It is generally agreed that modernism is a period and movement rich in interdisciplinary collaboration. What is often contentious in understandings of the modernist period is to whom modernist artists addressed their projects. On the one hand, traditional scholarship has tended to view modernism as an essentially elitist project practiced among a closed set orbiting around British and American expatriate coteries: Ezra Pound and his “Ezuversity,” Stein and her Paris Salon, Woolf and the Bloomsbury circle. On the other hand, recent scholarship in modernism has sought to expand the field to included modernisms practiced in different time periods, in different countries, and by a wider range of artists. While my project is firmly situated in the work of the so-called high modernists, my operatically focused approach, which sees Pound, Stein, and Woolf engaging directly with mass culture by way of opera (albeit in different ways and to different aims), suggests that we need to re-think the way in which we have mythologized the period, even where these “high” modernists are concerned. In chapter one, I read Pound’s operatic endeavors as alternative means of translation. Though these pedagogical projects valorize the art they “translate” for its unique difficulty, the use of opera and later, radio opera, as the means to translate this art demonstrates an interest in democratizing this difficulty. This is a remarkable inconsistency given Pound’s undisputedly fascist allegiances. Chapter two, which focuses on Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts, shows how the prospect of writing an opera helped Stein to forge a new connection between playwright and audience in the theatre. What I am calling the “envoiced landscape” is an anti-patriarchal, enabling alternative to teleologically driven narrative that defeats authorial control by way of play. Chapters three and four turn to Woolf’s conspicuously hybrid novels, The Waves and Between the Acts. Both works question the nineteenth-century notion of music’s capacity to transcend language, embracing instead a distinctly operatic frame of reference, as Woolf celebrates the novel as an omnivorous but democratic, open-ended, contingent form, endlessly capable of incorporating and co-opting other genres. Whereas The Waves enacts a critique of the Gesamtkunstwerk played out on the Wagnerian stage, Between the Acts considers the social text played out among opera’s audiences, positing, then critiquing, a Brechtian reevaluation of Wagnerian aesthetics.

It is generally agreed that modernism is a period and movement rich in interdisciplinary collaboration. What is often contentious in understandings of the modernist period is to whom modernist artists addressed their projects. On the one hand, traditional scholarship has tended to view modernism as an essentially elitist project practiced among a closed set orbiting around British and American expatriate coteries: Ezra Pound and his “Ezuversity,” Stein and her Paris Salon, Woolf and the Bloomsbury circle. On the other hand, recent scholarship in modernism has sought to expand the field to included modernisms practiced in different time periods, in different countries, and by a wider range of artists. While my project is firmly situated in the work of the so-called high modernists, my operatically focused approach, which sees Pound, Stein, and Woolf engaging directly with mass culture by way of opera (albeit in different ways and to different aims), suggests that we need to re-think the way in which we have mythologized the period, even where these “high” modernists are concerned. In chapter one, I read Pound’s operatic endeavors as alternative means of translation. Though these pedagogical projects valorize the art they “translate” for its unique difficulty, the use of opera and later, radio opera, as the means to translate this art demonstrates an interest in democratizing this difficulty. This is a remarkable inconsistency given Pound’s undisputedly fascist allegiances. Chapter two, which focuses on Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts, shows how the prospect of writing an opera helped Stein to forge a new connection between playwright and audience in the theatre. What I am calling the “envoiced landscape” is an anti-patriarchal, enabling alternative to teleologically driven narrative that defeats authorial control by way of play. Chapters three and four turn to Woolf’s conspicuously hybrid novels, The Waves and Between the Acts. Both works question the nineteenth-century notion of music’s capacity to transcend language, embracing instead a distinctly operatic frame of reference, as Woolf celebrates the novel as an omnivorous but democratic, open-ended, contingent form, endlessly capable of incorporating and co-opting other genres. Whereas The Waves enacts a critique of the Gesamtkunstwerk played out on the Wagnerian stage, Between the Acts considers the social text played out among opera’s audiences, positing, then critiquing, a Brechtian reevaluation of Wagnerian aesthetics.

Master of Arts / Department of Modern Languages / Amy L. Hubbell / According to Feminist Theory, the social construction of gender is carried out through ritualistic or performative acts in everyday life. The idea of “doing” gender, or the “understanding of gender as a routine accomplishment embedded in everyday interaction” has been commonplace in this field for over three decades (West and Zimmerman 125). Contemporary French author Anna Gavalda toys with typical gender stereotypes in her novel Ensemble c'est tout creating characters who “do” gender and culture utilizing a mix of stereotypical and subversive gender traits. In this thesis I will discuss and analyze how Gavalda's main characters simultaneously accept and reject many gender stereotypes, displaying a variety of masculine and feminine traits in their daily lives, performing their genders in an unconventional fashion, and promoting an ideal of androgynous behavior. In the end, Gavalda manages to create a sort of “spatial justice” in which the characters fulfill more than just the traditional roles society expects from them. The majority of Gavalda's work integrates French culture, specifically the French meal, in order to set the tone. True to form, she highlights the importance of commensality in French society with considerable amounts of the story's intrigue taking place around meals. The meals themselves become performative acts, ritualized and carried out in much the same way as gender. Gavalda promotes the institution of the French “repas” and the conviviality that accompanies it. Her representations of food and gender beg a variety of questions relating to the role of the modern French woman's appetite and femininity, hierarchies in (and out) of the kitchen, as well as the notion of class in relation to eating well. By combining typical gender expectations with more subtle subversion of societal roles, is Gavalda in fact cooking up a recipe for an androgynous kitchen? The integration of these gender behaviors built around the institution of the French “repas” underscores a shift in the current societal standards promoting a new collective ideal for social change.

This dissertation examines the general traits of Decadentismo and Scapigliatura and the position of the art and literary critic Vittorio Pica and the writer Carlo Dossi in representing and promoting themes directly linked to these two literary trends. Pica’s essays on the leading European writers of the day are published in All’avanguardia (1890) and Letteratura d’eccezione (1898). These two books are responsible for the introduction of French Decadentism in Italy. Pica is also known for categorizing decadent authors under the literary phenomenon of “arte aristocratica.” This is the term that Pica resorts to when classifying the ‘ultra aristocratic’ tendencies of authors worthy of this prestigious stature. Carlo Dossi is one of the most appealing figures within the Scapigliatura. His position within the movement is examined in light of the narrative and linguistic divertissement displayed in his works, the interplay of the subjective narratorial voice of the “I” and the writer’s revolutionary role within the Italian literary canon. Special emphasis is given to Dossi’s dismantling of the traditional literary text, the literature of the fantastic, humor and the role of the reader. These themes are exemplified in his personal journal Note azzurre and in the novels, L’altrieri, Vita di Alberto Pisani and La desinenza in A. Although Dossi the writer and Pica the critic produced works that are entirely different in nature, the dissertation attempts to draw attention to a series of convergences and divergences between the two of them.

This dissertation examines the literary responses to the British “good taste” movement in the work of Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, and John Betjeman. Bolstered by the increased prominence and influence of design experts in the early-twentieth century, critics and designers sought to improve public taste in Britain. The didactic and rhetorical strategies these taste reformers employed gradually convinced Britons that their nation, which lagged behind its European neighbours in accepting modern design, was in the throes of a “taste crisis.” The increased authority of design experts, the public enthusiasm for decoration, and the growth of the market for household goods led not only to a widespread fascination with design, but also to the formulation of an increasingly narrow and orthodox definition of “good taste.” I analyze these authors’ critical and literary writing, relying, in many cases, on their unpublished or neglected work in order to reveal the development of their taste theories. I argue that these writers, dissatisfied with what they perceived to be the “good taste” movement’s stultifying and homogenizing effects, produced a “dissident” taste theory in reaction to the consensual and codified notion of “good taste.” Chapter One considers Huxley’s often overlooked role as the editor of House & Garden magazine in the context of his early fiction and his gradual conversion to mysticism. Chapter Two examines the architectural novels of Evelyn Waugh, noting, in particular, the inherent tensions he navigated between modernity and tradition, Philistinism and theory, theology and aesthetics. Chapter Three studies John Betjeman’s roles as critic, poet, guide-book writer, and preservationist, charting the development of his tastes from international modernism to local eclecticism. Rather than accepting the easy distinctions between “good and bad” taste, Huxley, Waugh, and Betjeman—themselves so often criticized for being unyieldingly absolute in their worldviews—attempted instead to articulate a “taste between,” one that fused the aesthetic, ethical, and psychic components of taste in an imaginative spectrum, rather than an orthodox system.

This dissertation examines the literary responses to the British “good taste” movement in the work of Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, and John Betjeman. Bolstered by the increased prominence and influence of design experts in the early-twentieth century, critics and designers sought to improve public taste in Britain. The didactic and rhetorical strategies these taste reformers employed gradually convinced Britons that their nation, which lagged behind its European neighbours in accepting modern design, was in the throes of a “taste crisis.” The increased authority of design experts, the public enthusiasm for decoration, and the growth of the market for household goods led not only to a widespread fascination with design, but also to the formulation of an increasingly narrow and orthodox definition of “good taste.” I analyze these authors’ critical and literary writing, relying, in many cases, on their unpublished or neglected work in order to reveal the development of their taste theories. I argue that these writers, dissatisfied with what they perceived to be the “good taste” movement’s stultifying and homogenizing effects, produced a “dissident” taste theory in reaction to the consensual and codified notion of “good taste.” Chapter One considers Huxley’s often overlooked role as the editor of House & Garden magazine in the context of his early fiction and his gradual conversion to mysticism. Chapter Two examines the architectural novels of Evelyn Waugh, noting, in particular, the inherent tensions he navigated between modernity and tradition, Philistinism and theory, theology and aesthetics. Chapter Three studies John Betjeman’s roles as critic, poet, guide-book writer, and preservationist, charting the development of his tastes from international modernism to local eclecticism. Rather than accepting the easy distinctions between “good and bad” taste, Huxley, Waugh, and Betjeman—themselves so often criticized for being unyieldingly absolute in their worldviews—attempted instead to articulate a “taste between,” one that fused the aesthetic, ethical, and psychic components of taste in an imaginative spectrum, rather than an orthodox system.

This dissertation examines the general traits of Decadentismo and Scapigliatura and the position of the art and literary critic Vittorio Pica and the writer Carlo Dossi in representing and promoting themes directly linked to these two literary trends. Pica’s essays on the leading European writers of the day are published in All’avanguardia (1890) and Letteratura d’eccezione (1898). These two books are responsible for the introduction of French Decadentism in Italy. Pica is also known for categorizing decadent authors under the literary phenomenon of “arte aristocratica.” This is the term that Pica resorts to when classifying the ‘ultra aristocratic’ tendencies of authors worthy of this prestigious stature. Carlo Dossi is one of the most appealing figures within the Scapigliatura. His position within the movement is examined in light of the narrative and linguistic divertissement displayed in his works, the interplay of the subjective narratorial voice of the “I” and the writer’s revolutionary role within the Italian literary canon. Special emphasis is given to Dossi’s dismantling of the traditional literary text, the literature of the fantastic, humor and the role of the reader. These themes are exemplified in his personal journal Note azzurre and in the novels, L’altrieri, Vita di Alberto Pisani and La desinenza in A. Although Dossi the writer and Pica the critic produced works that are entirely different in nature, the dissertation attempts to draw attention to a series of convergences and divergences between the two of them.

This thesis offers a new approach to mind modelling in modernist narratives. Taking Nietzsche’s work as exemplary of modernist ideas about cognition’s relational basis, I argue that conceptual blending theory, a particularly cogent model of a fundamental cognitive process, has roots in modernism. I read inscriptions of relational cognition in modernist narratives as “conceptual blends” that invite cognitive mobility as a central facet of reader response. These blends, which integrate conceptual domains, invite similarity-seeing and difference-seeing, exposing the reader to new conceptual content and new cognitive styles; she is thus better able to negotiate the reading-related complexities of modernist narrative’s formal innovations and the real-world complexities of modernity’s local and global upheavals. Chapter One considers blending’s interrelated rhetorical motivations and cognitive effects in Chiang Yee’s Silent Traveller narratives: bringing together English and Chinese domains, Chiang’s blends defamiliarize his readers’ culturally entrenched assumptions, invite collaborative reading strategies, and thus equip his readers for relating flexibly to a newly globalized world. Moving away from blends in a text’s narration, Chapter Two focuses on blends as textual structuring principles. I read Virginia Woolf’s The Waves as a thinking mind with fundamentally relational cognitive processes; I consider the mobile cognitive operations we perform reading about a text’s mind thinking and thinking along with it. Chapters Three and Four cross the nebulous text-peritext border to examine blends in modernist prefaces. Chapter Three focuses on blends in Joseph Conrad’s and Henry James’s prefaces, relating them, through the reading strategies they invite, to the narratives they accompany. Chapter Four considers allographic prefaces to Arthur Morrison’s Tales of Mean Streets and two of Chiang’s narratives: blends in these prefaces invite the cognitive mobility necessary for reconceptualizing both allographic preface-text and East-West relations. All four chapters treat the modernist narrative text as a textual system whose blends, often interacting and borderless, signal reciprocal, mutually permeable relations among its textual levels. Dialogic relations also underwrite the interaction between these blends and blends the reader performs when engaging with them. Modernist narratives model (bear inscriptions of) cognition’s relational processes in order to model (shape) the reader’s mind.

This thesis offers a new approach to mind modelling in modernist narratives. Taking Nietzsche’s work as exemplary of modernist ideas about cognition’s relational basis, I argue that conceptual blending theory, a particularly cogent model of a fundamental cognitive process, has roots in modernism. I read inscriptions of relational cognition in modernist narratives as “conceptual blends” that invite cognitive mobility as a central facet of reader response. These blends, which integrate conceptual domains, invite similarity-seeing and difference-seeing, exposing the reader to new conceptual content and new cognitive styles; she is thus better able to negotiate the reading-related complexities of modernist narrative’s formal innovations and the real-world complexities of modernity’s local and global upheavals. Chapter One considers blending’s interrelated rhetorical motivations and cognitive effects in Chiang Yee’s Silent Traveller narratives: bringing together English and Chinese domains, Chiang’s blends defamiliarize his readers’ culturally entrenched assumptions, invite collaborative reading strategies, and thus equip his readers for relating flexibly to a newly globalized world. Moving away from blends in a text’s narration, Chapter Two focuses on blends as textual structuring principles. I read Virginia Woolf’s The Waves as a thinking mind with fundamentally relational cognitive processes; I consider the mobile cognitive operations we perform reading about a text’s mind thinking and thinking along with it. Chapters Three and Four cross the nebulous text-peritext border to examine blends in modernist prefaces. Chapter Three focuses on blends in Joseph Conrad’s and Henry James’s prefaces, relating them, through the reading strategies they invite, to the narratives they accompany. Chapter Four considers allographic prefaces to Arthur Morrison’s Tales of Mean Streets and two of Chiang’s narratives: blends in these prefaces invite the cognitive mobility necessary for reconceptualizing both allographic preface-text and East-West relations. All four chapters treat the modernist narrative text as a textual system whose blends, often interacting and borderless, signal reciprocal, mutually permeable relations among its textual levels. Dialogic relations also underwrite the interaction between these blends and blends the reader performs when engaging with them. Modernist narratives model (bear inscriptions of) cognition’s relational processes in order to model (shape) the reader’s mind.

Si le sublime occupe une place privilégiée au sein de la réflexion philosophique, esthétique et littéraire, rares sont les travaux qui y sont consacrés pour les œuvres de la deuxième moitié du XIXe siècle. C’est pour tenter de pallier ce manque que cette thèse analyse le sublime dans les contes et nouvelles de Mérimée, Barbey d’Aurevilly et Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. En nous appuyant sur la réflexion du sublime amorcée par Longin et prolongée notamment par Burke, Kant, Schiller ou encore Hugo, il s’agit de définir son évolution et surtout sa spécificité en cette période de crise profonde, où le sublime apparaît comme une réponse à la conquête d’autonomie de la Littérature par rapport à la science et à la question de sa finalité. Dans un premier temps, la thèse aborde la question du sublime d’un point de vue rhétorique. Nous examinons ainsi la capacité du langage à exprimer et à représenter le sublime en oscillant entre une rhétorique de l’effet, fondée sur l’expressivité du langage dans la mise en scène des conteurs et l’organisation rhétorique de la narration, un questionnement sur le tragique et enfin une rhétorique de l’ineffable, puisque le sublime ressort à bien des égards d’un imprésentable. Dans un deuxième temps, le sublime est analysé en tant que poétique fondée sur un dispositif paroxystique et oxymorique. Enfin il est envisagé en tant que véritable acte esthétique où il tend à rejoindre le concept de sublimation et à se faire, notamment par une expérience du mal, le lieu non seulement d’une connaissance, d’une croyance, mais surtout d’une métamorphose profonde aussi bien de l’homme que de la littérature elle-même, qui y trouve un moyen de lutter contre les valeurs de la modernité tout en fondant une écriture résolument moderne.