Thesis (Ph.D. (English)) - Rhodes University, 2009.

This thesis addresses the literary representation of food in the period from 1900 through 1945 in the work of Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf. Taking up nineteenth-century fascinations with sensual and aesthetic taste, these authors explore the implications of food preparation and consumption in Britain, America and France. They use representations of everyday culinary practices as a way to examine articulations of anxiety about the state of civilization, a fear that is amplified and altered by both World Wars. The thesis approaches the question of the significance of food to literary modernism in two ways. The first is a theoretical analysis of modernist ways of thinking about the dialectic between the concepts of civilization and barbarism. The second is grounded in material history, establishing the contexts and conditions of food culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on sociological thinking from Norbert Elias's conception of the civilizing process and Pierre Bourdieu's theory of distinction, and using a combined methodology of close reading, biographical and historical analysis, I show that food acts as a lens for these authors' ideas about civil society and modernity. My original contribution to knowledge is threefold. The first is my interpretation of 'culinary Impressionism' as an extension and repositioning of current scholarly thinking about Ford's literary Impressionism. The second is my reading of Stein's and Toklas's jointly-authored cookbook draft as evidence of their collaboration. This forms the crux of my argument about Stein adapting domestic culinary techniques into her other writing. The third is in my chapter on Virginia Woolf. My original archival research shows that in A Room of One's Own Woolf's representation of the financial and culinary difference between men's and women's dining in colleges at the University of Cambridge is justified and the material inequality was in fact worse than previously understood. I argue that the disparity in institutional food intensifies Woolf's later reimagining of the term 'civilization' in Three Guineas. While drawing on the work of modernist studies scholars on modernism and the everyday, civilization, and food, my project is unique in demonstrating that food reflects modernist conceptions of civilization and barbarism. My thesis contributes to the understanding of transatlantic aesthetics and gendered productions of modernism by illuminating the centrality of agriculture, cookery, domestic work and institutional dining to modernist authors.

As literary modernism was emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of its most important figures and precursors began to talk about their own writing as a kind of starvation. My doctoral thesis considers the reasons for and development of this previously little-explored trope, arguing that hunger becomes a focal point for modernism’s complex relationship to aesthetic autonomy. I identify a specific tradition of writers, beginning in the nineteenth century with proto-modernists such as Melville and Rimbaud, flourishing in the pivotal figures of Knut Hamsun, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, and expiring with modernist-influenced contemporary writers such as Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee. Although these writers are avid readers and devoted disciples of one another, mine is the first study to read them alongside one another as a coherent literary tradition. Reading them in this way, I am able to trace the development of the ‘art of hunger’ as a locus for a crisis in aesthetic autonomy that spans the twentieth century. I develop this line of argument in two phases. In the first, I trace the emergence of an art of hunger out of modernist engagements with philosophical aesthetics and its notions of aesthetic autonomy. Readings of the “art of hunger” in Herman Melville, Arthur Rimbaud, Knut Hamsun, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett’s post-war work reveal that starvation carries autonomy to an extreme and hyper-literal endpoint, revealing both its desirability as an aesthetic ideal and the impossibility of art’s complete autonomy from the body, the market or the social dimensions of language. In the second phase, I consider how this trope has animated later twentieth-century engagements with modernism. For authors writing in the aftermath of modernism, hunger provides a way of considering new complications to aesthetic autonomy in the light of both their debt to modernism and their specific historical circumstances. In this light, I consider three different extensions of the modernist art of hunger: its absorption into high formalism in Beckett’s late prose; its collapse in the face of an emerging concern with the social in Paul Auster; and its transformation into an ethical aesthetics of food taboos, restriction and asceticism in J. M. Coetzee.

‘The poet’, Eliot wrote, ‘is occupied with frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail, though meanings still exist’. This dissertation is an investigation into the ways in which four poets – Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot – imagine what it might mean to labour in verse towards the ‘frontiers of consciousness’. This is an old question about the value of poetry, about the kinds of understanding, feeling, and participation that become uniquely available as we read (or write) verse. But it is also a question that becomes peculiarly pressing in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. In my introductory chapter, I sketch out some of the philosophical, theological, and aesthetic contexts in which this question about what poetry might do for us becomes particularly acute: each of these four poets, I suggest, invests in verse as a means of sustaining belief in those things that seem excluded, imperilled, or forfeited by what is felt to be a peculiarly modern or (to use a contested term) ‘secularized’ understanding of the world. To write poetry becomes a labour towards enabling or ratifying otherwise untenable experiences of belief. But while my broader concern is with what is at stake philosophically, theologically, and even aesthetically in this labour towards the frontiers of consciousness, my more particular concern is with the ways in which these poets think in verse about how the poetic organisation of language brings us to momentary consciousness of otherwise unavailable ‘meanings’. For each of these poets, it is as we begin to listen in to the paralinguistic sounds of verse that we become conscious of that which lies beyond the realms of the linguistic imagination. These poets develop figures within their verse in order to theorize the ways in which this peculiarly poetic ‘music’ brings us to consciousness of that which exceeds or transcends the limits of the world in which we think we live. These figures begin as images of the half-seen (glimmering, haunting, dappling, crossing) but become a way of imagining that which we might only half-hear or half-know. Chapter 2 deals with Tennyson’s figure of glimmering light that signals the presence, activity, or territory of the ‘higher poetic imagination’; In Memoriam, I argue, represents the development of this figure into a poetics of the ‘glimpse’, a poetry that repeatedly approaches the horizon of what might be seen or heard. Chapter 3 is concerned with Hardy’s figuring of the ‘hereto’ of verse as a haunted region, his ghostly figures and spectral presences becoming a way of thinking about the strange experiences of listening and encounter that verse affords. Chapter 4 attends to the dappled skins and skies of Hopkins’ verse and the ways in which ‘dapple’ becomes a theoretical framework for thinking about the nature and theological significance of prosodic experience. And Chapter 5 considers the visual and acoustic crossings of Eliot’s verse as a series of attempts to imagine and interrogate the proposition that the poetic organisation of language offers ‘hints and guesses’ of a reality that is both larger and more significant than our own.

This thesis offers an analysis of selected works by Virginia Woolf through the theoretical framework of technology of place. The term “technology”, meaning both a finished product and an ongoing production process, a mode of concealment and unconcealment in Martin Heidegger's sense, is used as part of this thesis's argument that place can be understood through constant negotiations of concrete place perceived through the senses, a concept based on the Heideggerian notion of “earth”, and abstract place perceived in the imagination, a concept based on the Heideggerian notion of “world”. The term “technology of place”, coined by Irvin C. Schick in The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alteritist Discourse (1999), is appropriated and re-interpreted as part of this thesis's adoption and adaptation of Woolf's notion of ideal biographical writing as an amalgamation of “granite” biographical facts and “rainbow” internal life. Woolf's granite and rainbow dichotomy is used as a foreground to this thesis's proposed theoretical framework, through which questions of space/place can be examined. My analysis of Flush (1933) demonstrates that place is a technology which can be taken at face value and, at the same time, appropriated to challenge the ideology of its construction. My analysis of Orlando (1928) demonstrates that Woolf's idea of utopia exemplifies the technological “coming together”, in Heidegger's term, of concrete social reality and abstract artistic fantasy. My analysis of The Years (1937) demonstrates that sense of place as well as sense of identity is ambivalent and constantly changing like the weather, reflecting place's Janus-faced function as both concealment and unconcealment. Lastly, my analysis of Woolf's selected essays and marginalia illustrates that writing can serve as a revolutionary “place-making” technology through which one can mentally “make room” for (re-)imagining the lives of “the obscure”, often placed in oblivion throughout the course of history.

Texte remanié de: Th. État--Litt.--Paris 3, 1984. / Bibliogr. p. 321-346. Bibliogr. des oeuvres d'A. Césaire et de M. de Andrade p. 339-341. Notes bibliogr.

Univ., Diss. u.d.T.: Cole, Merrill Grant: The erotics of masculine demise--Washington, 1999. / Literaturverz. S. 161 - 171.

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From the first electric lights in London along Pall Mall, and in the Holborn Viaduct in 1878 to the nationalisation of National Grid in 1947, the narrative of the simple ascendency of a new technology over its outdated predecessor is essential to the way we have imagined electric light in London at the end of the nineteenth century. However, as this thesis will demonstrate, the interplay between gas and electric light - two co-existing and competing illuminary technologies - created a particular and peculiar landscape of light, a 'lightscape', setting London apart from its contemporaries throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, this narrative forms the basis of many assertions made in critical discussions of artificial illumination and technology in the late-twentieth century; however, this was not how electric light was understood at the time nor does it capture how electric light both captivated and eluded the imagination of contemporary Londoners. The influence of the electric light in the representations of London is certainly a literary question, as many of those writing during this period of electrification are particularly attentive to the city's rich and diverse lightscape. Though this has yet to be made explicit in existing scholarship, electric lights are the nexus of several important and ongoing discourses in the study of Victorian, Post-Victorian, Modernist, and twentieth-century literature. This thesis will address how the literary influence of the electric light and its relationship with its illuminary predecessors transcends the widespread electrification of London to engage with an imaginary London, providing not only a connection with our past experiences and conceptions of the city, modernity, and technology but also an understanding of what Frank Mort describes as the 'long cultural reach of the nineteenth century into the post-war period'.