Thesis advisor: Marjorie Howes / Thesis advisor: Andrew Von Hendy / By representing the relationship between a subject and a particular object, key modernist writers offered paradigms for conceiving their literary aesthetics more explicitly. <italic>A World of Objects</italic> presents three interconnected narratives about literary making in the twentieth century by pairing James Joyce with the hoarded object, Elizabeth Bowen with the toy, and Samuel Beckett with the forsaken thing. The over-arching aim of this study is to prove the logic of these pairings by contextualizing the object within each writer's work. In addition to offering detailed analyses of specific texts by Joyce, Bowen, and Beckett, I explore the ways that their work participated in larger aesthetic movements made up of fellow writers, visual artists, cultural theorists, psychoanalysts, and philosophers. Focused on the objects that dangerously clutter Shem's inkbottle house in <italic>Finnegans Wake</italic>, my first chapter reopens critical questions about modernism's stylistic engagement with waste, obsessive cataloguing, and projects of indefinite scope. By integrating recent case histories and psychological discourse on compulsive hoarding, I probe both Joyce's increasing interest in the excesses of the object world and its effects upon his readers. Hoarders and critics of the Wake are alike prone to anxieties concerning the potential value of acquired items. These anxieties lead to an extreme tendency that psychological researchers and clinicians refer to as "elaborative processing." Whether encountering a piece of trash, like a pack of used matches, or an obscure signifier, like "fallen lucifers," (an item in Shem's house) both the hoarder and the Joycean create cognitively rich associative networks for accumulated material or linguistic objects. Through an understanding of the phenomenon of hoarding, I offer an analysis of Joycean objects that assumes their potential value within a range of deferrable symbolic registers. Such a reading calls for a reconsideration of Joyce's later aesthetics and a critique of the critico-stylistic techniques peculiar to <italic>Wake</italic> scholarship. I go on to argue that the consequences of Joyce's equation of litter with literature extend well beyond <italic>Finnegans Wake</italic>; and that a large number of modernist texts exhibit the same potential for the discovery of value in the seemingly valueless. Bowen's theories on toys and character--presented in a series of essays, memoirs, radio broadcasts, and novels, particularly <italic>The House in Paris</italic>--provide a rich resource for considering the object of play in twentieth-century literary aesthetics. Bowen had a life-long obsession with toys ranging from Edwardian toy-theaters to Japanese dolls to Czechoslovakian marionettes. In the unpublished essay "Toys," she argues that the highest form of play involves resourceful manipulation, or the faculty to turn a found object into something else. Bowen's resourceful toy, like the hoarded object, relies upon an individual's heightened creative tendency to invent infinite uses (or misuses) for things. This chapter employs Bowen's theory by reemphasizing trope's etymological meaning of "to alter or to turn one thing into another." This method of encountering the phenomenal world can be discovered in a strain of twentieth-century writers who share Bowen's preoccupation with the effects of troping subjects with objects. Bowen was attracted to the toy because of its abilities to create tensions between subject and object distinctions; its mimetic potential to contest, invert, or reflect established ontological assumptions; and its capability to underscore the inter-construction of interiority and exteriority. My project's culminating chapter appropriates the phrase "forsaken things" from <italic>Malone Dies</italic> as a term to signify the recurrent, infraordinary objects that litter Beckett's texts and the daunting critical trajectories necessary to understand his aesthetic projects. Predominantly critics have abandoned Beckett's objects as either bereft of symbolic value or confoundedly too symbolic. My approach counters these readings by accepting the object's status as purposely forsaken, or liberated from confining ideological and aesthetic frames of judgment. Beckett uses objects to bait his audience into accepting tempting, cogent interpretations (whether allegorical, existential, psychoanalytic, autobiographical, or another); however, his technique is to undercut any stable reading by endowing the object with a paradoxically determined indeterminacy. I develop this argument by tracing the ways that a series of objects (spent matches, pebbles, "pointless" pencils) purposely fail to exhibit or contribute to a consistent syntax of meaning across Beckett's novels and short stories. I conclude my chapter by looking at Beckett's first completed play, <italic>Eleutheria</italic>, and a series of short stories that he wrote between 1946-47. Though one associates Beckett with the absence of objects, analysis of these texts proves that like his contemporaries, he, too, was dependent upon them. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Esta tese tem por objetivo apreender as relações do código verbal nas imagens das palavras, promovendo o resgate da palavra, a qual prescinde do código visual, e que descreve as sensações e percepções diferenciadas e múltiplas, mostradas em níveis graduados, do contextual ao estético; concomitantemente com os traços de modernidade, detectados nas obras selecionadas. O corpus de análise compõe-se de nove obras, dos autores brasileiros tem-se: Bartolomeu Campos de Queirós, Cecília Meireles, Clarice Lispector, Leo Cunha, Lygia Bojunga e Paulo Leminski; dos portugueses, Alice Vieira e José Saramago; e do africano, Mia Couto. Através da observação de algumas características comuns, e buscando-se apoio teórico nos autores que discorreram e discutiram criticamente a modernidade, foram captados tais traços comuns, elencados no primeiro capítulo. O segundo capítulo faz uma pequena incursão sobre os modos de processar a percepção. O terceiro apresenta as análises realizadas, categorizadas em três paradigmas, evidenciando-se os traços de modernidade, cuja presença aparece em menor ou maior grau. Desta forma, o verbal comprova a sua força e seu caráter essencial, que tanto sugere quanto mostra sensações e percepções na leitura da palavra imagética. / This thesis aims at understanding the relationship of verbal code, promoting the rescue of the word, which does without the visual code, the images of words that describe the sensations and differentiated and multiple perceptions, shown in graduated levels of contextual to the aesthetic; concomitantly with traces of modernity, detected in the selected works. The corpus analysis consists of nine works, of Brazilian authors: Bartolomeu Campos de Queirós, Cecília Meireles, Clarice Lispector, Leo Cunha, Lygia Bojunga e Paulo Leminski; of Portuguese Alice Vieira e José Saramago; and African, Mia Couto. By observing some common features, we sought theoretical support in authors who discoursed and critically discussed modernity; raised the features listed in the first chapter. The second chapter makes a small incursion into the ways of processing the perception. The third presents the analyzes, categorized in three paradigms; showing traces of modernity, whose presence appears to a lesser or greater degree. Thus, the verbal proves its strength and its essential character, which both suggests as shows sensations and perceptions in imagetic word reading.

The 1990s saw a climax of literature representations in what Ong called the secondary orality, particularly in film, television, and radio; for instance, the film industry produced a number of adaptations of novels that had been accepted into the American literary canon, while television and radio marketed literature through book clubs and literary shows. All these literary productions mediated through film, radio, and television are referred to in this study as mediatized literature. The argument of this dissertation is that 1990s U.S. mediatized literature constitutes a post-modern re-enactment of the traditional oral literature that initially emerged on U.S. territory with pre-literate populations. In support of this thesis, chapter 1 presents the features of the oral traditions of four ethnic groups, while subsequent chapters feature an application of these characteristics, or variations thereof, to literary discourses from film, television, and radio. There is a structural correlation between the oral tradition of the four ethnic groups presented in chapter 1 -- Native-American, African-American, Hispanic, and Asian -- and some of the movie adaptations discussed in chapters 2 and 3 that are based on fiction representing the same ethnic groups (Beloved for the African-American mediatized literature, The Mambo Kings for the Hispanic one, etc.). While analyzing the features common to both the oral tradition and the mediatized literature, this study makes use of four variables (authorship, audience, literary product, and literary aesthetics) and of a complex critical apparatus that includes theories of the linguistic sign, the Bakhtinian dialogic system, the Jungian concept of the collective unconsciousness, Bolter's concept of remediation, etc. Throughout this dissertation, I will argue that, in spite of the Ongian condescension vis-á-vis oral cultural messages as inferior to the written ones, and contrary to Postmanian media apprehensions and Franzenian inertia toward mediatized literature, both oral and mediatized literary messages can be classified as literature, although they may not always follow traditional aesthetic parameters embraced by canonical written literature. Chapter 5 of this dissertation presents some of the major points of the current conversation related to the acceptance of mediatized literature and of the oral tradition into the category of literature and to the complex socio-economic and literary implications of the dissemination of literature through mass media.

Esta tese tem por objetivo apreender as relações do código verbal nas imagens das palavras, promovendo o resgate da palavra, a qual prescinde do código visual, e que descreve as sensações e percepções diferenciadas e múltiplas, mostradas em níveis graduados, do contextual ao estético; concomitantemente com os traços de modernidade, detectados nas obras selecionadas. O corpus de análise compõe-se de nove obras, dos autores brasileiros tem-se: Bartolomeu Campos de Queirós, Cecília Meireles, Clarice Lispector, Leo Cunha, Lygia Bojunga e Paulo Leminski; dos portugueses, Alice Vieira e José Saramago; e do africano, Mia Couto. Através da observação de algumas características comuns, e buscando-se apoio teórico nos autores que discorreram e discutiram criticamente a modernidade, foram captados tais traços comuns, elencados no primeiro capítulo. O segundo capítulo faz uma pequena incursão sobre os modos de processar a percepção. O terceiro apresenta as análises realizadas, categorizadas em três paradigmas, evidenciando-se os traços de modernidade, cuja presença aparece em menor ou maior grau. Desta forma, o verbal comprova a sua força e seu caráter essencial, que tanto sugere quanto mostra sensações e percepções na leitura da palavra imagética. / This thesis aims at understanding the relationship of verbal code, promoting the rescue of the word, which does without the visual code, the images of words that describe the sensations and differentiated and multiple perceptions, shown in graduated levels of contextual to the aesthetic; concomitantly with traces of modernity, detected in the selected works. The corpus analysis consists of nine works, of Brazilian authors: Bartolomeu Campos de Queirós, Cecília Meireles, Clarice Lispector, Leo Cunha, Lygia Bojunga e Paulo Leminski; of Portuguese Alice Vieira e José Saramago; and African, Mia Couto. By observing some common features, we sought theoretical support in authors who discoursed and critically discussed modernity; raised the features listed in the first chapter. The second chapter makes a small incursion into the ways of processing the perception. The third presents the analyzes, categorized in three paradigms; showing traces of modernity, whose presence appears to a lesser or greater degree. Thus, the verbal proves its strength and its essential character, which both suggests as shows sensations and perceptions in imagetic word reading.

La partie création, pièces d’eau, est un recueil de proses poétiques qui mettent toutes en relief une fracture entre les termes par lesquels un lieu est rendu intelligible et la realité sensible qu’ils invoquent. Les textes procèdent d’une élaboration des traces de vie qui restent suspendues au développement architectural, patrimonial et économique d’un lieu. Qu’elles procèdent à partir d’une pulsion vers l’hagiographie, de connaissances parcellaires, d’une incapacité de faire des phrases, ou bien d’une certitude hystérique, les pièces d’eau du titre sont ici à considérer comme autant d’inachèvements, voire de rebuts des procès historiques dont elles sont le refoulement. L’essai, Lisibilités de la trace dans The Obituary de Gail Scott, aborde la lisibilité en tant que question épistémologique, historiographique et esthétique. Le déchiffrement de la trace appelle une conception sans cesse recommencée de ce qu’est la lisibilité. Dans The Obituary, le déploiement d’une esthétique littéraire axée sur le paradigme de la trace concrétise une ambivalence profonde à l’égard des processus par lesquels le passé nous apparaît comme lisible au présent. À partir d’une aporie du discours historiographique, le travail poétique et narratif de Scott revient aux matières qui produisent cette machine à perte qu’est le réel. Il apprête au final un renouveau de l’imaginaire politique du savoir ainsi que des modalités littéraires définissant notre rapport sensible au passé. / The creative work pièces d’eau is a collection of poetic prose texts that tease out fractures between the terms through which a place is made intelligible and the sensory information they seek to designate. The pieces each invoke forms of life constituting an externality to the architectural, patrimonial and economic development of place. Whether they proceed from a hagiographic impulse, a fractional knowledge, a struggle to form sentences, or a hysteric certainty, the pièces d’eau of the title are indisposed, involuntary documents of the progress of which they are the refuse. The essay, Lisibilité de la trace dans The Obituary de Gail Scott, addresses legibility as an epistemological, historiographic and aesthetic notion. Reading traces calls for a constantly renewed engagement with material at the edges of legibility. In The Obituary, the deployment of an aesthetic articulated around the paradigm of the trace mobilizes a deep ambivalence with regards to processes by which the past becomes legible in the present. Written across the aporias of historiographic thought, Scott’s poetic and narrative work in this novel beckons a reappraisal of the political imaginary of knowledge and of the literary modalities that define our sensate engagement with the past.