published_or_final_version / English Studies / Master / Master of Arts

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Thesis advisor: Laura Tanner / In "Everyday Speech" Maurice Blanchot eloquently articulates the long held and often rehearsed notion that the everyday eludes representation. Yet, in recent years, literary and cultural studies scholars have begun to explore the limitations of this conception. Monotonous Feeling contributes to this burgeoning conversation by examining three Modern and Contemporary novels that take the everyday's resistance to representation not at a cue for aesthetic transformation but for formal innovation. It argues that Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans, Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, and Marilynne Robinson's Home, which each define the everyday as a mode of taken-for-granted or distracted attention, use formal techniques to make manifest the monotonous attentions of the everyday in order to make us feel what in the formal and affective limitations of our aesthetic approaches we cannot know. In arousing and making use of feelings that we so often regard as signals of a fractured meaning making process, these novels invite, even push, us to consider the value of everyday felt states that might structure our narratives. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

This dissertation searches for a body of queer modernist poetry while at the same time attempting to rework the definition of “queer.” In chapter I, I use a reconceptualization of queerness not as an abstract, theoretical rendering of the breakdown of identity categories but in its fundamental, historical sense: a political coalition made up of individuals with different subjective sexual identities who are similarly marginalized in decidedly sexual terms. Thus, this project seeks to locate texts that demonstrate moments of empathy, intersection, and cooperation between LGBT speakers, characters, or editors and people with different sexualities, races, or abilities. In this project, I avoid traditional, well-known texts of modernism in favor of recovering forgotten work by non-heterosexual authors who have been at one time or another marginalized in the canon and in society at large—Amy Lowell, Langston Hughes, and Hart Crane. In order to rediscover this overlooked work by formerly forgotten poets, the project utilizes archival research and a material methodology in which I analyze poems not just in the abstract but in their original, ephemeral locations and venues: archival manuscripts, little magazines, and book-length collections. In chapter II, I uncover an experimental editorial method that Lowell pioneered in her Some Imagist Poets anthologies in which, rather than selecting and editing the selection as a traditional editor, she offered equal space to each contributor to choose and arrange their own suite of poetry. In chapter III, I analyze Hughes’ “A House in Taos” in both its first publication in a Mexico-based literary journal then in one of his own understudied collections, arguing that the poem represents an interracial, bisexual triad. In the chapter on Crane, I analyze several versions of a poem about a young man with a cognitive disability with whom Crane was acquainted while vacationing in Cuba, showing that, when the poem is set outside of the U. S. border, the speaker evinces a deep empathy for the marginalized young man.

Whereas recent studies of psychoanalysis and modernism have tended to 'translate' literature through contemporary French psychoanalytic thought, this dissertation opens up a historical dialogue between English psychoanalysis, modernist writing, art criticism and literary criticism. I argue that a shared anxiety about the redemptive role of art in a period which both writers and analysts characterise as marked by 'unsublimated' drives towards destruction, is coupled with an increasing concern with the precariousness of the frontier between self and culture, and between art and the social and political ideologies upon which culture rests. This double movement is reflected in the structure of the dissertation which begins with a comparison of attempts to make a moral and~aesthetic out of 'the destructive element' by I.A. Richards and Melanie Klein, and ends with Marion Milner's and Stevie Smith's speculations on the complicity between the violence of the self and the violence of the outside world in the thirties. Other writers discussed include W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Roger Fry and Virginia Woolf, as well as Ella Freeman Sharpe, Paula Heimann, Hanna Segal and Adrian Stokes.