This dissertation examines literary modernism as foremost an endeavor that concerns the imagination. Gaston Bachelard, whose studies on material and dynamic imagination provide the theoretical underpinning for the dissertation, defined the imagination as "nothing other than the subject transported inside the things." Reformulation of subject-object relations, clearly suggested in that definition, is indeed an important element in the aesthetics of Bachelard and that of Adorno, another thinker whose thought informs the dissertation. As the principle behind modernist responses to the crisis of the modern world, the crisis Georg Lukács captured in the phrase "transcendental homelessness," reformulation of subject-object relations impels the mobilization of creative energies in the way that may very well be called "the modernist imagination." I first state the premise for the dissertation and situates it in the present landscape of modernist scholarship. Then I examine Adorno and Bachelard at the intersections of their thoughts, in preparation for a theory of the modernist imagination. Next I consider Mrs. Dalloway as a modernist probing of the sensual, in which familiar dualisms – subject vs. object, the external vs. internal, life vs. death, mind vs. body – collapse. Following this, I examine The Magic Mountain as an attempt at what Adorno calls materialist metaphysics. The novel's preoccupation with death in all its aspects, its problematizing of the human body and the imagination of cold are examined in light of Adorno's view on reviving metaphysics in modernity. Then I read in Ulysses water's lyricism, a lyricism learned from water, into which important modernist themes (not least the ones considered previously in the dissertation) converge. Lastly I look at a film – Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris – and a science fiction novel from the 1950s – Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 – in light of what may be called the "philosophy" of modernism. The spirit of modernism – the primacy of the object as a modernist dictum, modernism‘s resistance to identity thinking and its dismantling of dualisms – is shown to continue in genres other than literature and in the period now called "post"-modern.

The short story was the most profitable literary form for most fiction-writers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries because it was quick to write, relative to novels, marketable to a wide variety of periodicals, and able to be re-sold, in groups, for book collections. While the majority of writers composed short fiction within conventional modes and genres and published collections rarely exhibiting more than a superficial coherence of setting or character, modernist authors found in the form’s brevity helpful restrictions on their stylistic and narrative experiments, and, in the short story collection, an opportunity to create book-length works exhibiting new, modern kinds of coherence. This dissertation examines four modernists' experiences writing short stories and publishing them in periodicals and books: Henry James in The Yellow Book and Terminations (Heinemann, 1895); Joseph Conrad in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories (Blackwood, 1902); James Joyce in The Irish Homestead and Dubliners (Grant Richards, 1914); and Virginia Woolf in Monday or Tuesday (Hogarth, 1921). For these writers, the production of short fiction within the literary marketplace had definite and important consequences on their texts as well as the formation of their mature authorial identities. (With the exception of James, I focus on the early, most impressionable periods of the writers’ careers.) In bucking the commercial trend of miscellaneous collections, the unified book of stories came to represent, for such artists, something of a bibliographic rebellion, which, because of its inherent formal fragmentation, proved a compelling and fruitful site for their exploration of modernist themes and styles. The conclusion explores some of the consequences of these experiences on the writers’ subsequent, longer texts—Lord Jim, Ulysses, and Jacob's Room—arguing that such so-called “novels” can be understood better if studied within the literary and professional contexts created by their authors’ engagements with the short story. The same is true of the “short story cycle,” “sequence,” and “composite,” as strongly-coherent books of stories have been termed variously by scholars. This dissertation, particularly its introduction, sets out to provide historical, material background for scholarship on this too-long neglected literary genre. / text

The “Unreal City” of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land looms large over the landscape of critical inquiry into the metropolitan character of Anglo-American modernism. Characterized by the disorienting speed and chaos of modern life, the shock of harsh new environments and bewildering technologies, and the isolating and alienating effects of the inhuman urban mob, the city emerges here, so the story goes, as a site of extreme social disintegration and devastating psychic trauma; as a site that generates a textuality of overwhelming dynamism, phantasmagoric distortion, and subjective retreat. This dissertation complicates such conventional understandings of the city in modernism, proposing in place of the “Unreal City” a habitable one—an urban space and literature marked by the salutary everyday practices of city dwellers, the familiar environs of the metropolitan neighborhood, and the variety of literary modes that register such productive and adaptive dwelling processes. Taking seriously Rita Felski’s consideration of the “multiple worlds” of modernity, and thus diverging from the canonical formulations of modern urban experience put forth by the likes of Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, my work explores the richly ambivalent and ambiguous modernist response to the spatial complexities of the metropolis, drawing on the work of Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol in the two volumes of The Practice of Everyday Life to attend to the quotidian valences that signal a healthful engagement with the city. I uncover this metropoetics of habitability in the vexed response to the city’s network of interconnected spaces in T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations and The Waste Land; in the attention to the viable dwelling practices of individual urbanites—in contrast to city itself as dominant and dominating character—in John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer; in the routine daily operations on display in James Joyce’s Ulysses—breakfast, for instance, or running an errand; in the ordinary series of moments that constitute the work of everyday life in the familiar cityscape of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway; and finally in the broad-ranging depictions of urban life in Jean Rhys’s The Left Bank and Other Stories and Quartet.

“O weary Champion of the Cross, lie still”: così Christina Rossetti apre un sonetto del 1890 intitolato Cardinal Newman, composto in occasione della dipartita del cardinale e dedicato alla memoria di uno dei più influenti pensatori, teologi e uomini di lettere dell’epoca. L’accorato canto di Rossetti sottolinea la potenza del pensiero newmaniano assimilando le azioni e gli scritti del cardinale all’impeto delle acque di marea, metaforizzandoli poi in un’alluvione che va a sconvolgere il tranquillo corso di un ruscelletto: “Thy tides were springtides, set against the neap/ Of calmer souls: thy flood rebuked their rill (7-8). La metafora acquatica impiegata da Rossetti sintetizza in modo efficace le qualità trasformatrici proprie della lunga parabola esistenziale di John Henry Newman (1801-1890), la quale lascia profondi solchi nel tessuto ideologico e storico di quello che gli studiosi hanno identificato come “very long nineteenth-century”. Gran parte di questi solchi sono stati tracciati da Newman percorrendo una strada faticosa e mai lineare, che lo studioso oggi può seguire attingendo al voluminoso corpus delle opere e all’altrettanto ricco apparato critico e biografico andato formandosi negli anni a commento dei suoi scritti. Assieme a John Keble e Hurrel Froude, Newman fondò le basi di quello che passa alla storia come Oxford Movement, un’esperienza intellettuale nata fra i Colleges dell’Università di Oxford che mirava a ricostruire le basi cattoliche della Chiesa Anglicana, in un contesto di generale inquietudine nei confronti dell’istituzione ecclesiastica e dei modi da questa adottati per declinare la professione di fede all’interno del tessuto sociale dell’epoca. Gli uomini del Movement concentrarono i propri sforzi teorici nella stesura e pubblicazione di numerosi Tracts for the Times, nei quali si affrontavano i temi ecclesiologici più disparati, col fine di attivare un dialogo riformatore in seno alla Chiesa d’Inghilterra. La pubblicazione dei Tracts fu di breve durata (1833-1845) ma foriera di importanti conseguenze per la società inglese e per l’esistenza di Newman, coincidendo la sua conversione al cattolicesimo con la cessazione delle pubblicazioni (1845). La conversione di Newman fece enorme impressione sull’opinione pubblica, specie per il forte sentimento antiromano che circolava nelle fila dell’establishment inglese. Il motto “No Popery” costituiva un refrain udibile in molte delle produzioni culturali dell’epoca e in special modo nei romanzi a tema religioso, fra le cui pagine il cattolico si muove come personaggio intriso di caratteristiche negative proprie del villain: “a spy, a secret agent, suave, supercilious and satanically unscrupulous, laying his cunning plots for the submission of England to ‘Jesuitocracy’”. Falsità, propensione all’inganno, sete di potere, assenza di scrupoli erano tutti connotati che l’immaginazione protestante associava alla Chiesa di Roma: la conversione procurò a Newman accuse dello stesso segno che il futuro cardinale cercò di dissipare nei suoi scritti, impegnandosi ad arrivare a una fetta di pubblico il più vasta possibile mediante due romanzi e la celebre autobiografia spirituale Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864). Le opere letterarie di Newman conobbero un dilagante successo, intrise com’erano di istanze culturali associate alla vita religiosa e di elementi autobiografici che andavano a soddisfare la curiosità del pubblico per la vicenda personale di uno degli uomini più in vista del regno di Vittoria. La peculiare intersecazione fra la determinante storico-culturale e quella autobiografica nella testualizzazione letteraria newmaniana è l’oggetto di studio qui proposto. La ricerca prende il via da un iniziale progetto su biografia e romanzo in relazione alla cosiddetta “crisi religiosa” che caratterizza gli anni vittoriani. Nel considerare i vari aspetti della questione assieme al mio tutor Prof. Enrico Reggiani, si è constatato come non fosse opportuno inscrivere la figura di Newman in uno studio tematico e pluritestuale, metodologicamente orientato a una prospettiva storico-culturale: l’influenza del cardinale sulle lettere di derivazione anglofona appare caratterizzata da un’imponente, multilivellare pervasività che echeggia sia nelle pratiche artistiche dell’epoca, ossia nell’opera della già citata Rossetti, nell’estetica della Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, nella poesia di Gerald Manley Hopkins, che in quelle novecentesche, come il sistema testuale joyciano. Se il ruolo determinante del pensiero newmaniano è riconosciuto e analizzato dalla critica nel dettaglio dei suoi aspetti teologico-religiosi, altrettanto non può dirsi dei suoi scritti più specificamente letterari: il lavoro qui presentato sarà da intendersi pertanto come un dispositivo di avvicinamento a questi aspetti dell’opera di Newman. A tal fine si è deciso di concentrare lo studio sulla close-reading di uno dei due romanzi newmaniani, Loss and Gain (1848), la cui testualità sarà investigata mediante un selezionato apparato metodologico afferente in primis al macrotesto dell’autore e in secundis a più recenti formulazioni teoriche di taglio narratologico. / In an 1890 composition dedicated to the memory of John Henry Newman, Christina Rossetti metaphorized his legacy into “springtides, set against the neap/ Of calmer souls: thy flood rebuked their rill”. She so sought to synthesize the transformative qualities of Newman’s existence (1801-1890) in the context of the “very long nineteenth century”, as defined by Margot Finn. Along with John Keble and Hurrell Froude, Newman founded the Tractarian Movement, an Oxford-based intellectual movement intending to rebuild the Catholic foundation of the Anglican Church, which at the time was facing an ever growing disquiet on behalf of its affiliates, for both ecclesiological and political reasons. In order to ignite a reformative dialogue within the Church of England, the Tractarians published a relevant number of Tracts from 1833 to 1845, when Newman converted to Catholicism. Newman’s conversion sparked a huge controversy within the public opinion, catholics at the time being subjected to a heavy cultural stigma within the establishment. Falsity, a propension to deceit and thirst for power connoted the catholic character in numerous religious novels in the Victorian period, thus prompting Newman to defend himself from similar allegations in various writings such as the Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864). Newman’s literary writings were extremely successful, since they put on display a peculiar intersection between religious cultural issues and his own autobiography. Such intersection is the object of my thesis, which will articulate around a close-reading of Newman’s novel Loss and Gain (1848) in order to highlight the main features of the Cardinal’s literary theory and practice in relation to his overall theological views, and to project them on a synchronic and diacronic perspective to attest Newman’s legacy on Eighteenth and Nineteenth century literature.

The thesis, entitled "The Avant-Postman: James Joyce, the Avant-Garde and Postmodernism," attempts to construct a post-Joycean literary genealogy centred around the notions of a Joycean avant-garde and literary experimentation written in its wake. It considers the last two works by Joyce, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, as points of departure for the post-war literary avant-gardes in Great Britain, the USA, and France, in a period generally called "postmodern." The introduction bases the notion of a Joycean avant-garde upon Joyce's sustained exploration of the materiality of language and upon the appropriation of his last work, his "Work in Progress," for the cause of the "Revolution of the word" conducted by Eugene Jolas in his transition magazine. The Joycean exploration of the materiality of language is considered as comprising three stimuli: the conception of writing as concrete trace, susceptible to distortion or effacement; the understanding of literary language as a forgery of the words of others; and the project of creating a personal idiom as an "autonomous" language for a truly modern literature. The material is divided into eight chapters, two for Great Britain (from Johnson via Brooke-Rose to Sinclair), two for the U.S. (from Burroughs and Gass to Acker and Sorrentino) and three for France...

Dissertação (mestrado)—Universidade de Brasília, Departamento de Teoria Literária e Literaturas, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Literatura, 2014. / Submitted by Albânia Cézar de Melo (albania@bce.unb.br) on 2015-01-28T12:37:01Z No. of bitstreams: 1 2014_MariangelaFerreiraAndradePraia.pdf: 868636 bytes, checksum: c019a22c9043eb53c513c637abf4fbba (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Ruthléa Nascimento(ruthleanascimento@bce.unb.br) on 2015-02-10T19:40:32Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 2014_MariangelaFerreiraAndradePraia.pdf: 868636 bytes, checksum: c019a22c9043eb53c513c637abf4fbba (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-02-10T19:40:32Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 2014_MariangelaFerreiraAndradePraia.pdf: 868636 bytes, checksum: c019a22c9043eb53c513c637abf4fbba (MD5) / Esta dissertação aborda questões em torno da escritura joyceana. Stephen Dedalus, personagem-conceito assume a escrita do texto e brinca de artífice, dando margem para que o texto trabalhe questões como aspectos de sua criação, uma certa característica de hospitalidade, seus desdobramentos e a reflexão acerca do gênero textual. A hospitalidade derridiana é discutida também sob os olhares da tradução, que se revela enquanto abertura infinda. Nesse ponto o trabalho também discute a relação cíclica texto-leitor-texto e suas leis. A discussão acerca do gênero textual envolve Biografia, Autobiografia, Retrato, Confissão, Diário, Ensaio. Os pactos leitorautor-texto, o pacto e o espaço biográfico. Por fim, as questões da criação conversam com Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari sobre o plano da imanência, o da composição e o que mais nos importa do personagem-conceitual que é Stephen Dedalus. _______________________________________________________________________ ABSTRACT / This dissertation addresses issues concerning Joyce’s writing. The conceptual persona Stephen Dedalus undertakes the writing of the text and acts as an artificer, letting the text work issues such as aspects of its creation, a certain trait of hospitality, its consequences and reflections on genre. Derrida’s hospitality, which is also discussed from the standpoint of translation, is revealed as a conceptual opening up. At this point the cyclical text-reader-text relationship and the laws governing it are then discussed. The discussion on genre involves Biography, Autobiography, Portrait, Confession, Diary, Essay; all the possible pacts readerauthor- text, and then the biographical pact and biographical space. Finally, the issues of criation converse with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on the plane of immanence, composition and what matters most importantly, Stephen Dedalus as a conceptual persona.

The predominant focus on the male protagonist in the Bildungsroman genre has provoked feminist critics to offer a re-definition of the genre, claiming that the female protagonist's development differs in significant ways from the traditionally expected course of development (i.e. male). A feminist comparison between A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man and Martha Quest found, unexpectedly, that the female protagonist follows the traditional Bildungsroman trajectory in several respects, whereas the male protagonist deviates from it. A Portrait emphasizes the themes of childhood, formal education and religion, while in Martha Quest the themes of family relations, informal education, sexuality and marriage are treated at length. Martha Quest as an example of a female Bildungsroman deals specifically with the issues of role models, gender roles and gender inequality, which neither the traditional Bildungsroman nor A Portrait does.

This thesis posits post-humanism as a philosophy that engages directly with the problem of anthropocentrism and is concerned primarily with the metaphysics of subjectivity. It studies five literary texts (James Joyce's Ulysses, Virginia Woolf's Flush, Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, Brigid Brophy's Hackenfeller's Ape and J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons) that challenge the humanistic or classical subject through critical engagement with what this subject traditionally saw as its antithesis - the animal. These texts contest various fixed assumptions about animality and disrupt the status-quo of the human. Breaking with the tradition that treats animals exclusively as a metaphor for the human, they attempt to see and understand animality outside the framework of anthropocentric suppositions. This project aims to describe the strategies these texts employ to conceptualize animality as well as the methods they apply to delineate its subversive potential and to disrupt the human- animal binary. Its theoretical framework combines the work of thinkers belonging to the new but thriving field of Animal Studies with the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. It is this project's great ambition to contribute towards the development of new post- humanist ethics defined by its...

The purpose of my thesis is to analyze notions of the sublime in James Joyce’s Ulysses and how the sublime is evoked and presented in Joyce’s work. The present work will examine concepts of the sublime from the Classical and Medieval period, through the Enlightenment, and into the Romantic era to develop my own definition. Placing the sublime in a historical perspective allows me to discover how the sublime is at work through Joyce’s creative use of complex narrative approaches. The beauty of aesthetic perfection was achieved by employing all of Joyce’s artistic faculties. My thesis investigates how Ulysses’ experimental writing technique, unique structuring, and difficult prose created a work of genius which evokes the sublime. By analyzing Joyce’s use of language, unconventional narrative, and ambiguity in Ulysses I will explore how the sublime is aroused.

Irony and satire in two of James Joyce's works.