The First World War wrought untold destruction on the physical and psychological landscape of Europe. For Britain, the immediate post-war period represented no less than a national “nostos,” or homecoming, and few social institutions were so fragmented by the conflict as the home. This thesis will explore the various conceptions of “home,” from the nation and the domestic sphere to post-war consciousness, through the lens of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier. Though unique in style and scope, Woolf and West interrogate and revise pre-war notions of “home” and suggest a Modernist aesthetic of what it is to be both at “home” and at home in the world.

The First World War wrought untold destruction on the physical and psychological landscape of Europe. For Britain, the immediate post-war period represented no less than a national “nostos,” or homecoming, and few social institutions were so fragmented by the conflict as the home. This thesis will explore the various conceptions of “home,” from the nation and the domestic sphere to post-war consciousness, through the lens of Virginia Woolf’s "Mrs. Dalloway" and Rebecca West’s "The Return of the Soldier." Though unique in style and scope, Woolf and West interrogate and revise pre-war notions of “home” and suggest a Modernist aesthetic of what it is to be both at “home” and at home in the world.

Since Presocratic Greece, suicide in the West has been “known” and controlled, both politically and discursively. Groups as diverse as theologians and literary critics have propagated many different views of self-killing, but, determining its cause and moralizing about it, they have commonly exerted interpretive power over suicide, making it nameable, explicable, and predominantly reprehensible. The four modernist authors that I consider in this dissertation -- Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner -- break completely with the tradition of knowing suicide by insisting on its inscrutability, refusing to judge it, and ultimately rendering it “almost unnamable,” identifiable but indefinable. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Victory, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Sound and the Fury, respectively, these authors portray illustrative, but by no means definitive, modernist self-killings; they construct a distinctive representational space around suicide, one free of causal, moral, theoretical or thematic meaning and, I argue, imbued with the power to disrupt interpretation. “‘Almost Unnamable’: Suicide in the Modernist Novel” examines the power of self-killing’s representational space in early twentieth-century fiction, arguing for its importance not only to the history of suicide in the West but also to the portrayal of death in the twentieth-century novel. / text

This essay applies a critical lens to Mrs. Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf. The aim of this essay is to investigate if and how Mrs. Dalloway can be utilized for students to practice critical consciousness in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf criticizes her own contemporary society by deliberately writing about the obnoxious social class system in London during the inter-war period. This deliberate social critique is analyzed by both looking into the author’s background and the historical time period the novel was written. The Marxist literary critic, Terry Eagleton argues that in order to fully understand literature, you must compare both the author and the author’s contemporary society to the novel itself. By analyzing these aspects, it is possible to understand any piece of literature from any given historical time period. Moreover, this essay desires to ascertain if canonical literature is relevant when teaching students about social class and inclusiveness. Furthermore, this essay argues that having a Marxist perspective can help students become critically conscious of both their environment and society. Also, it examines if the combination of Marxist theory together with critical pedagogy can create an educational situation that is equally fair for all students, regarding their socioeconomic status. The results of this essay concluded that applying either Marxist theory or critical literacy pedagogy to literature, could make students become more critically conscious about their environment, which could help to replicate the teaching philosophies of critical pedagogy by Paulo Freire.

This dissertation examines sensation in twentieth-century narratives of London and argues that vulnerability is a constitutive experience of the post-imperial city. Sensations of vulnerability in London arise because of the built environment of the city: its status as an imperial center and a global capital create important intersections of local, national, and global concerns which render the city itself vulnerable. I chart the trajectory of vulnerability as an affective history of London that is documented in cultural texts ranging from fiction and film to political debates and legal materials. Since the sensational experiences of the present partly arise from the materials of the past embedded in the landscape, affective histories create new ways of understanding history as a spatial experience. The narrated sensations of the city make vulnerability legible as a persistent feature of twentieth-century London life. I begin with a modernist, imperial London, in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and in Parliamentary debates from the same year (1925). Ambivalence about London's dual status as a local site and as a national and international capital is a response to London's vulnerable position at the end of the Great War. Next, I turn to World War Two London and Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day. I discuss intimacy as an important national feature in narratives of London during the crisis of this war. National narratives about intimacy constructed by Winston Churchill and heard on BBC radio respond directly to London's defensive vulnerability. My third chapter concerns Margaret Thatcher's 1980s London and the crucial role autonomy plays in constructing London as an invulnerable, international financial and civic capital. Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming-Pool Library documents Londoners' attempts to make sense of their autonomy in a postimperial capital. My final chapter examines sensations of social and political belonging in contemporary London through reading Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things alongside legal documents about immigration. I contend that reading cultural texts affectively creates counter-histories of the city that accommodate a deeper range of experiences than do traditional histories and offers to literary studies a new way of understanding the relationship between official and unofficial histories. / text

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

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