This dissertation uncovers a strand in early twentieth century British literature that is currently missing from readings of modernism - a fascination with portraying meditative states of mind. Modernist authors were intrigued by the mind's capacity to be in constant movement between the present, past, and future - what they represented as a stream of consciousness. This study examines the potential of the "still," calm, and concentrated mind in modernist visions of consciousness by exploring how the meditative mind takes a different shape in theme and form in the writings of Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, and Aldous Huxley. Drawing from the works' preoccupation with physical practices such as spiritual and ritual dance, relaxation techniques, Yoga, the Alexander Technique, and meditative walking, this study highlights the role of the body in views on consciousness in modernist literature. This dissertation argues that looking at modernism through the lens of meditation allows us to see the period not only in terms of the split, wounded self in the fast-paced modern metropolis but reveals its yearning for what the authors in this study call "wholeness," "mind-body harmony," and "the spirit of peace" - a search for peace attainable within, if not without, an attempt to cure the self in the fracturing modern world through experiencing the mind at peace.

This dissertation considers how defenses of traditional faith in Britain have adapted to new frontiers of cultural relativism and religious difference. Its contention is that poetry has become central to such defenses. Relativistic thinking would seem to dispose against metaphysical belief; poetry, as a parallel claimant for cultural and expressive particularity, and as a sensuously non-empirical rhetorical medium, offers a way of muffling the dissonance that might otherwise arise from positioning difference and particularity as pretext for claims of universal truth. This study traces formal and rhetorical innovations from the Victorian crisis of faith forward to literary modernism, with a brief conclusion contemplating related developments in more contemporary poetry and religious thought in Britain.

This dissertation reconstructs the tradition of “democratic modernism” in the United States from its origins in the fertile avant-garde circles of the early 1910s through the maturation of American modernism as a cultural institution in the 1920s, the subsequent challenge to its authority by the radical social movements of the 1930s, and culminating in the ideological battles and profound geopolitical shift during and after World War II. It focuses on the overlapping intellectual careers of four literary figures – William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Burke, Archibald MacLeish, and Charles Olson – against the background of a wider cohort that included Marianne Moore, Malcolm Cowley, Edmund Wilson, F. O. Matthiessen, Melvin Tolson, Ruth Benedict, Edward Dahlberg, Dwight Macdonald, and Allen Ginsberg. The dissertation argues that debates over form and experience, strongly influenced by the writings of Ezra Pound and John Dewey, defined these central figures’ efforts to conceptualize a democratic subject grounded in aesthetic experience. For the democratic modernists, the poetic subject became a metaphor for a fully realized democratic subject, and “poetry” came to symbolize not just verse but also a heightened aesthetic orientation towards society that could serve as the basis for cultural reform and, for a time, revolutionary transformation. In reconstructing democratic modernism as a tradition, this dissertation aims to rethink the origins of the postwar counterculture as the political and philosophical heir of radical democracy in the interwar period. As the counterculture emerged in the shadow of the Cold War, leading figures such as Olson and Ginsberg helped shift the political ideals of the 1930s left towards aesthetic practice, preserving a cultural space for radical democracy between official anti-Communism and the aesthetic autonomy professed by intellectual elites. It concludes that the “true contrary” that Olson urged his fellow poets and artists in the late 1940s to seek through aesthetic practice had been there before him and continues to be a relevant stance within American society. This tradition proposes that through an active and critical inquiry into the conditions of one’s experience and the values that make them up, any person through receptivity, imagination, and poetic speech, broadly construed, can mediate the seeming oppositions in society, creating new forms of understanding, ritual, and symbolic experience.

Mak, Ka Yu. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 122-125). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / "Introduction: Don Juan: ""the most readable poem of its length""" --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter One: --- Parodying Authorial Presence in Don Juan and Orlando --- p.12 / Don Juan and Orlando as Literary Jokes --- p.13 / Don Juan and Orlando as Cross-Genre Literature --- p.15 / Common Literary Predecessors --- p.18 / The Byronic Biographer --- p.22 / "Fictional Life, Real Life" --- p.28 / Literary Tyrant and Liberal Equivocator --- p.33 / Their Ambiguous Human Portraits --- p.42 / The Parodies' Resolution --- p.51 / Chapter Chapter Two: --- The Modern Artist's Listless Monologue in Don Juan and The Waves --- p.57 / Don Juan as a Modern Man's Monologue --- p.58 / The Waves as Don Juan's Modem Counterpart --- p.63 / "The Wave's Narrative Frame and ""Dramatic Soliloquies""" --- p.66 / The Complication of the Narrative Perspective(s) --- p.70 / Byron's Young Man --- p.74 / Yet Byron never made tea as you do --- p.77 / The Making of Modem Artists --- p.82 / The Infant and the World --- p.86 / "The Wo/Man ""Outside the Thinker""" --- p.96 / The Death of Heroes --- p.103 / Social Alienation --- p.108 / Ennui and Boredom --- p.111 / Yet Life Goes On --- p.115 / Conclusion --- p.118 / Works Cited --- p.122

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 324-349).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Comparative Literature, December 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--Marshall University, 2003. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains iv, 80 p. including illustrations. Bibliography: p. 73-78. "Works cited": p. 67-72.

published_or_final_version / Literary and Cultural Studies / Master / Master of Arts

By comparing the novels of William Faulkner and Patrick White, this thesis reconsiders modernism's elitism and solipsism by revealing within them a critical interest in liberating minority perspective. Theoretical debates which continue to insist on modernism's inherent distance from the identity politics which front the postmodernist movement are overlooking modernism's deeply embedded evaluative mechanisms which work to expose and criticize the activity of psychic and social co-optation. Faulkner and White are both engaged in fictionally tracing the complexities of a failing patriarchy which can no longer substantiate its primary subjects — the white, upper class male. As representatives of modernism we can see that Faulkner and White, perhaps unwittingly, initiate the awareness that the 'failure' of their chosen subjects is in large measure due to processes of marginalization which both created the authoritative power structures within which they are constructed and helped serve to collapse them. The classic isolation of the modernist subject can be looked at not simply as an isolation predicated on endless self-referentiality, but rather on a desperate social outreaching for which he or she is not psychically equipped. By following the trajectory and perspective of specific novels and characters it becomes clear that it is precisely this handicap which clears the textual space for diversity of representation, just as it overturns the notion of modernism's functioning separatism. Chapter one concentrates on the double-edged representation of the female subject constructed as always-already 'guilty' within the psychologically, emotionally and physically repressive terms of the dominant male power structures within the context of Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun and White's A Fringe of Leaves. Chapter two investigates the psychological parameters of the morally disenfranchised modern subject whose disillusionment results from prejudicial social practices promoted by virulent racial anxiety as exemplified in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and White's Voss. The third and final chapter discusses Light in August and Riders in the Chariot with attention to modernism's own investigation of the exclusion of minority voices from collective social imagining. The thesis posits that literary modernism is interested less with reconciling its literary subjects within a self-contained totalizing project than it is with invoking new social and psychological paradigms that stress the necessity of external, not internal, represented multiplicity, and that what has been (mis)recognized as modernism's self-closure is, in fact, the key not only to its own continuing relevance, but to the contemporaneous literary injunction to let all voices be heard.