This thesis examines Ezra Pound's linguistic theory in relation to literary, philosophical and academic treatments of language in the modernist period. Pound is a central figure in the history of twentieth century literature, and his poetic career marks a sustained engagement with questions of how language can register thought, how it can transmit and communicate images, and, ultimately, how language is able to mediate between artists (or, indeed, language speakers as a whole) and the world. I read Pound's statements on language against the disciplinary history of linguistics, assessing the extent to which his positions are representative of his period, or, conversely, the ways in which they form part of an idiosyncratic worldview. My approach is broadly historical. I begin with Pound's educational background, and move chronologically through his career to the concluding passages of his Cantos. I investigate the extent to which Pound's critical writing engages with new departures taking place in linguistics in the late nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century. The scope of my investigation ranges from the legacy of nineteenth century philology to the approaches taken by William Dwight Whitney, Michel Bréal, and Ferdinand de Saussure, to name but a few, in focusing linguistic scholarship on synchronic study of language as function in the early twentieth century, to Franz Boas's and Edward Sapir's studies in the relationship between language and culture between 1910 and 1939. In situating Pound in relation to the history of linguistics as a discipline, I argue that his work asks some of the period's most apposite questions about language and culture, even if his conclusions differ from the dominant academic positions of the time.

This thesis describes how Eliot's concern for language and form finds roots in early twentieth century language philosophy. It also explores the way Eliot's early philosophical themes concerning language and meaning reemerge in his literary criticism and philosophical poetry during the 1920s and 1930s, and in his more explicitly philosophical Four Quartets. More significantly, this thesis historically elucidates Eliot's debt to the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Bertrand Russell, reframing his philosophy within the two poles of the "Linguistic Turn". By closely examining Eliot's unpublished and only recently published essays and notes, the thesis unearths probable connections between Eliot's own philosophical interests and his later poetics, redefining his legacy as a prototypical modernist poet, and suggesting a new framework of study for scholars and students of literary modernism.

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.

This study constitutes a single strand of a wider argument for a thorough-going reassessment of the place of fantasy literature within the canon. In particular, it aims to redress a marked lack of critical attention paid to the distinct movement towards fantastic modes of representation in the mid-twentieth century.

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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. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

In this thesis we have attempted to demonstrate that Noucentisme, as defined and propugnated by Eugeni d'Ors in the Glosari 1906-1910 is a continuation of the first Catalan Modernism. This theory has in great part been influenced by research on this subject compiled by the late Eduard Valentf, in his book, KL primer modernising Catalan y_ sus fundamen- tos ideol6gicos. We have, therefore, greatly relied on his generational and theological definition of Catalan Modernism, which we elaborate upon and sum up in the first two chapters. Owing to the extensive nature of Houcentisme, as of any literary movement, we have restricted our research to the work of its originator and theoretician, Eugeni d'Ors. In our thesis we have tried to point out that d'Ors reacted against the "fin de siecle" literary movements, which were a degenerate form of the original Catalan Modernist grouping, represented by L'Avenc.that was dispersed aflter 1893. In order to demonstrate that d'Ors absorbed, reorganized, and modified Catalan literary modernism, we have proceeded by closely examining the greater part of his work and ideology between 1900 and 1910, as well as most posterior writings concerning this period of. his development. In Chapter IV ye have studied his so-called modernist writings produced between 1900 and 1905, and collected in La muerte de Isidre Nonell seguida de otras arbitrariedades,'. From these we have determined the basic "modernist" ideas forwarded by d'Ors during those years. Between Chapter V and Chapter VII we have delineated the aesthetic and political ideology which d'Ors considers to be the basis of Noucentisme, and which was primitively contained in La muerte de Isidre Nonell seguida de otras arbitrariedades. In Chapter Till we have examined the direct relations between d'Ors theories and the modernist writers. The explicit formal relation between Modernism and Noucentisme is briefly discussed in the conclusion. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate

This thesis seeks to map out the development of literary modernism in the 1930s and 1980s People's Republic of China (PRC). Despite the long temporal halt, these two periods are innately and historically related to each other. Much as Chinese literary modernism was a literary legacy of Western modernism, its decades-long development provided it with the conditions for a second life. When it reemerged in the 1980s, it bore unique national characteristics that, in turn, enriched the realm of global modernism. In short, the distinct historical and national context of the twentieth century China dictated that Chinese literary modernism could not be a mechanical reproduction of its Western counterpart. The importation and translation of Western modernist creative and critical works, together with the modernist practices of modern Chinese intellectuals, contributed to the formation and rise of modernist literature in the 1930s, as well as its revival in the 1980s PRC. Structurally, this thesis identifies three localities of global modernism in the works and literary theory of Fei Ming, Mu Dan, and Wang Zengqi. It argues that these writers' modernist practices and distinct writing styles not only represented the characteristics of Chinese literary modernism, but also added diversities to modernist literature in the global context. Methodologically, I pair the Chinese modernists with their Western counterparts, including Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot. This comparison helps to find similarities between modernist works across time and place, and to identify the unique features of Chinese literary modernism. In practice, when studying the three modernists' first encounters with literary modernism in Republican China, as well as their respective experience in the PRC, I seek to (i) present three modes of initiation of literary modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century; (ii) trace the development of literary modernism both in the republican era and its revival in the PRC; (iii) show the process of Chinese literary modernism growing its distinct characteristics and evidence its second life. In short, Chinese modernists' participation in the building of global modernism and their contributions to the enrichment of literary modernism in the global context are two foci of my thesis. In the final analysis, this thesis engages research on Chinese literary postmodernism. No matter the literary movement's status in the PRC, then and now, how and why it differs from the development of postmodernism in Western literature and culture are valuable research questions.

Among slaughterhouses and suffragists—writers of the American Modernist movement were called to the creative task of reimagining boundaries between human and nonhuman while also extending this conversation onto the site of “New Women.” The threat to “civilized man” by “primal nonhuman animal” becomes tied up with the threat of an independent “wild” woman to a system which traditionally depends upon her domestication. Female animality in modernist texts thus emerges as a symbol of both masculine anxiety and feminine liberation. When women begin to challenge traditional institutions which would see her survive exclusively by contract to a male “keeper,” men become increasingly desperate to establish an apex social, economic, and political position. As such, female animality in these texts is designed to reinforce or resist standard constructs of human/nonhuman and masculine/feminine, yet both assert the feminine-animal-character as a hybrid commodity bred for patriarchal consumption. Despite the heteronormative compulsion to sketch woman as an elusive animal to be hunted (courtship), caged (marriage), and kept (children)—there is also an advantage in recognizing one’s place in such a “jungle,” as scholars have often described progressive-era America. By examining the intersection of animality and feminist theory within modernist literature, it becomes clear that the category of nonhuman animal is one historically manipulated through patriarchal systems to delegate women’s bodies as a site of oppression and subordination. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2021. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Although the term modernismo means many things to many people, it is generally agreed upon that as a literary period it gave a legitimacy to Spanish-American letters and that it was the coming of age of that continent's literature. In addition to modernista works themselves, this period has also generated an unprecedented body of criticism, both of which have been studied with a unique intensity in Latin American letters. However, in spite of this vast body of criticism, certain aspects of the modernista sensibility have never been addressed by critics. This study begins by questioning the absence of women writers of this generation (in spite of the fact that women were living and writing before, during, and after modernismo). The most celebrated female protagonist of the modernista novel, the femme fatale, contrary to her reputation as destroyer of men, frequently suffers a premature and often violent death at the hands of the male artist/protagonist/poet. While examining the turn-of-the-century ideal of womanhood, using both literary and extra-literary sources, this study postulates that because modernistas considered themselves to be a literary men's club, a fraternity, in their own words, the female writer may have purposely eschewed becoming a part of an aesthetic which destroyed women. Through the analysis of three representative modernista novels, El triunfo del ideal (Pedro César Domínici, Venezuela, 1901), Juana Lucero (Augusto d'Halmar, Chile, 1902), and La gloria de don Ramiro (Enrique Larreta, Argentina, 1908), parallels can be drawn between the modernista aesthetic and the pornographic one. While modernismo has been called the "effeminate" literature of a group of dandies, it is, in fact, profoundly misogynist. The rape, torture, murder and burning at the stake and otherwise objectification of the female protagonists tends to confirm this reading. The Latin American dichotomy of civilización/barbarie can also be expressed in the pornographic one of culture versus nature. Rather than a tragedy, the deaths of beautiful young women are perceived as a requisite for the artist's source of inspiration. If the death of a beautiful woman produces poetry, the turn-of-the-century female writer's reluctance to join this club becomes more understandable.