Thesis advisor: Marjorie Howes / Networking Modernist Institutions: Technologies of Literature in Yeats, Joyce, Gissing, and Woolf explores how authors, readers, and books were linked through complex institutions that produced, distributed, organized, and manipulated literary works. More specifically, I argue that often-overlooked literary systems, such as the private press industry, postal service, and libraries, governed the interaction between books and people. In doing so, I look first to W. B. Yeats and the bookmaking traditions that shaped his notion of a sacred book of literature. By leveraging private press networks, I suggest, Yeats attempted to reimagine the book as a sacred object capable of challenging a commercialized and commodified literary world and enacting a poetic and national tradition distinct from the dominant patterns of literary production in the early twentieth century. I then trace the physical movement of texts through a study of the postal service, arguing that James Joyce reveals the various relays, diversions, destructions, and interventions associated with the movement of mail in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), and more importantly, that Joyce’s formal experiment emanates from these everyday experiences of the mail, as books, printed and delivered, settling on the shelves of private and public institutions. The fiction of George Gissing gives insight into the uses of such spaces on the eve of modernism. I argue that Gissing’s chronicle of libraries and their uses in the late nineteenth century provides insight into how modernist authors’ ambivalence about the library and its social consequences. Finally, I turn to the fiction of Virginia Woolf, revealing some of the ways books existed as objects in the early twentieth century. As a printer, publisher, binder, reader, and writer, Woolf recognized books as everyday objects that demanded her care and attention. In her fiction, she imagines the ways in which books simultaneously build tangible barriers and create modes of intimacy. Consequently, she inscribes a modernist sense of the book that simultaneously unites its readers ideologically while keeping them physically at a distance. By extending recent studies of modernism’s response to the shifting media ecology of its day and the importance of historical readings of the bibliographical context of modernist works, I shed light on literary representations of these institutional spaces and their influence on modernist forms. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

This dissertation provides the first critical account of modernism as a constitutional culture. I explore how key Anglophone modernists responded to the emergence of federal governance as a national norm and international ideal, with particular focus on the movement for British imperial federation and the forms of postcolonial governance it influenced during the twentieth century. Intervening in recent methodological debates over the social effects of literary form, I develop an interdisciplinary analysis of literature's relationship to informal constitutional change and write literary history as alternative constitutional history. Through close reading and original historical and archival research, I show how writers incorporated federalism's logic of plural perspectives and distributed sovereignty while also registering unacknowledged forms of racial apartheid, or what Edward Kamau Brathwaite calls “negative federation.” By identifying modernist fiction’s critical relationship to liberal federalism, I argue that modernism’s distinctive formal disruptions mediated the changing constitutional form of states across the Anglophone world. My introduction surveys the Anglo-American discourse of federation and defines the study’s central concepts of racial capitalism, modernist formal decadence, and informal constitutional change. Chapter one explores ways in which Oscar Wilde's study of political philosophy and his 1882 visit to the southern United States influenced his critical views on imperial federation and his development of the gothic Bildungsroman as a means of portraying metropolitan constitutional corruption. Chapter two places Virginia Woolf's novels on the timeline of constitutional reforms that prolonged British rule in India, demonstrating that her characters' identity crises and her invention of a style of modernist national biography reflected attempts to redefine the Empire as a quasi-federal Commonwealth. Chapter three analyzes the historical and romance elements in William Faulkner’s fiction, arguing that his attention to liberal federalism’s economic foundations produces a collection of constitutional apocrypha that disrupts the perspectives and assumptions of white supremacy. The conclusion sketches liberal federalism’s postcolonial trajectories through case studies of Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, Claude McKay, Ralph Ellison, and Salman Rushdie. The narratives I examine indicate modernist fiction’s ability to amplify what modern political theory refers to as “constituent power”: the disruptive influence of subjects who have been excluded from the liberal state’s formally constituted power.

Thesis advisor: Frances Restuccia / What qualifies a work as distinctly modernist or postmodernist? Moving beyond the idea that modernism and postmodernism are primarily distinguishable on a temporal basis, D’Errico instead argues that the key difference between these two movements lies on a theoretical level. Grounded in a framework of contemporary theory put forth by Žižek, Lacan, Deleuze, and Badiou, D’Errico proposes that the Real-Symbolic relation manifests differently in modernist and postmodernist works; the structural paradigms of the torus and rhizome are helpful to illuminate this fundamental theoretical difference. Expanding on Žižek’s definitions of modernism and postmodernism (from Looking Awry ), D’Errico posits that a torus-shaped Real-Symbolic relation accords with modernism and that a rhizomatic Real-Symbolic relation accords with postmodernism. This interdisciplinary analysis of twentieth-century art mainly focuses on literature, but also invokes poetry, visual art, theatre, and film. Overall, D’Errico dissects the theoretical structures of The Sun Also Rises, Waiting for Godot, The Trial, White Noise, and Caché to qualify the alignment of each with either the modernist or postmodernist canon. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: English.

The rapid expansion of the mass press in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century France, along with the concurrent rise of an information-driven style of journalism known as reportage, coincided with a shift in literary portrayals of the press. Early to mid-nineteenth-century novels of journalism such as Balzac’s Illusions perdues consistently depict the world of journalism in intensely hostile tones, as do many later novels and works of poetry, at times with even greater vitriol. By contrast, from Baudelaire onwards, some French authors including Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and Proust took a more ambivalent approach to the press, pivoting between antipathy and enthusiasm for what became a truly massified and ubiquitous cultural phenomenon during their lifetimes. Their equivocal portrayals of the press in poetry and prose fiction epitomize their broader ambivalence towards modernity itself – a trait that distinguishes these modernist authors from their avant-garde contemporaries, who advocated a radical break with tradition and tended to be more consistently hostile or enthusiastic towards journalism. The thematic prominence of journalism in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century French literature reflects its ongoing role as what Marie-Ève Thérenty calls “the laboratory of literature,” whereby authors published poetry and prose fiction in the mass press, for which they also wrote opinion columns, criticism, and other forms of journalism that they then frequently recycled in their literary works. Belying the account of literature’s autonomization found in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who argues that literature and the mass press had grown apart by the end of the nineteenth century, modernist poetry and prose fiction continued to appear in large-circulation, commercially oriented newspapers and magazines into the twentieth century. From the 1880s onwards, the growth of the mass press was paralleled by the emergence of a wave of little magazines known as petites revues that became the primary literary laboratory of literary modernism. These petites revues had many material links to the mass press. Authors often wrote simultaneously for both newspapers and petites revues. Many of the latter courted publicity in the former, even as they denounced those very same publications as the antithesis of true literature. And petites revues published many pieces of reportage – a style of journalism associated with the mass press. These connections to the mass press left their mark on the literary works published in petites revues, which often draw on newspaper articles and confront topical journalistic subjects. Moreover, several petites revues evolved into major publishing houses, including Éditions Gallimard, whose extensive commercial interactions with the mass press further shaped the works they published as modernist authors themselves became intimately involved in publicizing their books. Early to mid-nineteenth-century authors consistently avoid confronting their debts to journalism in their literary works. They thunder against the press but cannot live without it. Anti-journalistic thunder underlain by various kinds of dependence on the press remains a dominant feature of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century French literature and cultural criticism. By contrast, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and Proust as well as Gide and Péguy all allude to the ambiguous position of journalism within their prose poetry, poetry, novels, and essays. These authors at once draw on journalism in their literary works and reflect on the significance of their journalistic borrowings within those works themselves. The self-conscious modernist spirit of their writing thus allows them, unlike their precursors and most of their contemporaries, to finally come to terms with the challenge posed by the mass press to literary creation.

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This thesis concerns the Southern family in the work of William Faulkner, specifically The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses.

This thesis focuses on swedish modernist painter Sigrid Hjertén. The purpose of the thesis was to research how Hjerténs art and craftsmanship was depicted in daily newspapers from the year 1910 to 1940. The method and theory was mainly critical discourse analysis for the research of the articles in daily newspapers for the set time. The analysis is divided in three parts, one for each decade with an introductory part where a short analysis of how Hjertén was depicted in a variation of litterature. In the discussion the results from the analysis is presented and discussed, and different research paths are presented. The result from the analysis is that the general depiction of Hjerténs craftsmanship in daily newspapers from 1910 to 1940 was positive, with emphasis on the 1930’s decade. The analysis portrays partial inequality between different social groups.

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In this dissertation, I argue that infrastructural development, with its technological promises but widening geographic disparities and social and environmental consequences, informs both the narrative content and aesthetic forms of modernist and contemporary Anglophone fiction. Despite its prevalent material forms—roads, rails, pipes, and wires—infrastructure poses particular formal and narrative problems, often receding into the background as mere setting. To address how literary fiction theorizes the experience of infrastructure requires reading “infrastructurally”: that is, paying attention to the seemingly mundane interactions between characters and their built environments. The writers central to this project—James Joyce, William Faulkner, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Mohsin Hamid—take up the representational challenges posed by infrastructure by bringing transit networks, sanitation systems, and electrical grids and the histories of their development and use into the foreground. These writers call attention to the political dimensions of built environments, revealing the ways infrastructures produce, reinforce, and perpetuate racial and socioeconomic fault lines. They also attempt to formalize the material relations of power inscribed by and within infrastructure; the novel itself becomes an imaginary counterpart to the technologies of infrastructure, a form that shapes and constrains what types of social action and affiliation are possible.