Life and Death in the Kingdom of Shoes is an exploration into the lives of the people of Zlín, Czechoslovakia from 1923 to 1941. During this period Zlín became the headquarters for one of the most successful commercial concerns in the world, the Bat’a Company. Alongside its explosive economic growth, the company attempted to transform its workforce and town into a highly rationalized operating system, which held strikingly new determinants for inclusion and exclusion within the body politic. From planners, architects, and executives to criminals, housewives, and students, Life and Death in the Kingdom of Shoes encompasses high and low to suggest that the conflicts and compromises of those living in Bat’a’s model industrial towns produced a distinct ideology with its own symbols, heroes, and discourse. The ideology, Bata-ism, was part of a transnational project to design, build, and control cities based on scientific principles of rationalism. The project transcended national, class, and religious boundaries to offer a new way of identification: the Bata-man or woman. Work, play, gender, loyalty to the company, and appearance became much more important in deciding one's place within Bat’a’s twenty four towns, and some 3,600 retail outlets, than nation, class, or religion. This dissertation challenges dominant historical narratives of Czechoslovakia and Bat’a in the interwar period, which have focused almost exclusively on national conflict and on the designs of the executives. By turning attention to the debates and implementation of something that radically changed people’s lives - the rationalization of everyday life – Life and Death in the Kingdom of Shoes adds a crucial chapter to our understanding of interwar Czechoslovakia The primary aim is to peel away the facade of the utopian company project to locate, in the words of the historian Richard Stites, “oceans of misery, disorder, chaos, corruption, and whimsicality that went with it.” With the stories of people like Marie Urbašková, a prostitute who led police on a fool’s errand, Life and Death in the Kingdom of Shoes allows disparate narratives to unravel tidy conceptions of Bat’a’s utopian project. / text

By 1970, Singapore’s urban landscape was dominated by high-rise blocks of planned public housing built by the People’s Action Party government, signifying the establishment of a high modernist nation-state. A decade earlier, the margins of the City had been dominated by kampongs, home to semi-autonomous communities of low-income Chinese families which freely built, and rebuilt, unauthorised wooden houses. This change was not merely one of housing but belied a more fundamental realignment of state-society relations in the 1960s. Relocated in Housing and Development Board flats, urban kampong families were progressively integrated into the social fabric of the emergent nation-state. This study examines the pivotal role of an event, the great Kampong Bukit Ho Swee fire of 1961, in bringing about this transformation. The redevelopment of the fire site in the aftermath of the calamity brought to completion the British colonial regime’s ‘emergency’ programmes of resettling urban kampong dwellers in planned accommodation, in particular, of building emergency public housing on the sites of major fires in the 1950s. The PAP’s far greater political resolve, and the timing of and state of emergency occasioned by the scale of the 1961 disaster, enabled the government to rehouse the Bukit Ho Swee fire victims in emergency housing in record time. This in turn provided the HDB with a strategic platform for clearing other kampongs and for transforming their residents into model citizens of the nation-state. The 1961 fire’s symbolic usefulness extended into the 1980s and beyond, in sanctioning the PAP’s new housing redevelopment schemes. The official account of the inferno has also become politically useful for the government of today for disciplining a new generation of Singaporeans against taking the nation’s progress for granted. Against these exalted claims of the fire’s role in the Singapore Story, this study also examines the degree of actual change and continuity in the social and economic lives of the people of Bukit Ho Swee after the inferno. In some crucial ways, the residents continued to occupy a marginal place in society while pondering, too, over the unresolved question of the cause of the fire. These continuities of everyday life reflect the ambivalence with which the citizenry regarded the high modernist state in contemporary Singapore.

The North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), a high modernist continental water diversion project drafted in Los Angeles in 1964, is examined for the impact it had upon social conceptions of nature, the scale of water diversion in North America, and the extent of American Southwestern efforts at sustaining unsustainable Northern lifestyles. Drafted to address the anxiety of perceived ecoscarcity regarding water shortages in the early 1960s, NAWAPA emerged after a century of increasingly large-scale diversion projects, and seemed a logical continuation of such grandiose, “jet-age” type thinking. It proposed to re-engineer the North American landscape to provide water from the North to the arid Southwest. Reasons for the plans failure (including the monumental shift in scale, and Canadian territorial and environmental opposition) are examined in relation to how nature was conceived – or forgotten – in the proposal.

The North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), a high modernist continental water diversion project drafted in Los Angeles in 1964, is examined for the impact it had upon social conceptions of nature, the scale of water diversion in North America, and the extent of American Southwestern efforts at sustaining unsustainable Northern lifestyles. Drafted to address the anxiety of perceived ecoscarcity regarding water shortages in the early 1960s, NAWAPA emerged after a century of increasingly large-scale diversion projects, and seemed a logical continuation of such grandiose, “jet-age” type thinking. It proposed to re-engineer the North American landscape to provide water from the North to the arid Southwest. Reasons for the plans failure (including the monumental shift in scale, and Canadian territorial and environmental opposition) are examined in relation to how nature was conceived – or forgotten – in the proposal.

By 1970, Singapore’s urban landscape was dominated by high-rise blocks of planned public housing built by the People’s Action Party government, signifying the establishment of a high modernist nation-state. A decade earlier, the margins of the City had been dominated by kampongs, home to semi-autonomous communities of low-income Chinese families which freely built, and rebuilt, unauthorised wooden houses. This change was not merely one of housing but belied a more fundamental realignment of state-society relations in the 1960s. Relocated in Housing and Development Board flats, urban kampong families were progressively integrated into the social fabric of the emergent nation-state. This study examines the pivotal role of an event, the great Kampong Bukit Ho Swee fire of 1961, in bringing about this transformation. The redevelopment of the fire site in the aftermath of the calamity brought to completion the British colonial regime’s ‘emergency’ programmes of resettling urban kampong dwellers in planned accommodation, in particular, of building emergency public housing on the sites of major fires in the 1950s. The PAP’s far greater political resolve, and the timing of and state of emergency occasioned by the scale of the 1961 disaster, enabled the government to rehouse the Bukit Ho Swee fire victims in emergency housing in record time. This in turn provided the HDB with a strategic platform for clearing other kampongs and for transforming their residents into model citizens of the nation-state. The 1961 fire’s symbolic usefulness extended into the 1980s and beyond, in sanctioning the PAP’s new housing redevelopment schemes. The official account of the inferno has also become politically useful for the government of today for disciplining a new generation of Singaporeans against taking the nation’s progress for granted. Against these exalted claims of the fire’s role in the Singapore Story, this study also examines the degree of actual change and continuity in the social and economic lives of the people of Bukit Ho Swee after the inferno. In some crucial ways, the residents continued to occupy a marginal place in society while pondering, too, over the unresolved question of the cause of the fire. These continuities of everyday life reflect the ambivalence with which the citizenry regarded the high modernist state in contemporary Singapore.

This paper examines the US-Cuban relationship during the first military occupation of Cuba from 1898 to 1902, to show the role of high modernist state building in the occupation and the scope of Cuban participation in this endeavor. This is evidenced by heavily examining the annual reports of the US Military Governor General of Cuba and the US appointed civil secretaries of the Cuban government. This research differs from previous studies in the field by introducing James C. Scott’s concepts of legibility and high modernist state building, as well as suggesting that the Cuban civil secretaries participated within a limited scope to help form an independent republic.

The dissertation examines how medieval poetic tradition was reactivated in the production of poetry from the period between the two world wars—the Polish interwar period, defined here as one of literary transition. The positioning in regard to certain literary conventions and the quest for a new normativity that is so prevalent in interwar poetry is also reflected in the era’s poetry on the theme of Mary. Marian lyrics, owing to their strong position in Polish literature (but also by dint of their role in Polish piety and national identity), serve as an indicator in identifying and defining certain poetic processes. Central to this are the respective relationships of Marian themes to tradition and to the poetic norms of the era: is a given poem located along the traditional axis (if so, which), does it run counter to it, or is it an innovation? The poems analysed—Julian Przyboś’ Heavenly Blue, Jerzy Liebert’s Litany to the Virgin Mary, Tytus Czyżewski’s De profundis, Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska’s The Black Portrait, Józef Czechowicz’ pious rhymes—represent disparate poetic models: the Krakow Avant-garde, Catholic literature, formism/futurism, the circle of Skamander, the Poetics of the Third Sphere in the Second Avant-garde. Reflected here is the broad spectrum of the period’s poetic trends, tendencies, and constellations—as are the historical and literary events of the era. Despite important differences in the poetic/aesthetic models, in these poems it is possible to identify shared characteristics relevant to this study, that is, elements of medieval poetry. The identifying criterion for these elements here is the concept of dogmatic formal language. In the poems medieval poetics are transformed into their own modern form and integrated into the respective poetic models. No other literary epoch offers what the poets are seeking better than poetic formal language modelled on medieval liturgical language. The five poets all participate in what has been called the interwar paradigm shift in Polish poetry—a parameter that only indirectly relates to modernism. The term high modernism (in the sense of the culmination of Polish poetic modernism) can serve to summarize the historical and literary delimitations and definitions in the study. As interwar poetry is indeed part of the definitive emergence and full expansion of modernism in Polish literature, serving as a link between tradition and innovation, such a study of the influence of high modernism and Marian lyrics on each other aspires to reflect general processes in the poetry of the time.

Considerado a culminação do projeto literário do escritor chileno Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003), o romance 2666, publicado postumamente em 2004, é formado por cinco partes de encaixes não harmônicos. Argumento, neste estudo, que 2666 assimila diferentes gêneros literários consagrados, como o romance realista norte-americano, o romance policial em mais de uma variante e, por fim, o romance de formação alemão. Num primeiro momento da tese, um close reading do livro analisa a estrutura e as modulações do narrador e do estilo de Bolaño de cada parte, num afã de compreender como esses gêneros são assimilados. Os principais temas do autor a relação entre ética e estética, arte e violência são alcançados a partir da análise formal, em diálogo constante com a fortuna crítica e, num esforço comparativo, com obras canônicas cujos gêneros Bolaño busca assimilar. Ao abordar 2666 por este viés, levanta-se uma série de questões que orbitam ao redor de duas perguntas fulcrais: que espécie de romance é 2666? E o que ele representa para a poética do início do século XXI? Uma vez que 2666 é ocasionalmente classificado como enciclopédico ou maximalista e posto em diálogo com outros romances longos norte-americanos, questiono essa taxonomia, buscando apresentar suas limitações e refletir sobre como o livro resiste a catalogações e leituras definitivas. Partindo de ligações sugeridas pelo próprio romance, aproximo 2666 de obras que lidam com o conceito de romance total escritas no entreguerras. Em uma leitura diacrônica, postulo, então, que Roberto Bolaño ressuscita o que é possível resgatar de um ideário modernista, que, por sua vez, ganha uma nova significação na sua poética, indissociável dos espectros do fracasso das utopias, da crise do humanismo e do triunfo do capitalismo tardio em toda a sua violência. A relação entre 2666 e o alto modernismo, no entanto, não é estável ou pacífica. A partir das fissuras, dos rastros, do excesso e do desconjuntado, elaboro, por fim, o conceito de um romance monstruoso que assimila com voracidade outros gêneros, expondo contradições inerentes ao fazer poético contemporâneo. / Regarded as the high point of Chilean writer Roberto Bolaños (1953-2003) oeuvre, the novel 2666, published posthumously in 2004, is divided in five disharmoniously connected parts. In this thesis, I argue that 2666 assimilates different literary genres such as the American realist novel, crime fiction in more that one variant, and finally the bildungsroman. The first part of the thesis is dedicated to a close reading of the novel, analyzing its structure, the narrators modulation and Bolaño\'s stylistic changes in each section, in order to understand how such genres are assimilated. The authors main themes the link between ethic and aesthetic, art and violence are reached through formal analysis, in a constant dialog with other works that belong to genres which Bolaño tries to assimilate. By approaching 2666 this way, many questions are raised regarding two main issues: what sort of novel is 2666? And what does it represent to the literary writing in early 21st century? The book is often classified as encyclopedic and maximalist, and placed side by side with other long American novels; I disagree with those labels, and seek to show how limited they are, reflecting upon the way 2666 rejects common categorical interpretations. Based on connections the novel itself suggests, I establish a link between 2666 and modernist novels that deal with the concept of a total novel. I propose then a diachronic reading that claims that Bolaño recovers what is still possible from the modernist ideology, which gains new meaning in his own poetics, inseparable from the specters of failed utopias, the crisis of humanism, and the ubiquity of late capitalism in all its violence. The connection between 2666 and high modernism, however, is not stable or simple. It is through its gaps, leftovers, excess and disharmony that I develop the concept of a monstrous novel that assimilates other genres and exposes contradictions intrinsical to contemporary poetics.

This thesis investigates the semantic values of the two concepts “smallholding” (Swe. “småbruk”) and “smallholder farmer” (Swe. “småbrukare”), as well their role and function as central concepts in the public debate about the “agricultural rationalisation” (Swe. “jordbrukets rationalisering”) reform initiated by the Swedish government together with industry actors in the late 1940s. Studying articles in the newspapers published by two Swedish farmers’ associations, as well as government documents and political pamphlets, I employ the concept of “temporalisation” developed by Reinhart Koselleck as part of his theory on conceptual history in order to identify implicit and biased expectations on “modernity” ruling against smallholding as a viable form of farming in the future. I also study how rationalisation advocates’ descriptions and opinions are contested in the writings of smallholder activists and practicians. I argue that the meanings and associations attributed to smallholding and its modus operandi in the late 1940s, strongly influenced by the “agricultural rationalisation” debate of the time, disqualified it from any modernising project on grounds that were oftentimes ideological rather than rational or factual. I further argue that a misunderstanding of the modus operandi and purpose of smallholder farming, prompted by the application of industrial concepts and ideals as well as undue comparisons with other trades and professions, exaggerated the poor socio-economic status of smallholder families. This resulted in a temporalisation of the “agricultural rationalisation” debate, depicting large-scale industrial agriculture as a thing of the future and smallholding as a thing of the past.

[pt] Baseado no conceito de angústia da influência desenvolvido por Harold Bloom em sua tetralogia da influência (1973-76) e, posteriormente, reformulado em The anatomy of influence (2011), o presente estudo busca analisar as obras de Adriano Espínola e Eucanaã Ferraz como desleituras da obra de João Cabral de Melo Neto. Enquanto poeta tardio no âmbito do movimento modernista (Geração de 45), João Cabral precisou lidar não só com o fardo do Cânone Ocidental mas também com a tradição modernista que já havia se estabelecido à altura de sua estreia com Pedra do Sono (1942) — dentre seus pais poéticos encontram-se Willy Lewin, Joaquim Cardozo, Murilo Mendes e, sobretudo, Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Nosso objetivo é demonstrar que justamente o poeta modernista que mais sofreu da angústia da influência veio a se tornar, senão o mais influente, decerto aquele cujo legado é o mais problemático — constituindo, conforme a previsão de J. G. Merquior, verdadeiro obstáculo para poetas estreantes desde a década de 60 até poucos anos após a sua morte em 1999. Nossa hipótese central é que tanto Adriano Espínola quanto Eucanaã Ferraz — ambos estreantes nesse período — se tornam poetas forte” à medida que erigem suas respectivas obras contra a obra cabralina. O corpus deste estudo consiste num recorte da obra de Eucanaã que abrange poemas desde o primeiro ao último livro (1990-2017) e, de Adriano Espínola, no recorte feito pelo próprio poeta quando da organização de sua antologia pessoal Escritos ao Sol (2015). / [en] Based on the concept of anxiety of influence developed by Harold Bloom in his tetralogy of influence (1973-1976) and later reformulated in The anatomy of influence (2011), this study aims to analyze the works of the Brazilian contemporary poets Adriano Espínola and Eucanaã Ferraz as creative misreadings of João Cabral de Melo Neto s poetry. As a latecomer in the Brazilian Modernist Movement (Generation of 45), João Cabral had to put tremendous effort into defending himself against the modernist tradition already established by the time he started his career — among his poetic fathers are Willy Lewin, Joaquim Cardozo, Murilo Mendes and, above all, Carlos Drummond de Andrade. We intend to demonstrate that precisely he, the modernist who suffered the most from the anxiety of influence, produced a poetry so strong that it came to be the most difficult influence to overcome for all generations of Brazilian poets from the early 1960s to his death in 1999. The central part of our hypothesis is that Adriano Espínola and Eucanaã Ferraz, both debuting poets within that period, constructed their works against Cabral s, whether by appropriation or repression. For that purpose, the corpus under study consists of poems by Eucanaã Ferraz from his first book to the most recent (1990-2017) and of Adriano Espínola s personal anthology Escritos ao Sol (2015).