No description available.

published_or_final_version / Fine Arts / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Fine Arts / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Fine Arts / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / English / Master / Master of Philosophy

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis investigates how two distinctive and conflicting literary modernisms generate, and subsequently attempt to deal with the proliferation of difficult historical meaning. Part one scrutinizes three novels from William Faulkner's middle period, The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Sanctuary (1931). Its arguments issue from three linked assumptions: first, that semantic meaning, in Faulkner, resides within the smallest of textual locations; second, that this meaning is insistently historical; and third, that the attempt to hide its release as historical meaning generates a formal opacity that, in turn, occasions acutely visual problems at the level of the text. Specific attention is drawn to what I consider to be the “compacted doctrines” (Empson) of Faulkner's prose: the pronoun. It is argued that, in these three novels, historically sedimented meaning congeals in three single words: “them”, “I” and finally, “it”. If Faulkner's texts come into meaning at the level of the word, John Dos Passos' come into meaning at the level of the concept. What was “small”, begrudging, and intractable in Faulkner becomes “big”, abundant, and eminently retrievable in Dos Passos. The semantic “concept” to which I attend is The Camera Eye, a place of visual efficiency. Two parallel concerns drive these chapters. First, I claim that The Camera Eye is the preeminent site of the dialectic in U.S.A.; second, that these episodes provide the formal indices for Dos Passos' shift in political intensities. Sustaining an antagonistic tension between aesthetic modernity and historical memory, however, these mechanical integers problematize their own semantic productions. With reference to the generation of surplus and to Marx's concept of “hoarding” I route the (over)production of the textual product, and its subsequent channelling into distinct textual locations, into conversations regarding commodification, reification and the division of labour.

In this thesis I explore how people conceptualised, explained and managed their experiences of everyday stress before the concept became ubiquitous. In doing so, I reveal some of the factors which contributed to that ultimate ubiquity. The existing historiography of stress comes mostly from a medical perspective and deals largely with post-traumatic stress. I address these limitations by specifically focusing on the everyday stress more commonly experienced by the wider population and by doing so from a more popular perspective. I focus on changes to everyday life at work and at home, which had a significant impact on the popularisation of stress, in the period from the First World War to the 1980s. Drawing on a range of sources including self-help books, diaries, oral history interviews and popular culture, I foreground continuities in the approach to treating stress and changes in ideas about causation. My analysis reveals a vocabulary of nerves and nervous disorders as precursors to stress, but also illustrates the mutability of the nerves/stress concept and how its very imprecision gave it utility. An examination of contemporary medical, sociological and governmental research demonstrates how the increasing problematisation of everyday life contributed to a growing discourse of stress. This was reflected in popular culture which revealed both the workplace and home to be potential locations of stress. I argue that this arose due to changes to these domains resulting from increased affluence, evolving gender roles and changes to people's expectations of life in the second half of the century. At its heart my thesis argues that despite material improvements in both work and home life during the period, societal changes and a growing popular discourse of stress made it far more likely that by the late twentieth century people would interpret their everyday woes as stress.