinction to much of postmodernist theory. The typicality of an artist is discussed via a deconstructive notion of exemplarity. And Derrida's deconstruction, which explores diverse features of the textual process, infonns the theoretical method throughout. However, it is not just an artist's experience that proposes a critique of postmodernism's version of the origin of meaning. This is proposed, too, via Richard Rorty's pragmatism, when that opposes 'realism' (which includes empiricism) and idealism (which includes deconstruction). This thesis concludes that it is useful (in Rorty's sense) for the artist to believe in a multifarious agency including the expressive self - experience notwithstanding. In moving from postmodernism's notion of the origin of meaning to the artist's, and beyond, to pragmatism's, this thesis attempts to recognise its reflexive dimension. So its voice (as the ambiguous index of its origins) diversifies postmodernism's voice, tending towards a cacophony, without abandoning a conclusion.

published_or_final_version / English Studies / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / English Studies / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / English / Master / Master of Arts