<p>Like several of her female peers, Marie Under (1883 - 1980) has been denied the international acclaim she deserves. The earliest text on Marie Under in swedish told of her greatness, but in classical fallic maner reduced her poetic production by marking it with pathological symtoms. Though latter texts by author Enel Melberg have put a feminist perspective on Unders work, the theoretical complexity of her poetic images and language, and its polemic relation to contemporary literary currents, has yet to be recognised. This study will seek to portrait Marie Under and her poetry in this new light.</p><p>The study moves from an installation of Marie Under in the modern discourse she so far has been estranged from, to an analysis of her earlier works (in the 1910’s and 1920’s). Lou Andreas-Salomés theory, characteristic of the period, will found Under’s debut in the discourse of Eros and the production of female subjectivity. Through the theory of Luce Irigaray I will try to see how this force towards a female subjectivity is inverted, to call into question the souvereignity of the (male) subject. That is, to see in the face of modernism not only the rise of female subjectivity but its relativization and multifaced constitution. Irigaray’s poststructuralistic theorizations leads to the postmodern philosophy/communication theory of Jean Baudrillard. With his hyperreal notion of imploded distances between subject and object, decomposition of causality and meaning I take on a search for a voice that surpasses the subject, a voice of simulacra in Marie Under’s poetry from early 20’s.</p><p>A significant portion of the study is engaged in Marie Under’s relationship to her mother tongue. Under wrote poetry in early years but not until her late teens in the language of her own country, estonian - mostly due to the russian occupation. From 1918, when independence was declared, estonian culture blossomed, and the estonian language was renewed. Marie Under’s poetry had a great deal in this linguistic regeneration, and I will sum up this poetic/linguistic practice in the chiasm: to seek language through poetry and the poetry in this language. This dialectic approach to Under’s poetry is an essential part of this study.</p>

This dissertation presents an argument for the ethical value of a reader's inability to fully comprehend works by Jorge Luis Borges, G.K. Chesterton, William Faulkner, and Brian O'Nolan (aka Flann O'Brien). Such texts demand creative engagement by the reader which could be described as a necessary betrayal of the text. Viewed in the context of the so-called "ethical turn" in literary theory, the revaluation of infidelity accomplished by such unfaithful reading can foster a greater openness toward the unknown, and ultimately unknowable, other. Similarly, by juxtaposing the work of Faulkner, a canonical modernist writer, with more nontraditional writers such as Chesterton and O'Nolan, I mean to betray the sort of limitations created by employing such categorical terms as "modernism" itself. In an introductory chapter, I use the work of ethical theorist Emmanuel Levinas, as well as the socio-political theory of Zygmunt Bauman and Ernesto Laclau, to develop a theoretical framework for the project, taking some examples from the writings of Borges. My chapter on Chesterton presents "The Man Who Was Thursday" as a site of multiple betrayals which can awaken the reader to the instability of any fixed notion of identity. I conclude the chapter with a specific show of infidelity in the 1924 Russian adaptation of Chesterton's novel for the Kamerny theater in Moscow, an intentional "misreading" that reveals aspects of the work glossed over by years of more ostensibly faithful interpretations. My third chapter features a sustained reflection on the ethics of reading Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying," a work which stubbornly "keeps its secret," to use Derrida's phrasing. Since any reading of this story must be, on a certain level, a betrayal, I discuss the possibilities opened up by resisting the tendency to fix the meaning of such an undecidable work. In my final chapter, I consider the work of O'Nolan as a testimony to the constitutive power of betrayal. In his deconstruction of authorial presence, his Judas-like betrayal of James Joyce, and his provocative 1943 "translation" onto the Dublin stage of the Capek brothers' "Insect Play," O'Nolan is always unfaithful to his object; however, the revaluation of infidelity posited by this dissertation suggests that his traitorous stance could paradoxically do more justice to the objects of his focus than would a more ostensibly faithful approach.

This work explores a fascinating and disturbing literary trope found in select German Expressionist prose in the years 1910-1920. Key Expressionist-era authors, including Georg Heym, Robert Musil, Egmont Colerus and Franz Kafka employed Antarctic and ice metaphors in their poetry and prose to exemplify inner feelings of displacement resulting from modernity. Expressionist discontent, as well as the “Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration” that occurred from 1895 to 1922, led to the creation of polar dystopias in some literature. These dystopias explored abstract interpretations of the South Pole, not as a place of excitement and adventure, but rather as a journey into philosophical inner ice in the era of Modernism. Heym, Musil and Colerus did not invent the disturbing Antarctic allegory, but rather returned to an established literary tradition in a time of polar “pulp” fiction. This thesis first examines the South Pole as a place of emptying, shown in Georg Heym's 1911 fragment “Das Tagebuch Shakletons” (“Shakleton's Diaries”). In other works, such as Heym's 1911 novella “Die Südpolfahrer” (“Travelers to the South Pole”), the South Pole is portrayed as a blank slate. Two Austrian works show the idea of the South Pole as a refuge: Robert Musil’s 1911 Das Land über den Südpol (“The Land over the South Pole”) and Egmont Colerus’ 1915 novel Antarktis. These works exemplify and interpret the modern soul’s tepid “temperature,” something sharply criticized by Expressionists. These authors and poets longed to see an improved world and expressed discontent by portraying imperialist “heroes” of their time as mere specks lost in the sea of modernity. In the literature of Heym, Musil, Colerus and Kafka, a bleak Antarctic world mirrors the authors’ views on their “dying” society and the European “symptom” that resulted in suffocating mediocrity. Self-fulfillment becomes a static or moving point on the horizon that will never be realized by either the explorer or the freezing bourgeois soul.

Portant sur luvre littéraire dE.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822), notamment sur les récits « Das Fräulein von Scuderi » et « Doge und Dogaresse » qui sont traités comme des paradigmes de luvre, le travail sest proposé comme objectif de mettre en évidence le fonctionnement intertextuel des ouvrages de cet auteur. En effet, bien quelle ait eu ses prédécesseurs en ce qui concerne lintertextualité chez Hoffmann, létude met au jour tout un réseau de références cachées (c.-à-d. non marquées) à dautres uvres qui, jusquà présent, sont passées inaperçues, entre autres : - des recours systématiques à dautres textes littéraires (en premier lieu aux uvres de Heinrich von Kleist et de Ludwig Tieck, et, à part cela, à des écrivains aussi divers que Boccace, Molière, M.G. Lewis ou Novalis) ; - des renvois précis et bien élaborés à la Bible et à la mythologie de lAntiquité ; - des citations de sources historiques ; - des recours à la peinture (entre autres Rubens, Canaletto, Hogarth, Goya, C.W. Kolbe) et à la sculpture (Michel-Ange), intégrant des éléments spécifiques de ces uvres en tant que composants narratifs au sein des récits ; - des références à lopéra (Mozart : « Don Giovanni » et « Die Entführung aus dem Serail » [« LEnlèvement au sérail »]) ou à la Commedia dellarte ; - des indices poétologiques (y compris des renvois aux poétiques dAristote ou de Boileau) inscrits dans luvre même tel un commentaire inhérent au texte ; - des références extratextuelles, c.-à-d. des allusions aux développements politiques et sociaux de lépoque scrupuleusement cachées, dépassant le domaine des artéfacts et qui, en quelque sorte, livrent des explications extérieures aux phénomènes textuels observés, tout en révélant des aspects dune critique sociale allusive et sous-entendue (le souverain, par exemple, y est nié en tant que centre positif dun État absolu et en tant que représentant de Dieu sur terre) sans jamais trouver, cependant, une issue de lambiguïté élémentaire qui pénètre luvre même jusquau fond de la sphère sociopolitique. La fonction principale de ces éléments consiste dans ce que cette étude décrit comme « lautoréflexion » de luvre même, c.-à-d. dans une réflexion de ses antécédents littéraires ou artistiques, de sa propre place dans lhistoire littéraire par le biais dune citation dautres uvres, celles-ci étant reflétées comme apparentées ou comme opposées. Ainsi, la thèse poursuit le chemin déjà indiqué par R. Homann (Munich 1986) qui, en partant des drames de Lessing et, surtout, de Kleist, avait démontré détonnants aspects dune autoréflexion de la littérature chez ces deux auteurs (et avait postulé le même caractère autoréflexif pour les successeurs dans le domaine de la littérature qualifiée par elle de littérature « esthétique ») parmi lesquels on peut également, daprès les résultats du présent travail, bel et bien ranger Hoffmann qui, dans sa propre uvre, livre dune manière bien précise la suite logique, conséquente et radicale du modèle établi par ses antécédents littéraires. Lidée centrale du concept de lautoréflexion de la littérature est que, après les résultats bouleversants des Lumières ainsi quen réaction contre lesthétique hégélienne du « beau » et en relation avec la proclamation de la « fin de lart », luvre « esthétique » (par opposition à luvre « naïve ») ne peut plus continuer à représenter simplement le monde, mais, en même temps, elle est dorénavant forcée à se représenter elle-même. Cest à cause de la disparition du narrateur omniscient qui était le garant dune histoire unifiée et à cause de la mise en question de la narrabilité dun monde qui est considéré comme étant devenu absurde que, dans les textes de certains auteurs, la littérature commence à parler delle-même. Par conséquent, les textes dHoffmann cette recherche sefforce bien de le démontrer sont lisibles à la fois comme des narrations dune histoire et, sur un deuxième plan « esthétique » ou « autoréflexif », comme des narrations de la narration, c.-à-d. comme des textes qui traitent implicitement de lacte décrire, qui contiennent leurs propres commentaires, qui comportent une sorte dhistoire littéraire inhérente. Cest ce plan autoréflexif que cette étude essaie de déchiffrer, et cest dans ce contexte que les récits dHoffmann témoignent dune modernité avant la lettre. Signes incontestables dune intrusion du « dehors » dans un intérieur dont on avait pensé quil était protégé et à labri des menaces de la multiplicité, symptômes dune contamination du « moi » par les puissances sous-jacentes de « lautre » devenues inévitables, les recours autoréflexifs à dautres uvres témoignent dune crise didentité fondamentale et bouleversante, dune identité déchirée de luvre dart ainsi que de sa propre mise en cause de son caractère unique. Au bout dune analyse de ces aspects à la fois, si lon veut, intertextuels et intermédiatiques à laquelle la thèse sest engagée, elle a, finalement, découvert un lien plus étroit et plus profond entre lautoréflexivité de luvre dune part et, dautre part, la disparition dune vérité absolue au milieu de ces uvres, c.-à-d. la « perte du centre » qui constitue le deuxième grand volet de létude. En effet, au cours des analyses, létude sest retrouvée face à des irrégularités troublantes dans les profondeurs incommensurables au-dessous de la surface saine des textes, à des ruptures narratives et à des contradictions immanentes qui sont cachées à lintérieur des récits et que la thèse sest, dès lors, efforcée de mettre en évidence. Cest aussi par ces fractures internes que les textes dHoffmann suivent les uvres de Kleist au-delà des sentiers battus de la narration traditionnelle ou « naïve », uvres qui sont, elles-mêmes, marquées de ruptures fondamentales. Cest par ces fractures internes, également, que les récits dHoffmann parlent de la disparition dun Dieu unifiant dans un univers brisé, dénué de sens, voire totalement absurde et, à cet égard, décidément « kafkaïen » bien avant la lettre, tandis que les références à « lautre » tournent autour dun centre vide, sans jamais pouvoir remplir la place laissée libre par la foi perdue. Et cest par ces fractures internes, finalement, que les textes témoignent dune négation des idées telles que les romantiques (parmi lesquels on a bien trop souvent rangé Hoffmann) les postulaient, ainsi que dune « décentralisation » du « moi » et du « monde » dans une uvre qui, à travers limage de la chute de lhomme, semble être tombée dans lobscurité, poussée loin au-delà des lumières dune clarté divine. Cette « perte du centre » décrite dans la thèse finit par révéler des correspondances surprenantes dans le domaine littéraire avec ce que H. Sedlmayr, dans son travail sur la peinture et les arts plastiques des 19e et 20e siècles (Salzbourg/Vienne 1948), a appelé la « perte du milieu », terme par lequel il désigne la disparition catastrophique et (à ses yeux) regrettable dun Dieu qui fut, un jour, au centre naturel de lart et du monde spirituel, mais qui, depuis lapparition de ce que Sedlmayr décrit comme un tournant historique autour de la Révolution Française, nest plus saisissable que par les signes de son absence. Mais bien que la thèse cherche à établir des liens entre les phénomènes textuels observés dune part et des événements ou changements historiques dautre part et notamment à trouver des explications à ces phénomènes dans ce quelle décrit comme la « révolution triple » (industrielle, métaphysique, sociopolitique) entrant en scène autour des années 1800 , elle aboutit, finalement, au diagnostic dune « crise de sens » plus vaste, plus complexe et plus profonde qui se manifeste dans les uvres dE.T.A. Hoffmann et qui paraît continuer de semparer de lhistoire de lhomme jusquà nos jours.

The subject of this dissertation is the Finland-Swedish author Gunnar Björling (1887-1960) and his journey towards Modernism. The principle thesis of this dissertation, the idea that Björling’s distinctive language cannot be understood without an underlying modernistic current, is outlined in Chapter I. It also discusses the idea that Modernism cannot be reduced to a matter of style, but encompasses particular values, ideological stances and practical matters, such as the forming of alliances, writing manifestos and publishing journals. Chapter II examines how and why Björling came to be regarded as a modernist. A strongly contributing factor was Björling’s language, which from the very first violated prevailing ideas on acceptable forms of expression. The fact that he published his first book through the modernist publishing firm Daimon, and contributed to its journal Ultra, further confirmed his modernistic placing. Chapter III focuses on Björling’s unpublished juvenilia from the 1910’s. The young Björling wrote traditional rhyming verse but was also influenced by writings of a more symbolistic and modern character. The chapter concludes with a study of bizarrerierna, Björling’s dream notes, originally written during the 1910’s but first published in 1928. With their bold enjambments and highly compressed form, these notes came to influence the continued development of his lyrical imagery. Chapter IV deals with his debut Vilande dag (Resting day) (1922) and its symbolistically coloured language problematic. Björling struggled to find a language that would convey his experience of the limitlessness of being, a language striving to transcend words, leaving space for silence. This struggle for the right words continues in the later Korset och löftet (The cross and the promise) (1925) and Chapter V demonstrates how this is connected with the quest for God. In the wake of German Expressionism and Dadaism, Björling adopts a more disjointed syntax and a bolder and more dissonant lyrical imagery. There also occurs a thematic expansion, giving greater prominence to the daily life of the metropolis, a life transformed by media. In accordance with modernistic patterns, Björling chose to end his book with a theoretical epilogue, which is a distinctive collation of life philosophy, anti-clericalism, passionate religiousness, moral-philosophical discussions and aesthetic expositions.

The doctoral thesis sets out to describe and analyse how the mid-twentieth century Norwegian design community domesticated ideologies partly inherited from the traditional applied art movement (brukskunstbevegelsen), partly imported from various international currents of the so-called “modern movement”, in their co-construction of industrial design culture. The empirical studies follow two paths/levels; the ideology/propaganda debated in and mediated through the design magazine Bonytt, and the strategies/materiality/products developed by the ceramics/earthenware/porcelain manufacturer Figgjo. As such, the thesis is a cultural history of industrial design, where design (as) culture is seen as a sort of dialectic or discourse between ideology and practice. This often uneasy relation between ideology and practice is the leitmotif of the study. The concept of domestication, along with other theoretical frameworks and methodological tools appropriated from STS, becomes valuable when studying this process by following the actors in their construction, negotiation and mediation of these ideologies as played out in their main debate forum, the design magazine Bonytt. However, the domestication of industrial design culture in Norway does not end with the writings of campaigning designers, enthusiastic journalists, ardent academics and organization men. The mediations between ideology and practice is also traced in a domestication perspective. As such, the manufacturing industry - here represented by the ceramic tableware manufacturer Figgjo - represents a second site of domestication, where the ideologies undergo new negotiations and transformations in meeting other users, requirements and circumstances.

No description available.

Den befriade sången. Stina Aronsons berättarkonst Liberated song. Stina Aronson’s narrative art Abstract This thesis discusses the narrative art of the Swedish author Stina Aronson (1892-1956) with special emphasis on Hitom himlen (“This Side of Heaven”) from 1946. This work forms the subject of the first part, with formal aspects like narrator construction, composition and genre as the starting-point. These aspects, and the originality with which they are treated by Aronson, are put in relation to modernist æstheticism. In the next step the modernist approach is linked to a discussion of modernity. The basis of this thematic analysis consists of entities like language, time, faith and individuality, all of which play an important part in Aronson’s writing. The thematization of individual freedom versus determinism makes the work a counterpart to existentialism, the current philosophy of the time. What becomes especially apparent is a striking ambivalence towards modernity, but also towards a more traditional, almost pre-modern, attitude to life prevailing in the severe Læstadianist village community described. This interpretation deviates from the idea of pure civilization criticism and of the near idealization of the world described, which has dominated earlier analyses of the Aronson’s work. Gender issues, too, play an important part in the thesis, especially in the section analyzing the main characters and the attitudes they represent. The two central characters of the text are women and they are fundamentally different. The criticism of the village community and the destructive effects on the individual of the austere faith is most evident in the portrait of Mira, one of the women. She emerges as a more modern character than the others, driven by an urge to break free and make her own destiny, a project which, however, fails completely. There are several reasons for this, but the decisive factor is that as a woman she is more strictly bound by conventions and norms in the surrounding environment and interpretative community. Part II discusses the author’s other works published in book form. The textual forms and their possible relation to modernism are discussed to some extent, but above all the same issues concerning modernity and gender are tested as outlined in the first part. Ambivalence vis-à-vis the modern is also noticeable in the early works, albeit in a less sophisticated way. The problematization of gender roles is a marginal but essential element in these works, most evident in those produced around 1930 and gradually becoming more and more complex. What is striking is the recurrent existence of gender-transcending characters. Aronson’s characters are depicted over and over again as untypical of their sex, which altogether conveys the image of a world where there is something fundamentally wrong with expectations. In the collected works of Aronson these themes remained constant throughout the great variation in genre, form and contents ever since the début in 1921 to her last work in 1952: opposition against all forms of normalizing categories prescribing how people should believe, communicate, experience time and function as man or woman.

<p>This study examines Irish modernist literature in order to complicate established critical modes which read modernist movements as reflective of distinctly vernacular or cosmopolitan aesthetic and political commitments. I argue that neither recent models of vernacular modernism nor older models of cosmopolitan modernism entirely account for the stylistic innovations and formal experiments of modernist literature. Instead, modernist writers negotiate a field of tension between the poles of cosmopolitan and vernacular, and demonstrate that their works represent forms of identity that accommodate elements of both national belonging and cosmopolitan individualism. </p><p>Examining works by four authors - William Butler Yeats, Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett, and Raymond Queneau - this project argues that modernist literature represents a set of idiosyncratic, dynamic efforts to negotiate the tensions between the limits of the nation-state system and a variety of emerging transnational modes of cultural exchange in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The nature of modernist writers' efforts to negotiate a period of passage between national and global systems of exchange is, I think, especially visible in the case of Irish modernism. Ireland's transition from a part of the United Kingdom to an independent nation-state in the interwar period makes that nation's literature an exemplary case for my argument, as does the critical importance of Irish writing in the modernist canon. </p><p>By examining these and other critical and historical perspectives alongside a sampling of plays, novels, short stories, and memoirs, this study makes the case that modernist literary aesthetics spring from writers' efforts to make sense of competing desires for national belonging and cosmopolitan autonomy. Focusing on works that cross categorical boundaries between Irish and cosmopolitan modernism, this study traces the ways in which modernist aesthetics construct dynamic, adaptive relationships between the global and the national, and suggest that we can imagine them as something other than static, exclusive alternatives.</p> / Dissertation

Willa Cather's 1913 novel, O Pioneers! concludes with an unexpected moment of extreme violence as two young lovers, Emil Bergson and Marie Shabata, are murdered by Marie's husband in a mulberry orchard. Cather's novel is almost wholly devoted to the psychological interior of the protagonist, Alexandra Bergson, thereby rendering this violent interruption more dynamic as it essentially undercuts the generally lulling interiority of the narration. My interest here is to examine this strange moment of violence and Alexandra's subsequent forgiveness of Frank for the murder of her brother and his own wife through the theoretical paradigms of René Girard, Jacques Derrida, and Slavoj Žižek.