The word "moment" - from the Latin movere (to move) - can be understood in various senses. It is a point of time, an instant; it connotes importance, or weight; in 1666, according to the OED, it could be used to suggest a "definite stage or turning point in a course of events"; in 1691 it came to mean a "cause or motive of action, a determining influence or consideration" ... This dissertation stems from the conviction that the importance and weight of Sigmund Freud's "discovery" and elaboration of psychoanalysis - its impact as a turning point for western modes of intellectual activity, and as a determining consideration for western culture as a whole - has been so profound that it would be impossible to seek from within it the precise measure of its influence. Across modern philosophy, the human sciences, and the arts - from surrealism to pop art, from advertising to social welfare policies - Freud's psychoanalysis permeates the ways in which we live, and is one of the key elements of that experience of modernity we can loosely call "modernism". The dissertation locates a number of moments ·of modernism in and around Freud's work - with attention to Freud's relation to the reading and interpretive practices of the twentieth century: Chapter One examines some of the ways in which psychoanalysis and literary studies have met, intersected and, at times, bypassed one another over the past few decades, in a flurry of encounters which have yet to settle into any definitive shape. Chapter Two responds to Stanley Fish's recent attack on Freud's scientific integrity in the "Wolf-man". The chapter focuses, in other words, on one particular strand of the critical tradition defined in the second section of Chapter One. Chapter Three - which concerns the famous case of "Dora" - attempts, first, to restore some sense of the theoretical moment in Freud's work represented by the case, and second, to re-introduce the question of history into what has become the critics' story of Freud's failure to get to the bottom of Dora's hysteria. The aim of this chapter is to suggest a way beyond the contradiction in which Freud is persistently invoked, in feminist criticism, as both liberator and oppressor, hero and villain. Chapter Four turns back to the interface between psychoanalysis and literature. Its focal point is a different permutation from that manifested in the "Dora" case history of Freud's life-long quest to solve the "riddle" of femininity. The chapter examines some of the problems Defoe's novel Moll Flanders has posed to a tradition of patriarchal literary criticism. These problems, it argues, are inseparable from questions of representation, female identity and the notion of ''femininity" itself - the same questions which proved so intrusive in Freud's narrative of the case of Dora. This dissertation is concerned not only with the apparent "logic" of the arguments it confronts, but also with the· deeper constitution of that logic in and through the complex textures of writing. It aims to demonstrate that one of the most powerful moments of modernism in Freud's work lies in the stimulus it provides to an art of interpretation constantly attentive to the complexity of these textures.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Université de Montréal, 2002. / Adviser: Livia Monnet. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 236-249).

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Iowa, 2009. / Thesis supervisor: Cheryl Herr. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 234-250).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 267-275).

Neil Gunn was one of the principal writers of the Scottish Literary Renaissance movement, the earlytwentieth century flowering of modernist literature in Scotland. Although some commentators have noticed the frequent mentions of psychoanalysis in his work, until now no wider study has been undertaken. In this thesis, I look at Gunn's interest in psychoanalysis in a number of different ways. This is down with the two-fold aim of first, providing a modern assessment of Gunn's work, and second, examining more broadly the history of modernism in Scottish literature. In the introduction, I propose an understanding of modernism based on the literary exploration of new theories of, in this case the mind. I argue that a complex understanding of the interplay of these new theories and literature serves better than a more simple concern with either intellectual developments or changes in literary form alone. In the first section, I look at Sun Circle and The Serpent in the light of psychoanalytic theories of 'primitive' psychology and the history of religion. In the second, I look at Highland River and The Silver Darlings in the light of Freudian and Jungian theories of personal development, regression, and childhood. In the third, I look at the way in which Gunn explores Freud's theories of the warring life- and deathinstincts in both The Shadow and The Lost Chart. I conclude by looking briefly at how Gunn's literary explorations of psychoanalysis link with the work of later writers such as Muriel Spark, Robin Jenkins, Alexander Trocchi, Alasdair Gray, Kenneth White and Alan Spence.

This thesis examines the American novelist Norman Mailer’s relationship to the 20th century avant-garde. Mailer is often remembered as a pioneer in the new documentary modes of subjective non-fiction of the sixties. Looking beyond the decade’s themes of fact and fiction, this thesis opens up Mailer’s aesthetics in general to other areas of historical and theoretical enquiry, primarily art history and psychoanalysis. In doing so, it argues that Mailer’s work represents a thoroughgoing aesthetic and political response to modernism in the arts, a response that in turn fuels a critical opposition to postmodern aesthetics. Two key ideas are explored here. The first is narcissism. In the sixties, Mailer was an avatar of what Christopher Lasch called the “culture of narcissism”. The self-advertising non-fiction was related to an emerging postmodern self-consciousness in the novel. Yet the myth of Narcissus has a longer history in the story of modernist aesthetics. Starting with the concept’s early articulation by Freudian psychoanalysis, this thesis argues that narcissism was for Mailer central to human subjectivity in the 20th century. It was also a defining trait of technological modernity in the wake of the atom bomb and the Holocaust. Mailer, then, wasn’t just concerned with the aesthetics of narcissism: he was also deeply concerned with its ethics. Its logic is key to almost every major theme of his work: technology, war, fascist charisma, sexuality, masculinity, criminality, politics, art, media and fame. This thesis will also examine how narcissism was related for Mailer to themes of trauma, violence, facing and recognition. The second idea that informs this thesis is the theoretical question of “the real”. A later generation of postmodernists thought that Mailer’s initially radical work was excessively grounded in documentary and traditional literary realism. Yet while the question of realism was central for Mailer, he approached this question from a modernist standpoint. He identified with the modernist perspectivism of Picasso and his eclectic “attacks on reality”, and brought this modernist humanism to a critical analysis of postmodernism. The postwar (and ongoing) debates about postmodern and realism in the novel connect in Mailer, I argue, to what Hal Foster calls the “return of the real” in the 20th century avant-garde. This thesis also links Mailer to psychoanalytical views on trauma and violence; anti-idealist philosophy in Bataille and Adorno; and later postmodern art historical engagements with realism and simulation. Mailer’s view was that a hunger for the real was an effect of a desensitising (post)modernity. While the key decade is the sixties, the study begins in 1948 with Mailer’s first novel The Naked and the Dead, and ends at the height of the postmodern eighties. Drawing on a range of postmodern theory, this thesis argues that Mailer’s fiction sought to confront postmodern reality without ceding to the absurdity of the postmodern novel. The thesis also traces Mailer’s relationship to a range of contemporary art and visual culture, including Pop Art (and Warhol in particular), and avant-garde and postmodern cinema. This study also draws on a broad range of psychoanalytical, feminist and cultural theory to explore Mailer’s often troubled relationship to narcissism, masculinity and sexuality. The thesis engages a complex history of feminist perspectives on Mailer, and argues that while feminist critique remains necessary for a reading of his work, it is not sufficient to account for his restless exploration of masculinity as a subject. In chapter 7, the thesis also discusses Mailer’s much-criticised romantic fascination with black culture in the context of postcolonial politics.

The focus of this thesis is on four novels’ illustrations of the parallels and interrelations between the foundational crisis of mathematics and the political, linguistic, and epistemological crises around the turn to the twentieth century. While the latter crises with their climax in the First World War are commonly agreed to define modern culture and literature, this thesis concentrates on their relations with the ‘modernist transformation’ of mathematics as illustrated in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers (1930-1932), and Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities (1930/32). In the revaluation of mathematics during its foundational crisis, the certainty and rationality of this most certain science is challenged, and the novels accordingly employ mathematics as an example for the dramatic transformation of the modern West, the wider loss of absolute truth, and the increasing scepticism towards Enlightenment values. Crisis, however, also implied some freedoms and opportunities for literature and criticism. When the developing modern notion of mathematics is defined by autonomy and independence from the natural world, it bears traits more commonly associated with literary fiction, and the novels examine the possible convergence of mathematics and literature in the freedom of imaginary existence. The novels thus highlight the unique position of the structural science mathematics in the relation of the (natural) sciences and the humanities and suggest it to escape or straddle the perceived divide between the disciplines. The examination and historicising of relations between fiction and mathematical conceptualisations of the world as introduced in the major works by Pynchon, Broch, and Musil thus also contributes to distinguishing the specific conditions of studying mathematics in fiction in the wider field of literature and science.

Thesis (Ph.D.). / Written for the Dept. of English. Title from title page of PDF (viewed 2008/08/05). Includes bibliographical references.