Orientador: Alcides Cardoso dos Santos / Resumo: No romance Enquanto agonizo (1930) o modernista estadunidense William Faulkner apresenta a jornada da família Bundren que, a fim de enterrar o corpo de sua matriarca, marca a saga de Yoknapatawpha com uma emblemática e tragicômica jornada até Jefferson, sede do condado imaginado pelo escritor. Em trânsito constante, os enlutados membros da família seguem absortos em um trio de conflitos – internos; entre si; e com seu tempo, lugar e meio. Comum às narrativas faulknerianas, o luto gera, mormente, a reflexão acerca daquilo que foi perdido, mas que permanece latente na memória, bem como acerca do que pode ou não ser reconstruído sobre as ruínas que restaram no presente. Ademais, o ciclo infindável da morte, expresso no título do romance no idioma original (As I Lay Dying), e a agonia, que figura no título traduzido para a língua portuguesa, atestam a experiência temporal da modernidade como marcada por irreparáveis perdas nos campos da metafísica, da teologia e da estética. A ênfase do autor nos aspectos existenciais das principais personagens dessa narrativa, por meio da exploração artística do fenômeno da morte, revela uma dimensão filosófica da obra faulkneriana ainda pouco estudada pela crítica. Nosso objetivo neste trabalho é o de evidenciar – por meio da recorrência às reflexões de filósofos modernos e contemporâneos como Arthur Schopenhauer, Martin Heidegger e Maurice Blanchot – como as reflexões feitas por Addie Bundren de dentro de seu caixão conectam a vida à morte em ... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: In the novel As I Lay Dying (1930) the American modernist William Faulkner presents the journey of the Bundren family, one that marks the Yoknapatawpha saga with a symbolic and tragic journey to Jefferson, the seat of the author’s imaginary County, with the objective of burying the family’s matriarch. Continuously moving, the family members remain engrossed in a trio of internal conflicts – with themselves; among each other; and with their time, place and environment. Mourning, common to Faulknerian narratives, mainly generates a reflection on what has been lost but which remains dormant in memory, as well as on what may or may not be rebuilt on the ruins that have remained in present times. Moreover, the endless cycle of death, expressed in the title of the novel in the original language, and the agony, which appears in the title translated into Portuguese (Enquanto agonizo), vouch for the temporal experience of modernity as marked by irreparable losses in the fields of metaphysics, theology and aesthetics. The author’s emphasis on the existential facets of the main narrative characters, through the artistic exploration of the phenomenon of death, reveals a philosophical dimension of faulknerian works that remain insufficiently studied by critics. Our goal in this thesis is to demonstrate – by recurring to the reflections of modern and contemporary philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Blanchot – how Addie Bundren’s ponderings from within he... (Complete abstract click electronic access below) / Doutor

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The “Unreal City” of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land looms large over the landscape of critical inquiry into the metropolitan character of Anglo-American modernism. Characterized by the disorienting speed and chaos of modern life, the shock of harsh new environments and bewildering technologies, and the isolating and alienating effects of the inhuman urban mob, the city emerges here, so the story goes, as a site of extreme social disintegration and devastating psychic trauma; as a site that generates a textuality of overwhelming dynamism, phantasmagoric distortion, and subjective retreat. This dissertation complicates such conventional understandings of the city in modernism, proposing in place of the “Unreal City” a habitable one—an urban space and literature marked by the salutary everyday practices of city dwellers, the familiar environs of the metropolitan neighborhood, and the variety of literary modes that register such productive and adaptive dwelling processes. Taking seriously Rita Felski’s consideration of the “multiple worlds” of modernity, and thus diverging from the canonical formulations of modern urban experience put forth by the likes of Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, my work explores the richly ambivalent and ambiguous modernist response to the spatial complexities of the metropolis, drawing on the work of Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol in the two volumes of The Practice of Everyday Life to attend to the quotidian valences that signal a healthful engagement with the city. I uncover this metropoetics of habitability in the vexed response to the city’s network of interconnected spaces in T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations and The Waste Land; in the attention to the viable dwelling practices of individual urbanites—in contrast to city itself as dominant and dominating character—in John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer; in the routine daily operations on display in James Joyce’s Ulysses—breakfast, for instance, or running an errand; in the ordinary series of moments that constitute the work of everyday life in the familiar cityscape of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway; and finally in the broad-ranging depictions of urban life in Jean Rhys’s The Left Bank and Other Stories and Quartet.

The early- to mid-twentieth century criticism surrounding E. E. Cummings often dismisses his poetry in Eliotic terms. In analyzing Cummings’s critics’ arguments and methodologies, I attempt to reveal the ways in which Cummings has been unfairly labelled, and also the strains in modernist criticism that have continued up through to today. I compare the modernist approaches to the text to the way recent critics talk about Cummings in order to shed light on our critical inheritance from modernism. Finally, I analyse Cummings’s poetry in terms of one of the more recent discussions of modernist texts, that of relationship between commodity and advertising culture and modernist poetry. My project seeks, by using Cummings as a case study, to articulate not only how certain literary values came to be established, but also how certain methods of persuasion in literary criticism can undermine and even silence certain aspects of a text.

Este ensayo expone los puentes comunicantes entre la estilística de las obras de dos autores modernistas: Julián del Casal y Delmira Agustini, y el contexto cultural y los mores sexuales de fines del siglo XIX. Las  dinámicas sociales de la vida nocturna expansiva, el sensacionalismo pandémico de la prensa amarilla, el creciente interés sobre la homosexualidad y la incursión de la mirada femenina en las letras, todo confluirá con ciertos preceptos del romanticismo tardío y el simbolismo para darle voz y formas de expresión inéditas a sexualidades alternativas de la época. El alejamiento del sentimentalismo y la pose “malditista” de los modernistas empalma con nuevas representaciones del deseo; el enrarecimiento del objeto como axioma simbolista inspirará el enrarecimiento de un objeto emergente: el del cuerpo masculino, y la insinuación de una nueva mirada: la de la mujer y la del desviado. / This essay shed light over the connection between the literary style from the works of two “modernistas” authors: Julián del Casal and Delmira Agustini, and the cultural contexts and sexual mores at the end of the 19th century. The social dynamics of the ever expansive night life, the lurid and ubiquitous tabloids of the time and the growing interests towards deviant sexual behaviors and women’s perspective in books, everything will align with certain guideline of the late Romanticism and Symbolism to shape new voices and expressions of desire. The Modernistas’ retraction from sentimentalism and their maudit pose suit the remodeling of the sexual; the rarified object from the symbolist axiom dictates an evermore rarified new object: the one of the male body and its locus in the nascent representation of women’s and deviants’ libidos.

Die vorliegende Dissertation deduziert eine bisher unbeachtete ‚alternate‘ Praxis modernen Schreibens aus der Analyse dreier experimenteller Stadtromane, die weder bei zeitgenössischen Kommentatoren, noch im bisherigen Forschungsdiskurs zum 'amerikanischen Modernismus' Beachtung gefunden hat. Diese Praxis wird exemplarisch in Waldo Franks City Block (1922), Nathan Aschs The Office (1925) und Mary Bordens Flamingo or the American Tower (1927) herausgearbeitet. Die Arbeit argumentiert, dass diese diachrone Missachtung/Nichtbeachtung darin begründet liegt, dass die Romane von ihren AutorInnen unabhängig voneinander, doch nahezu zeitgleich als Prosatexte konzipiert wurden, die eine Gegenläufigkeit zu dem normativen Akzelerationsdiskurs erkennen lassen, welcher sich in verschiedensten Domänen amerikanischen Lebens und Handelns während der ersten Beschleunigungswelle (ca. 1880-1929) herausgebildet hatte. In diesen Romanen finden sich einzigartige, doch vergleichbare stilistische Mechanismen sowie thematische/ideologische Ausrichtungen, die eine generative Agenda (‚generative agenda‘) erkennen lassen: ‚Schnelle‘ textuelle Stile werden appropriiert und/oder mit ‚langsamen‘ Stilen kombiniert (‚aesthetic of in-betweenness‘), um Lesern für die negativen Folgen von Beschleunigung zu sensibilisieren; das Phänomen an sich wird in nuancierter, handlungsorientierter Form neu verhandelt und mögliche Bewältigungsstrategien entwickelt; stilistische, formale und inhaltliche Mechanismen werden angewendet, um eine entsprechende Aktivierung des Lesers herbeizuführen.

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This thesis examines the theme of commerce in four magazines of literature and the arts, all published in New York between 1915 and 1922. The magazines are The Seven Arts (1916-1917), 291 (1915-1916), The Soil (1916-1917), and The Pagan (1916-1922). The division between art and commerce is addressed in the text of all four, in a variety of different ways, and the results of that supposed division are explored for each magazine. In addition ‘commerce’ is also used in this thesis in the sense of conversation or communication, and is used as a way to describe them in the body of their immediate cultural environment. In the case of The Seven Arts, as discussed in Chapter 1, the theme of commerce with the past, present, and future is examined: the way that the magazine incorporates the European classical past and rejects the more recent intellectual past; the way it examines the industrial present, and the projected future of American arts and letters. In the case of The Soil and 291 (the subjects of Chapters 2 and 3) there is extensive commerce between them in the sense of intercommunication, a rival dialogic demonstrating both ideological and economic rivalry. These two chapters comprise an extensive examination of the relationship between the magazines, and shows how much of this involves commerce in the financial sense. The fourth magazine, The Pagan, is concerned with a different sense of commerce, in the form of its rejection of the American capitalist system, and is critically examined here for the first time. The introduction is a survey of examples from the whole field of American periodicals of the time, particularly those immediately relevant to the magazines described here, and acts to delineate the field of scholarship and also to justify the particular approach used. The conclusion provides a summary of the foregoing chapters, and also suggests ways in which each magazine approaches the dissemination, or ‘sale’ of the idea of the new.

Despite having a rather weak family connection to Ireland, the American modernist poet Marianne Moore (1887-1972) described herself in a letter to Ezra Pound in 1919 as ‘Irish by descent’. This thesis relates Moore’s claim of Irish descent to her career as a publisher, poet and playwright, and argues that her decision to shape an Irish inheritance for herself was linked with her self-identification as an American poet. Chapter 1 discusses Moore’s self-confessed susceptibility to ‘Irish magic’ in relation to the increase in contributions from Irish writers during her editorship of The Dial magazine from 1925 to 1929. Moore’s 1915 poems to the Irish writers George Moore, W. B. Yeats and George Bernard Shaw, which reveal a paradoxical desire for affiliation to, and disassociation from, Irish literary traditions, are scrutinized in Chapter 2. Chapters 3a and b discuss Moore’s ‘Irish’ poems ‘Sojourn in the Whale’ (1917) and ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ (1941). In both poems political events in Ireland – the ‘Easter Rising’ of 1916 and Ireland’s policy of neutrality during World War II – become a backdrop for Moore’s personal anxieties as an American poet of ‘Irish’ descent coming to terms with her political and cultural inheritance. Expanding upon previous chapters’ discussion of the interrelation of poetics and politics, Chapter 4 shows how Moore’s use of Irish sources in ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ and other poems including ‘Silence’ and the ‘Student’ reflects her quixotic attitude to Irish culture as alternately an inspiration and a tool for manipulation. The final chapter discusses Moore’s adaptation of the Anglo-Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth’s 1812 novel The Absentee as a play in 1954. Through this last piece of ‘Irish’ writing, Moore adopts a sentimentality that befits the later stages of her career and illustrates how Irish literature, rather than Irish politics, has emerged as her ultimate source of inspiration.