This thesis examines how and why we remember the 1950s in Britain in particular ways. The 1950s have become a popular and visible decade in the culture of 'retro' since the late-1960s; there is a stylistic fascination with iconic symbols that have become shorthand for the post-war era. Popular memory is the everyday sense of a past which circulates in a particular culture through the interaction of past and present, public and private, which is expressed and experienced through memory, media and commodities. I interrogate how popular memory is expressed nostalgically through 'Fifties' retro and heritage in Britain, revealing the tensions between past and present in the politics of remembering. In the main, studies of popular representations of the past through nostalgia and retro have largely remained within the boundaries of academic disciplines such as subcultural studies, design/art history and collective memory theory. I use this scholarship in combination to analyse our popular historical culture because a popular sense of the past is created and experienced by an interaction of many different cultural expressions, experiences and representations. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this project blends interviews with fans of Fifties revival culture with other sources such as memories from the Mass Observation Archive, period dramas on film and television, retro in popular music, as well as press reception on retro and nostalgia. This innovative methodology foregrounds the tensions and politics of representing the past, challenging the notion of popular memory of the 1950s as merely 'retro' consumerism and manipulated history. Recent academic thought has emphasised the 'presentness' of nostalgia; that this emotional, rose-tinted view of the past is actually a response to the present. This project suggests nostalgia can be used with agency - individuals and communities use nostalgic images for a wide range of personal and political meanings; nostalgia can also be dynamic and pleasurable. We remember the past through family albums and personal memory, but these interact with mediated pasts in retro popular culture, favourite films and period dramas. My research calls for a more democratic approach to historical study which considers not just 'what happened' in the past but the politics of how we imagine and re-imagine the past.

This thesis will undertake a revision of art historians' critical appraisal of the paintings of Mark Gertler, in particular the issues of ethnicity and class which historians have claimed to have largely determined the development of Gertler's art. In doing this I will present a number of methodologies that reflect a social psychological perspective, in particular the critiques of Sander Gilman and his use of the notion of 'the other' within a Jewish historical perspective. Reflective of the psychological insight is the issue of class which although the thesis recognises it as a formal hierarchy, I will look at its subjective interpretation by using the writings of Henri Tajfel and his perspective on social groups and Angela Lambert's work in the realm of social linguistics as well as briefly discussing Basil Bernstein's perspective on social linguistics. The application of these methodologies will I feel render a greater understanding of the artist's difficulty in adapting to the social processes of the dynamics of the class system. The thesis will highlight what I argue is a valuable insight that these methodologies present to understanding in particular prior to 1916 of Gertler's 'Jewish' themes. The methodologies will be underpinned by referencing them to the primary source of the artist's letters and Gilbert Cannan's novel Mendel, based on Gertler's life.

This thesis focuses on Charles Henri Ford (1908‐2002). Spanning much of the 20th century, Ford's multiform and multimedia aesthetic sensibility incorporated poetry, visual art, filmmaking, photography, and magazine editing. Despite the breadth and depth of his numerous interests and achievements, scant critical attention has been paid to Ford. The little criticism that deals with Ford focuses on his experimental novel The Young and Evil (1933) and his magazine: View (1940‐47). This thesis addresses this imbalance. It seeks to recover a marginalized poet whose work unsettles contemporary and critical assumptions concerning modernist literary and aesthetic production. In order to do so, focus is shifted from View to Ford's first modernist little magazine: Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms (1929‐30). Blues made an indelible mark on Ford and informed many of his subsequent poetic and aesthetic projects. This thesis considers the significance of Blues and a selected assortment of Ford's subsequent projects and literary career moves. Divided into six chapters, and utilizing a reverse chronology, I trace Ford's various literary endeavors back through the decades. The first chapter focuses on Ford's poetic and editorial ventures in the 1980s. This chapter re‐positions Ford's late work in relation to a flexible and sociable version of modernism. The second chapter focuses on Ford's sociable poetics in particular as it culminated in the 1970s. The third chapter draws on the implications of the second and considers the ways in which the modernist Ford is an aesthetic precursor to the postmodern Warhol. The thesis then moves into the 1940s and 1950s to give an account of Ford's perpetual aesthetic awkwardness. Ford's conspicuous absence in the annals of literary history is attributable to his poetic and aesthetic unorthodoxy, which precluded easy incorporation into generally accepted critical narratives of modernism and avant‐gardism. Ford's marginalization has meant that his attempt to renovate modernism has gone unnoticed. Conducted in Blues, Ford's (belated) renovation of modernism is the focus of the final chapters of this thesis. The fifth chapter contextualizes Blues. The sixth and final chapter offers a series of readings focused on Ford's original literary apprenticeship: Blues.

Part One of my thesis reads Nancy Cunard (1896-1965) as a modernist collector, situating her material and literary collections in relation to the vogue nègre of the 1920s and 30s, when European fascination with black expressive culture reached unprecedented heights. It also looks at how Cunard's collecting practices translate into an ‘aesthetic of assemblage' in her work as an anthologist, and shows how the African sculpture section of her Negro anthology (1934) reflects the collecting cultures of early twentieth-century Europe. Part Two of my thesis reads Cunard in relation to cosmopolitan identity formations in the early twentieth century through an analysis of her poetry and private correspondence, and the fictional representations of Cunard that appeared in the novels of the period. It also examines her efforts to foster transnational networks between writers and artists across America, Europe and Africa, and the role her Communist politics played in forging these connections.

This thesis considers how Auster, Roth and DeLillo write in order to see themselves in the world. If Kafka's burrowing into himself and Nabokov's inscription of a chalk-white “I” on the inner blackboard of his shut eyelids exemplified Modernist strategies for projecting the isolated self into the world, my subject authors have confronted a theoretical situation in which the world as a permanent and common object doesn't exist. Negotiating an increasingly unreal American popular culture that stands in for this object and that has disassembled the monadic self, they reimagine the sight of darkness and premonitions of death inherited from their precursors' self-seeing as a means of reifying our world. The thesis proceeds in three author-specific chapters. The first traces Auster's chimeric appearances in the glass of fictive representation using popular cultural symbols. These symbols repeatedly erase the self, figuring its disappearance into the continuing present and giving the lie to a permanent visible world in which the self can be located. The second chapter explores Roth's writing characters as “darkening[s]” of the fictive glass. His fiction interrogates the obscure “inside of me” to locate an unseen point where the self is remade through transformative connections with the world. This connection, which he names “reality”, remains invisible, communicated in distorted images of grief and mourning that also reflect the unreal character of popular culture. In the final chapter, a new connection between the self and the world becomes visible in DeLillo's work. He reifies our dissembling culture by rendering it as a smeary, visible reflection of the unfixed, continuing present into which Auster's selves disappear. The sight of this unfixed, different world is co-eval with a new form of self-seeing in which the world is not permanent nor transparent but formed in characters' relationships to it, reciprocating today's wavering possibility of there being the world at all. In tracing the pursuit of self-seeing in the world in these three exemplary writers, the thesis develops a new relationship between the aesthetics of character and the world-rendering potential of novel-writing. In a period of theoretical transition after postmodernism, such new paradigms are vital for grasping how we envision selves now as reciprocations of the world's precarity, responding to the pressure of the real.

This thesis proceeds in two modes, utilizing both a critical and a creative lens to think about the use of simple language in formal writing. It examines the production of a register that categorizes insider/outsider status (the mechanics) as well as interrogating the (un)conscious attempts of authors seeking to prise into or remain removed from established cultural identity (the intention). It investigates the use of the vernacular and the informal in American writing in general and how it is ultimately reflected and reworked through an autobiographical channel: an examination of voice, register, and code-switching in my own writing. The first section, ‘Listening to Writing,' is a forensic analysis of Vonnegut and Saunders, two exemplars of literary informality in American writing. It seeks—employing the work of Sarangi, Milroy, Hunston & Thompson and others to pinpoint, at a microanalytical level, what makes the conversational conversational, and the sociolinguistic work of Austin (performativity), Giles, Coupland, and Gumperz (accommodation and identity), and Auer (code switching)—to investigate the authors' specific manipulation of pitch and register to create effect. It also appraises the historical and cultural imperative of the American abhorrence of intellectualism and hence the disdain for high-flown language and how that is reflected in not only the literature but also the very social self-positioning of the authors. The second section, ‘My Ice Age,' is an autobiographical foray into outsider/insider, normal/abnormal categories and boundaries, extending the investigation of voice and register as examined above to explore the complex nature of belonging and alienation, of community and identity, from being a white boy in an Inuit settlement to being from an Inuit settlement in Los Angeles to the complexities of belonging and alienation that arise from being gay. The juxtaposition of two different tones in ‘My Ice Age' is used to reflect the juxtapositions of geographic and temporal otherness, the distance (formality) and increased vernacular in the Los Angeles sections reflecting a need to fit in, to forge a place for myself both geographically and socially through the use of voice and register. Both the critical and the creative lenses elucidate use of simple language and variations of registers to create sociological bonds/alienation. Simple language—and humour—forges communion with reader. The adoption of the vernacular, therefore, has a purpose beyond mere stylistics, in that it also is used in a social and community building (or razing) way. In other words, the use of informality becomes a performative speech act.

published_or_final_version / English / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

The Best PhD Thesis in the Faculties of Architecture, Arts, Business & Economics, Education, Law and Social Sciences (University of Hong Kong), Li Ka Shing Prize, 2009-2010. / published_or_final_version / Comparative Literature / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / English Studies / Master / Master of Arts