Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1919. / Bibliography: p. 63. Also issued in print.

Inaug. Diss.--Hamburgischen Universitat. / Lebenslauf.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1919. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Bibliography: p. 63.

Inaug. Diss.--Hamburgischen Universitat. / Lebenslauf.

This dissertation elaborates an American pragmatist aesthetic tradition that anticipates recent "turns" in cultural studies to aesthetics and affect. Although a commitment to the nondiscursive ends of art is most explicitly voiced by pragmatist philosophers, I emphasize fiction writers who likewise argue that what most matters in art is our immediately felt, inarticulate experience of an artwork rather than anything we can say about it. These writers celebrated the nondiscursive character of aesthetic experience as a critique of an emerging culture of professionalism that, they felt, reduced aesthetic experience to linguistic meaning and thereby consolidated the authority of the professional middle class over rural, poor, and immigrant Americans. While these writers were critics of the culture of professionalism, they were also its products and participants, and they registered their dual commitments in images of bifurcated consciousness, most famous of which is W.E.B. Du Bois's concept of a racial "double-consciousness" endemic to the African American. Here double consciousness serves as a metaphor for the tension between professional discourse and nondiscursive aesthetic experience. Each chapter explores a different valence of this metaphor, illustrating it through analysis of a fictional work. The protagonists in these works are encountered at crises in their professional careers, and their dual commitments to discourse and nondiscourse are dramatized in their encounters with artworks. Chapter 1 argues that a dual commitment to the analytic and the vague in William James's The Principles of Psychology and Henry James's "The Figure in the Carpet" reflects these brothers' ambivalence toward a late-nineteenth-century aestheticism that insisted on art's "uselessness." Chapter 2 demonstrates that Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware negotiates a double consciousness prompted by the nineteenth-century "warfare" between science and theology. Chapter 3 examines the role that a racialized difference between "white" words and "black" music assumed during the Jim Crow era, as demonstrated in James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. Chapter 4 demonstrates that Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark mitigates a tension between art's functions as escapism and as propaganda by sketching a model of American cultural nationalism rooted in "primitive" nondiscursivity.

<p> <i>Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli </i> by Ronald Firbank and <i>Between the Acts</i> by Virginia Woolf both liberate the text from the expected form to engage emotional awareness and instigate reform of societal standards. Employing Mikhail Bakhtin&rsquo;s theories of the carnivalesque and grotesque realism as a means to create this perspective is unconventional; nevertheless, Firbank, predominantly misunderstood, and Woolf, more regarded but largely misinterpreted, both address sexuality and religion to parody what they believe to be the retrogression of civilization by narrating christenings, pageants, and other forms of carnival. Both novels forefront nonconformity, and the conspicuous influence of debasement is identified as a form of salient renewal. Christopher Ames, Melba-Cuddy Keane, and Alice Fox have already expressed remarkable insight into Woolf; unfortunately not a single scholar has approached Firbank&rsquo;s text in this manner, and this essay discusses the value of both authors in the aspect of Bakhtin&rsquo;s theories.</p>

Thesis (M.A.)--West Virginia University, 2003. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains iv, 58 p. Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 52-55).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Université Lyon 3, 1999-2000. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thèse--Université de Paris. / Without thesis note. "Bibliographie": p. [467]-475.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Université Lyon 3, 1999-2000. / Includes bibliographical references.