Thesis (M.A.)--University of Alabama at Birmingham, 2009. / Additional advisors: Sue Kim, Christopher Metress, Kieran Quinlan. Description based on contents viewed June 4, 2009; title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 87-91).

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<p>This study examines Irish modernist literature in order to complicate established critical modes which read modernist movements as reflective of distinctly vernacular or cosmopolitan aesthetic and political commitments. I argue that neither recent models of vernacular modernism nor older models of cosmopolitan modernism entirely account for the stylistic innovations and formal experiments of modernist literature. Instead, modernist writers negotiate a field of tension between the poles of cosmopolitan and vernacular, and demonstrate that their works represent forms of identity that accommodate elements of both national belonging and cosmopolitan individualism. </p><p>Examining works by four authors - William Butler Yeats, Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett, and Raymond Queneau - this project argues that modernist literature represents a set of idiosyncratic, dynamic efforts to negotiate the tensions between the limits of the nation-state system and a variety of emerging transnational modes of cultural exchange in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The nature of modernist writers' efforts to negotiate a period of passage between national and global systems of exchange is, I think, especially visible in the case of Irish modernism. Ireland's transition from a part of the United Kingdom to an independent nation-state in the interwar period makes that nation's literature an exemplary case for my argument, as does the critical importance of Irish writing in the modernist canon. </p><p>By examining these and other critical and historical perspectives alongside a sampling of plays, novels, short stories, and memoirs, this study makes the case that modernist literary aesthetics spring from writers' efforts to make sense of competing desires for national belonging and cosmopolitan autonomy. Focusing on works that cross categorical boundaries between Irish and cosmopolitan modernism, this study traces the ways in which modernist aesthetics construct dynamic, adaptive relationships between the global and the national, and suggest that we can imagine them as something other than static, exclusive alternatives.</p> / Dissertation

Thesis--Universität Göttingen. / Bibliogr. p. 287-310.

Otto Rank is a significant but generally overlooked figure in the early history of psychoanalysis, and his work provides an illuminating context for the study of subjectivity and modernist culture. The "modernist identity" of my title is intended to represent, first, the concept of the individual self identified and expressed during this period and, secondly, the unique identity of modernist culture developed by artists through creative acts and emanating as the intellectual ambiance of the era. Through an examination of Rank's later theories and the work of prominent modernist artists, including Lawrence, Yeats, and Eliot, this dissertation will show that Rank's expository writings emerge as psychoanalytic and cultural inquiry expressing essentially the same intellectual and social precepts presented by prominent modernist writers in substantially different ways. Rank's work therefore exists as a cotextual statement of the grand themes of those artists and of that era. I also show that Rank's perception of the modernist landscape, whether literary, social, or cultural, at once illuminates and refutes the concept of modernism consciously constructed and advanced, as a poetic manifesto, by artists generally associated with the traditional modernist temperament. The diverse voices of modernism, in fact, often represented Rankian irrationality over the Freudian unconscious, a personality capable of reconstructing the fragmented self over one acquiescing to disintegration, and the spiritual or magical over the rational constructs of a progressively more scientific and technological age. I will demonstrate that Rank's theories provide not only a method for reading literature but a means for addressing issues critical for our time, including subjectivity, the process of individuation, diversity, and the empowering exercise of creative will. The work of Eli Zaretsky and other contemporary cultural theorists, although never mentioning Rank or his work, presents the duty of criticism and psychoanalysis in our time as remarkably consistent with Rank's notion of psychoanalysis and the place of the individual in culture. Rank's ideas, originally founded upon nineteenth-century science and psychoanalysis, ultimately provide a context for understanding twentieth-century modernist culture as well as a rationale for developing a new concept of humanism and for advancing twenty-first century post-theory literary studies.

Yeats was part of a late nineteenth-century European literary movement which, dissatisfied with Western tradition, both scientific and religious, looked towards the Orient for enlightemnent. Unlike Pound, who sought solace in Japanese and Chinese sources, Yeats went to Indian philosophy and literature in his quest for "metaphors for poetry," and he remained a constant student of the Indian view of life. [...]

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This thesis has examined the moon and sun imagery of Yeats's Last Poems (1936-1939), contrasting the diminution and transmutations of astronomical imagery with its rich symbolic development from 1889 to 1936. Using lyric poetry of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats and selected prose works of William Butler Yeats, the study has traced the multiple antinomial forces embodied in moon and sun and the change in imagery that marked Yeat's poetic growth. The thesis has discussed vestiges of overt moon and sun imagery in Last Poems, Yeats's reasons for the changes that characterize his career, and the substitutes that replaced moon and sun.

This thesis has been a study of strategies employed in the poetry of W. B. Yeats. Specifically, it has treated five poems important in Yeats' development as a poet: "The Song of Wandering Aengus"; "The Wild Swans at Coole"; "Leda and the Swan"; "Lapis Lazuli"; "Long-Legged Fly." It has demonstrated certain devices used in the composition of the poems. In short, it has been an explication of the poems.Further, this thesis has revealed Yeats' concern for art as a subject for poetry. It has revealed that early in his development, Yeats was concerned with art and the individual, and that later in his development, he was concerned with art and civilization.

In addition to being a respected poet, dramatist, essayist, and statesman, William Butler Yeats was a dedicated student of the occult and practicing magician for most of his adult life. In spite of his dedication, Yeats’ commitment to occultism has often been ridiculed as “bughouse” (as Ezra Pound put it), shunted to the margins of academic discourse, or ignored altogether. Yeats’ occult-focused prose fiction—the occult trilogy of stories “Rosa Alchemica,” “The Tables of the Law,” and “The Adoration of the Magi” and the unfinished novel The Speckled Bird—has often received similarly dismissive treatment. Some critics have accused Yeats of being an escapist or of being out of touch with the intellectual currents of his time. However, Yeats was in touch with the intellectual currents of his time, one of which was the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century occult revival. This was not a fringe movement; it was one which intersected with some of the most pressing social and cultural issues of the time. These include the dissatisfaction with mainstream religions, the renegotiation of women’s roles, the backlash against science, and nationalism and the colonial enterprise. This intersection is what I have termed occulture. The central purpose of this dissertation is twofold. First, I demonstrate the cultural and academic relevance of the occult revival by analyzing its connections to these critical issues. Second, I situate the occult trilogy and The Speckled Bird as artifacts of the occult revival and its associated facets. Through its main characters, the occult trilogy illustrates a fragmented self associated with literary modernism and with scientific challenges to individual identity from Darwin, Freud, and others. In addition, these three stories exemplify a sacralization of the domestic sphere which conflicts with the officially-sanctioned sacred spaces of mainstream religions. The Speckled Bird also reconfigures the sacred space as Michael Hearne contemplates a magical order with Irish nationalist implications. In examining these works within this historical context, I present them as texts which engage with the social and cultural landscape of the time. / Occulture : occultism and the occult revival -- The occult trilogy : self and space in an occult context -- The speckled bird : sacralizing Ireland. / Department of English