Dissertation (DPhil)--University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (M.S.)--North Carolina State University, 2005. / UMI number: 3232673. Originally issued in electronic format. Includes bibliographical references. Also available via the World Wide Web.

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

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 217-229).

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.

In this dissertation, I argue that Douglas Sirk was attempting to dissolve the boundaries of the cinematic medium by assimilating elements of avant-garde art, architecture and design into the colour, composition and settings of many of his most popular studio produced films. While the exaggerated artifice of this director�s formal style has often been remarked upon, it has yet to be interpreted in the light of his detailed cognisance of the major art and architectural movements of the period, which include German Expressionist painting and Machine Age Modernist design. This is a lacuna that my thesis should at least partially fill, since I have shown that Sirk�s highly self conscious visual approach was deeply influenced by the artistic debates that were taking place in Europe during the 1920s and �30s and in America after World War II. To my mind, there is no doubt that this director�s syncretic mise-en-scène was the result of an interdisciplinary, transnational dialogue, and I have sought to illuminate some of the social, philosophical and political meanings that it seems to convey.

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In this dissertation, I argue that Douglas Sirk was attempting to dissolve the boundaries of the cinematic medium by assimilating elements of avant-garde art, architecture and design into the colour, composition and settings of many of his most popular studio produced films. While the exaggerated artifice of this director�s formal style has often been remarked upon, it has yet to be interpreted in the light of his detailed cognisance of the major art and architectural movements of the period, which include German Expressionist painting and Machine Age Modernist design. This is a lacuna that my thesis should at least partially fill, since I have shown that Sirk�s highly self conscious visual approach was deeply influenced by the artistic debates that were taking place in Europe during the 1920s and �30s and in America after World War II. To my mind, there is no doubt that this director�s syncretic mise-en-scène was the result of an interdisciplinary, transnational dialogue, and I have sought to illuminate some of the social, philosophical and political meanings that it seems to convey.

"Metropolitan Theatrics" charts the unsettling and reshaping of everyday life in Weimar Berlin between 1919 and 1933. It does so, by convening a conversation between the multidisciplinary insights of performance studies and recent geographical approaches to the study of the modern city. Berlin's restless relationship with the 'modern' offers, it is argued, an ideal historical milieu in which to test performance theory while at the same time question some of its presentist assumptions. Drawing on a variety of historical sources, the study focuses on the role of performance - not only theatrical representation, but also the popular press, novels, the visual and performing arts, modern dance, scientific experiments, and everyday practices - in order to demonstrate the specific conjunction of visuality and embodiment that allied 'Berlin' with 'modernity.' The thesis is divided into two main parts. Part One is a close reading of texts and images and how they have come to figure Weimar Berlin as an imagined environment. In this respect, recent scholarship in the humanities has been caught on the horns of a theoretical dilemma, namely how to accommodate the seemingly undocumentable event of performance. Different responses to this dilemma are discussed. In particular, it is argued that in seeking to go beyond representation to embodied experience, a sense of the cultural presence of the former in the latter merits greater critical attention. Part Two continues the thesis's discussion of performance's unorthodox archives by drawing attention to a repertoire of aesthetic and scientific practices which were developed to sense and adapt to the traumatic shock of metropolitan modernity. Ultimately, this thesis provides an historically specific account of aspects of Weimar modernity and thus means to contribute not only to an historical geography of Berlin, but also to the forging of methodologies that serve to widen the cross-disciplinary study of modern culture and modernity. Given the importance of the Weimar era to our understanding of the nature of European modernity, the development of a geography of performance makes a strong case for re-examining the ways in which the relationship between 'modernity' and the 'city' is usually formulated / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

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