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published_or_final_version / Comparative Literature / Master / Master of Philosophy

Caught between a cultural scene nostalgic to historic architecture and economic growth manifesting its volume in tall skyscrapers, the overlooked modern heritage of Kuwait City is increasingly vanishing. This thesis tests to what extent modern heritage can inform a contemporary mixed-use development in Old Kuwait City. Not perceived as a source for fixed prototypes, modern architecture is studied both as a major component of the contemporary cityscape, giving the city its urban nature, and as a product of critical thinking that explores different possibilities in mediating the modern with the particularities of the Middle Eastern context. The work of elite architects inspired an investigatory reading of the contemporary City, with focus on lasting implications both modern planning and design had on the city. Modern heritage of Kuwait City is studied at various scales for strategies, in an attempt to arrive at a design that breaks away from prototypical forms while being continuous with the past.

My dissertation examines the traces of inverse (mytho)mysticism, more synchronous with mythical alchemy than transcendent mystery, in H.D.’s mature work (1946-1961). Whereas H.D.’s earliest works respond to a fin de siècle occultism and a collective psyche troubled by the eschatological distress that, as Susan Acheson writes, “was widespread amongst modernist writers grappling with …world events and with the implications of Nietzsche’s inaugural annunciation of modernity in terms of the death of God” (187), her later oeuvre is dedicated to the same work of soul undertaken by the “secret cult of Night” in Vale Ave. Here, her thematic scope faces two ways: backward to ancient Greek mystery cults and their palingenesic rites and forward to depth psychologists searching for the Soul of the World. Vale Ave plays a pronounced role in my study as symbolic guide; in its seventy-four sequences the layering of time in the “trilogy” of past, present, and future that H.D. had explored during the years of the Second World War in order to get behind the fallen walls of cause and effect collapses into two distinct phases of human origin—“meeting” (evolution) and “parting” (involution)—and the poem invites Lilith and Lucifer to be its archetypal guides. My method for the study is imaginal, entering such disciplines as history, philosophy, and theology and bringing psychological understanding to them. John Walsh’s introduction to Vale Ave notes H.D.’s theme “that the human psyche exists in a dimension outside of time and space as well as within them. In Vale Ave, H.D. presents the extremity of this dual-dimensionality: metempsychosis” (vii). However, the concept that H.D. investigates is more than a literary processus of characters who adopt different masks and appear at various junctures in a chronological unwinding of history. I explore H.D.'s works as part of a Modernist tradition of writing “books of the dead” designed not to guide the soul after death, but to draw the gaze upon “a nearer thing,” as H.D. writes in Erige Cor Tuum Ad Me In Caelum, the wisdom intrinsic in the spirit of life itself. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2011-08-31 20:54:49.581

This thesis addresses the work of Philip Larkin in the light of critical positions, stemming from mainly modernist perspectives, which characterize it as the opposite of what counts as innovatory, experimental and progressive in twentieth-century poetry. It aims to critique this assumption without, however, trying to prove that Larkin’s work is modernist or experimental. Rather, understanding ‘form’ in modernism as an entity that resists subjectivity and ostensibly includes otherness within its self-reflexive boundaries, it aims to offer readings of Larkin’s work that do not begin from these parameters but from an understanding of otherness as relational. Additionally, it gives extended consideration to Larkin’s prose with the aim of initiating a reconsideration of Larkin’s contribution to literature in English from a perspective that includes the essays and the novels. My introduction sets out the reasons and precedents for thinking about otherness in Larkin’s work in a different way from that found in modernism-inclined literary criticism. I show that such criticism diagnoses an aesthetic regression in Larkin’s poems on the basis that they rely on the projection of personality rather than the foregrounding of form. I argue that recent critical work on modernism privileges form because of its ostensible ability to present otherness in art, but that this critical heuristic is inadequate for dealing with Larkin’s work. I then outline an alternative more suited to Larkin’s work: a way of conceptualising otherness that locates it in the relation of the work to subjectivities external to it (such as readers’), which, I argue, is not susceptible of capture through what is designated as ‘form’. The first chapter attends closely to the theme of failure to relate to otherness in Larkin’s two novels; I argue that it is this failure that Larkin’s fictions meditate on by creating fantasized love-objects that their protagonists desire and yet seek to arrest in non-response and self-identity. Building on this, the second chapter examines Larkin’s polemical deployment of the idea of ‘pleasure’ as what the reader coming from a position of otherness to the art is entitled to seek in it. Comparing Larkin’s position with Adorno’s in Aesthetic Theory, a major twentieth-century work on aesthetics in the capitalist age, I try to locate Larkin’s difference from Adorno and develop the perspective he offers in his essays and poems to show that it allows readers to approach literary writing without being constrained by formal prescriptions. The last three chapters are studies of three themes that have been the focus of special attention in Larkin criticism: subjective voice, place and death. In the third chapter, I argue that Larkin’s poetry makes use of (what I identify as) a ‘Romantic’ register that is undercut by a ‘personal’ one. I do this by examining how a Romantic voice – one that constructs the self and projects it into the world in symbolic and lyrical forms – is at odds with a personal voice which sees these forms as prisons. The result, I argue, is an art that explores the idea of being ‘different from oneself’. Chapter four, on the significance of place in Larkin, argues that while he does subscribe to certain notions of belonging to England, and more importantly, to the idea of belonging as a poetic imperative, he also problematizes what belonging means, treating it not as identification with a place, but as an unsettled and sometimes defamiliarizing relation with it. The last chapter, on the theme of death in Larkin’s work, shows that it uses ‘death’ not as a fixed point of annihilation, but one that moves backwards and forwards in life, informing its sense of possibility, and constituting an experience of something that is always present and yet always beyond experience.

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Thesis (M.A.). / Written for the Dept. of English. Title from title page of PDF (viewed 2008/07/28). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 269-275).

Thesis (M.A.)--Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 1996. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 130-140).