Thesis advisor: Robert S. Lehman / This dissertation argues that literary modernism is structured by a logic of belatedness—its sense, that is, of having arrived too late. Belatedness thus perceived entails a reconsideration of late modernism, illuminated as it has been by scholars such as Jed Esty, Tyrus Miller, and C.D. Blanton. Because modernism is constituted first and foremost by its fraught relation to time, and, specifically, to the present and its representations, any discussion of late modernism must begin by interrogating the “afterlife” of this temporal predicament. Following Edward Said’s claim that modernism is a late-style phenomenon, Belated Modernism challenges the construct “late modernism” given that the notion of lateness is constitutive of modernism itself. This project necessitates a thinking beyond the generic, nationalistic, linguistic, and disciplinary distinctions that have informed most of the critical discourse on (Anglo-American) late modernism. To that end, Belated Modernism addresses a constellation of European writers whose late style emerges in modernism’s late phase: the strange parenthesis of 1939–1941, when the war had already begun but its magnitude was as yet unknowable. Focusing on the final works of Sigmund Freud (Moses and Monotheism [1939]), Walter Benjamin (“On the Concept of History” [1940]), and Virginia Woolf (Between the Acts [1941]), I argue that the singular conjunction of late style and late modernism reveals, in light of individual and world-historical ends, an intensification of the philosophical problem of belatedness that has haunted modernism since its origins. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Over the past two decades a body of scholarship on the Global South has begun to present new ways to conceptualize African cities and their spatio-temporal specificity. Despite this, the city of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia is moving towards the reestablishment of its faded glory through means of aspatial modernization. The city’s aspirations for distinction and visibility can be seen as responses to the variable scales of contemporary urban systems. As ‘place’ is arguably no longer a singular concept, cities are rooted in relational networks rather than in ‘place’ alone. ‘Locality’ thus extends beyond the physical site to include linkages with a network of places around the world. Using an art-based research methodology, this research contributes to the discourse of urban development in the Global South generally, and Addis Ababa specifically. Findings are juxtaposed through documentation that includes theoretical essays, reportage, survey-informed graphics, interviews, and excerpts from a short film series and an existing plan for the Megenegna area. Potentials and challenges of place-based conceptions of urbanism are discussed, linking to the legacy of the 1960s mechanical and social paradigms. The insitutional role of UN-Habitat in the global collective supports is discussed for potential to supports existing resources and demographics for improved mobility and accessibility.