Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2003. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 218-226). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 318-329).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 68-70).

Over the course of his long career, architect Richard Neutra developed his notion of biorealism, a theory distinct from the modernist movement. Biorealism was no mere aesthetic approach; it applied the biological and psychological sciences to foster solutions for the built environment. Influences from Neutra’s formative years led him to believe that biorealistic design was the only way the human race would survive. He spent his life and career devoted to this single cause. This thesis explores Neutra’s definition of biorealism, using his many published works as evidence. It delves into Neutra’s formative years, looking at the influence of his brother, Wilhelm Neutra, the internist Schrötter von Kristelli, Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Wundt, and Hippocrates. Turning then to Neutra’s built works, it looks at the effects of biorealism on three of his commissions: the Lovell Health House, the VDL Research House, and the Kaufmann Desert House. Each house demonstrates biorealistic design in its own way. Finally, this work scrutinizes why the literature on Neutra has been virtually void of a discussion of biorealism, and why scholars have largely overlooked this important aspect of his work. A following chapter analyzes the current and past literature on Neutra as they relate to biorealism. / text

This thesis explores how constructs of gender and sexual identity in both psychoanalytic and fictional writing between the wars affect the fonn and structure of a text. The keen interest Bowen, Lehmann and Townsend Warner show in mental processes and patterns of sexual development, allows us to read across psychoanalytic and fictional discourses and rigid genres. While the psychoanalytic texts utilise elements of the Bildungsroman, the fictional narrative often enacts the pathologies of the story in an erotics of fonn. The intersection of scientific and narrative discourses coincides with a modernist debate about the limitations of conventional modes of representation in Edwardian and realist texts. The shifts between earlier modernist gestures of moving away from realist modes and structures and a later return to a more conciliatory approach of utilising them for modernist agendas, can be interpreted as a specific anxiety of origins. Shifting between modernist and realist modes of writing, and between nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century concepts of sexuality and gender produces peculiarly hybrid texts which negotiate this anxiety in various fonns of ambivalence and in-between-ness. Through the examination of six novels by Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen and Sylvia Townsend Warner, the thesis examines this anxiety in the difficulties psychoanalytic and fictional texts have in talking about the maternal, placing them in the context of socio-cultural ambiguities about femininity and motherhood during the interwar period. The thesis opens with a discussion of the possibilities and limitations of crossing between post-structuralist, psychoanalytic and historicist readings of modernist texts and provides a brief biographical framework for the three women writers in so far as it relates to gender, sexuality and the maternal. The following six chapters are divided into two parts grouping the first novels against the mature work in order to trace changes in the ways of representing sexuality, gender and maternal ambivalences through form, plot and structure. The first part discusses Rosamond Lehmann's Dusty Answer (1927), Elizabeth Bowen's The Hotel (1927) and Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Will owes (1926), while the second part examines The Weather in the Streets (1936), The Death of the Heart (1938) and Summer Will Show (1936) retaining the order of authors. The conclusion summarises the findings, contemplates its implications for the discourse on modernism and broaches the divergencies of Bowen's, Lehmann's and Warner's fictions in the 1940s.

This study examines the way Britten's operas and their audiences muddied the waters of the so-called "great divide" between modernism and mass culture, mediating between the aesthetics of difficulty and distinction on the one hand, and the pleasures and conventions associated with popular opera on the other. Using the fraught responses of early critics as a way in, I examine the precise musical and critical strategies through which the operas confounded a range of marked modernist binaries - between innovation and tradition, difficulty and sentimentality, modernism and mass culture. One of the main appeals of Britten's operas, I argue, lay in providing mid-century audiences with the chance to have their modernist cake and eat it, to revel in the putatively "cheap" pleasures of consonance, lyricism and theatrical spectacle even while enjoying the prestige that flows from rejecting them. / Music

The present thesis is about aspects of Wagnerism in the works of T.S. Eliot, in terms of both influence and affinities. The opening chapter offers a brief historical background to Eliot's familiarity with and relation to Wagner, as well as an account of the principal issues to be discussed in the following chapters. The two artists' volumes of criticism mostly show in theory how they work in practice. One key theme there is the maintenance of the idea of tradition and at the same time that of revolutionizing the arts (poetry, opera and drama). Eliot's interest in music, notably in the use of the Wagnerian leitmotif, is one of the highlights of this study. Then, Eliot's concern for myths: his 'mythical method' is discussed in a separate chapter for comparison with Wagner's way of handling myths in his operas. Other important topics feature drama, the Greeks and Shakespeare, and poetry, especially Dante's, the Romantics' and that of the French Symbolists. Certain themes common in both (like salvation and love) are tackled in more than one chapter because of their relevance throughout, but a selection of motifs is singled out in a separate chapter. The study also investigates Eliot's and Wagner's relation to art and life from religious (Buddhism and Christianity) and philosophical (Schopenhauer and Nietzsche) paints of view. Where relevant, some biographical data shedding light on their arts are touched upon--e.g. their personal (including marital) experiences and their anti-Semitism. The concluding chapter rounds off the subject by mainly offering some possible reasons for Eliot's obscure and neglected Wagnerism.

Framing the Sacred revisits the significance of ekphrasis, the verbal rendering of a visual representation, in modern and contemporary American poetics. Although a seemingly marginal strain of lyric poetry, ekphrasis is a literary crucible in which the problems of representation converge, catalyzing a unique process of enchantment and disenchantment. Through an examination of a number of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poems, I argue that this enchantment has bearing on how we envision the import of religion in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America and its literature. On account of its liminal status--a text that is "betwixt and between" the verbal and visual--ekphrasis does not need to meditate explicitly on spiritual, sacred, or religious objects to undermine and destabilize our definitions of such terms. Each chapter in Framing the Sacred examines the manifestation of a single trope of containment--the figure of the frame, the genre of still life, the genre of the self-portrait, and the acts of collection and curation--and discovers the various ways the ekphrastic work of William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Charles Wright, A.E. Stallings, and Jorie Graham constructs and deconstructs such tropes. The pattern that emerges from a number of dramatically different ekphrases reveals the generative value of loosening the frames through which we consider the sacred in the study of literature and the visual arts.

This dissertation examines the reaction of many post-WWII American authors against the modernist privileging of form. These authors predicate their response upon what I call "blissful realism," a term which reflects an unlikely conflation of the critical work of Roland Barthes and Georg Lukács. I argue that Saul Bellow and John Updike are exemplars of a larger post-war contingent, including Flannery O'Conner, Bernard Malamud, Joyce Carol Oates, and John Cheever, to name a few, who use the liminal space between the waning of modernism and a burgeoning postmodern sensibility to complicate and critique modernist formalism while exploring (and often presciently critiquing) the nascent ontological inclinations of postmodernism. The characters within their novels endeavor to declare and maintain their autonomy by, through, and against their contact with a cold reality and defining ideological structures. This tension is mirrored in the aesthetic project of the authors as they work by, through, and against modernist strictures. This dissertation also offers a comparison between Bellow and Updike and the work of Ralph Ellison and Vladimir Nabokov in an effort to distinguish and delineate blissful realism from "late modernism." The concluding chapter posits that recent "post-postmodern" work draws heavily on its blissful realist predecessors. Many contemporary authors' concerns with subjective autonomy, authenticity, and notions of transcendence, in spite of postmodern declarations to the contrary, offer different sensibilities and political possibilities that turn away from irony, play, and image toward agency, meaning, and morality.

This dissertation is concerned with the gendered discourse of nation and home where women carry the symbolic duty of holders of a pure, uncontaminated culture passively confined to the domestic space. I consider two commonplace tropes, the woman-as-nation metaphor and the Victorian angel in the house, both of which convey a limited view of women's agency and her significance in simultaneously resisting and ratifying patriarchal visions of nation and gender. The novels in this study document various phases of nation building under periods of colonialism and postcolonialism, and each features the plight of women affected by the realities of sham democracies and political instability. My analysis rests on the claim that postcolonial authors continue the inquiries into the ironic and futile foundations on which nation and identity is built which define modernist despair. I assert the value in understanding how women respond to disillusionment across cultures in an attempt to recover the experience of women and her political consciousness, granting a relevance to the role women play in textual deliberations on political skepticism and political idealism often reserved for male actors.