Thesis (M.A.)--Victoria University of Wellington, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

This research stems from an interest in the role of the flâneur and his interaction with the city. The flâneur has been theorised as one of the most prominent figures in understanding modernity. This study draws upon two well-known modernist writers, Baudelaire and Woolf, using their literary flânerie to understand modernity from a twenty-first-century vantage point. The purpose of this thesis is to interrogate and reinterpret the notion of modernity: experience of modernity is that of spatiotemporal dislocation, a sense of in-betweenness that can be likened to the gap between a train and the platform. From the gap imagery, this thesis explores the paradoxical nature of modernity demonstrated in the writing of Baudelaire and Woolf. While existing studies have discussed the theme of flânerie extensively, the discourse is dominated by Benjaminian assumptions, which results in a visuo-centric bias. With recourse to Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, this thesis provides a more holistic understanding of the intertwining relationship between the flâneur, the city, the writer, and the text. Comparing the flâneur to a writerly device, this study explains how the flâneur offers the writer a novel perspective on the city. The aim of the writer's manipulation of the flâneur is to approach what I call line-scape. This notion designates an ideal literary horizon which the writer constantly endeavours to reach, to no avail. Various implications of line-scape are investigated, most notably through landscape painting tradition, to highlight the way in which the writer deploys the flâneur figure as an implied observer of line-scape. Translation theories and phenomenology-inspired studies are also incorporated into the research. Ultimately, flânerie as a clue to line-scape takes part in the current literary landscape, allowing for a revaluation of modernist writing, engendering novel interpretations of the act of walking, and renewing interest in modernity and the city.

The PhD thesis deals with the topic of male homosexuality in the works of Japanese modernist authors; its aim is to discern in what ways homosexuality is portrayed in these works. In the theoretical part, the thesis first provides a wider definition of modernist literature, which encompasses not just the so-called pure literature but also popular literature works from the same period. It then offers an overview of male homosexuality in Japanese history from the Heian period to the 1930s with an emphasis on artistic representation of male homosexuality. Starting from the Tokugawa period, the focus is on individual discourses on male homosexuality - legal, medical and popular. The theoretical part also contains the methodology used for achieving the aim of this thesis, which is based mostly on post-structuralism and queer theory. This methodology is used in form of concrete tools - discourse analysis and deconstruction of binary oppositions underlying the social constructs of gender and sexuality. These approaches are complemented by strategies created by Martin C. Putna and Gregory M. Pflugdelder, who use a combination of topic and textual strategy analysis together with biographical and autobiographical information about the author to find different types of homosexuality representation in literary...

This thesis explores the citation of documents in the modernist novel. From contracts to newspaper articles, telegrams to reports, documents are invoked as interleaved texts in ways that, to date, have not been critically interrogated. I consider a range of novels, including works by Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, and Willa Cather, which are selected, in part, as a litmus of Anglo-American modernism, though they can more productively also be understood as coalescing around the example set by Joseph Conrad. Replete with allusions to documents, Conrad’s oeuvre is developed across the thesis as a meta-commentary on the document in modernist literature. In placing the document at the centre of analysis, and in using Conrad as a diagnostic of the document in modernity, the manifold ways in which authors use interpolated texts to perform denotative and connotative “work” in their narratives emerge, with the effect of revising our understanding of documents. These authors reveal the power of mass produced documents to lay claim to novelistic language; the historical role of documents in reifying inequality; on the level of narrative, the thematic potential of the document as a reiterable text; and finally, the capacity of the document, in its most depersonalized form, to realize social collectivity and community. This project therefore asks us to rethink and relocate the document as central to the modernist novel.

Using Gillian Beer's suggestion that literature and science 'share the moment's discourse' (Open Fields, 1996), this thesis explores the ideas associated with Albert Einstein's three revolutionary 1905 papers, examining the ways in which similar concepts appeared across disciplines during the early part of the twentieth century, and focusing in particular on their manifestation within the literary works of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. The study seeks to distinguish between instances of direct influence and a shared contemporary discourse, arguing that the analysis of both is essential to studies within the field of literature and science. Part I focuses on concepts of duality and complementarity, considering Max Planck's introduction of the quantum, Einstein's development of light quanta, Louis de Broglie's wave-particle duality and Niels Bohr's principle of complementarity. It analyses other contemporary discussions of duality and complementarity, and explores Virginia Woolf's attempts to simultaneously express both sides of dualistic models, suggesting that Woolf is a complementary writer. Part II focuses on Einstein's theories of relativity, exploring D. H. Lawrence's adoption thereof in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), in particular his claim that 'we are in sad need of a theory of human relativity'. It argues that this proposed theory is directly relevant to Lawrence's fictional works, both those that precede Fantasia and those that follow it. It also analyses the impact on Lawrence of contemporary ideas of relativism, especially those of William James as expressed in Pragmatism (1907). Part III explores the ways in which both Woolf and Lawrence write about individuals within crowds. It considers the possible links between such scenes and Einstein's paper on Brownian motion as well as contemporary studies of crowd psychology. It suggests that individual characters within modernist works can be considered as similar to the individual particles suspended in a mass which exhibit Brownian motion.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1997. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 170-180).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 161-171) and index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 161-171) and index.