Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Department of Music, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--York University, 2000. Graduate Programme in English. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 372-387). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ67899.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 1973-1092). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Although presenting the concept of love in a form not accepted by societal conventions does indeed estrange the conception of love in Nabakov's Lolita, it does nothing to explain how readers accept Humbert's passion, without immediately and consistently disregarding it as lewd and inappropriate. I will argue that Nabakov estranges the romantic conceptions not by defamiliarizing the occasion of love (i.e. by making the romance a manifestation of pedophilia), but rather by defamiliarizing and complicating the acts of both reading and interpreting. First, I will make associations between the Romantics and Nabokov, regarding their shared desire to renew the habitual acts of both perceiving and interpreting human life, which they accomplish through methods of isolating the emotions effected by acts--not the acts themselves. After which, I will examine the theories of phenomenology and externalist philosophy to cement the concepts of anticipation and hermeneutics, starting in general and then narrowing to the act of reading. In following, I will demonstrate how Nabokov agitates this anticipation for readers, making the very act of reading Lolita a new experience, in which Romantic themes do not appear cliché and outdated. On the whole, I will maintain that it is this disruption in interpretation that absolves Humbert's ills, allowing Lolita to maintain its status as one of the greatest love stories of the twentieth century.

This thesis studies Oscar Wilde’s encounter with the idea of China in late nineteenth century Britain. After Marcartney’s embassy to the Qing court and the two Opium Wars, “China” became an increasingly negative idea in nineteenth century Britain. Wilde’s sympathy with China under such historical circumstances induces reconsiderations of the relationship among aestheticism, orientalism, and modernism. The story of how Wilde utilized and appropriated Chinese culture is at the same time a story about how orientalism was used by British aestheticism to protest against the late Victorian middle-class ideology and invent the politics of modernist aesthetics. This thesis contributes to the study of the idea of China in nineteenth century Britain in general and to the scholarship on Oscar Wilde, aestheticism and modernism in particular. Wilde’s reading of Chuang Tzu and his appreciation of the anti-realist Chinese aesthetic and visual power embodied in patterned blue and white china helped him articulate his aestheticism. The thesis examines Chinese influence on his aesthetic, social and political ideas against British middle-class ideology. The historical contexts of Wilde’s encounter with Chinese philosophy and material culture are also scrutinized to show that China, as an exotic-familiar antithesis to British bourgeois ideology, became a critical point of reference for Wilde to launch his trenchant criticism of Western society. Works and collections by other proponents of British aestheticism, such as James McNeill Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, are also included to further demonstrate China’s role in the British Aesthetic Movement. The thesis is based on three interrelated central arguments: first, British aestheticism was a reaction to the social problems and consumer culture in late Victorian Britain, and it aims to aestheticize not only art, but also life and society; second, the nineteenth-century British construction of China, especially in the translation and deciphering of Chuang Tzu in early British sinology in Chapter one, and in Chapter Two, blue and white china’s visual anti-realism widely discussed and condemned in the late Victorian mass media, crucially participated in Wilde’s theory of art and British aestheticism in general; third, Wilde’s aestheticism, by incorporating Chinese thought and aesthetics, had experimented with modernist aesthetics before it came to be known as such. Although Wilde and other British aesthetes were complicit in the orientalist construction of China when placing China and the West into a binary position, they revised the nineteenth-century British imperial discourse that subjugated and denigrated the Orient and invested in the kind of Sino-British communication advocating and incorporating the aesthetic values of Chinese culture. / published_or_final_version / English / Master / Master of Philosophy

This thesis considers the relationship between literary modernism and visual culture in the work of Caribbean modernist Jean Rhys. Through analysis of a range of visual modes—theatre, fashion, visual art, cinema and exhibition culture—it examines the racialised sexual politics of Rhys’s modernist aesthetics, as represented in her texts of the 1920s—30s. I read Rhys’s four interwar novels—Quartet (1928), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939)—in the context of contemporary visual practices and the politics of empire. Rhys’s descriptions of artistic practices, acts of viewing and interpreting art, and the identification of her protagonists as both objects and consumers of art are a crucial aspect of her anti-colonial feminism. The politics of vision and of empire are always intertwined for Rhys. Chapter One studies theatrical spectacle and everyday performances of the self. Chapter Two moves to the fashioning of female identities and sartorial constructions of Englishness. Chapter Three turns to Rhys’s use of ekphrasis to question representational structures as they exist in the modernist, primitivist art context. Chapter Four reads Rhys and cinema, focusing on divided or fractured subjectivities as relayed through allusions to distorted mirrors. This conveys Rhys’s powerful evocation of themes of alienation and dislocation. I conclude by analysing what ‘exhibition’ means for those occupying both subject and object visual positions within the imperial metropolis. Analysis is supported by readings of unpublished short stories, letters and poems, works that are relatively absent from current Rhys scholarship. The conjunction of revolutions in the visual arts and the destabilization of the empire in the modernist period provides clear space for investigation into the creation of new ways of seeing that provided a degree of visual agency for those deemed incapable of aesthetic production. Crucial to this is Rhys’s own Creolité. Situated within and outside of European visual subjectivity, Rhys’s work becomes vital to any study of social acts of seeing, in terms of individual subjectivity and within the wider systems of vision produced through the arts. / published_or_final_version / English / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

The central issue in the works of Danish philosopher and religious thinker Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) takes the form of a question: "What does it mean to become a Christian?" However, Kierkegaard's ideas exerted influence well beyond Christian circles and have been important to many notable philosophical and literary figures, some of whom chose not to concern themselves primarily with this question (Sartre, Camus, Heidegger, Buber), and some of whom did choose to concern themselves primarily with this question (Tillich, Bonhoeffer, Berdyaev, Marcel). Even though Kierkegaard died in relative obscurity, thanks to posthumous translation of his works into German and to those translations then being embraced by thinkers as diverse as the atheist Sartre and the Hasidic rabbi Martin Buber, Kierkegaard's writings evolved into a great shaping force in twentieth century philosophy, theology, and literature. Extending slightly Kierkegaard's influence, the present study draws upon his concept of irony as indirect communication and upon his concept of the three spheres of existence to engage in close readings of four masterpieces of literature: The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, Mrs. Dalloway, and Ulysses. The four close readings then become a point-of-departure for considering how Kierkegaard's concept of irony---more specifically, its three spheres of existence--might apply to the world of present-day scholarship and pedagogy. The close readings of the four novels thus serve to establish the context for the final chapter, which considers how Kierkegaard's concept of the three spheres of existence might apply to a broader understanding of scholarship and pedagogy. In addition to offering literary analysis (conventional close readings) of the four novels, the present study also serves as a primer to the theology of Kierkegaard in that the close readings of the novels illustrate various aspects of what Kierkegaard believed to be the three spheres of existence. The study also forwards the action of scholarship and pedagogy by inviting the reader to consider how the three spheres of existence might apply to contemporary scholarship and pedagogy.

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This study focuses on Italy's transition to industrial modernity (in the years from the end of the Risorgimento to the rise of Fascism) from the perspective of some of its iconic objects: wristwatches, bicycles, cigarettes, and cameras. Through the combined analysis of their reception (engendering new social practices like tourism, sport, and photography) and their representation in contemporary art (literature, painting, photography), this research reconstructs the gradual transformation of Italy into a modern nation. These objects reveal a cultural laboratory of the nation's quest for a shared modern identity, both in the positive overlapping of tradition and modernity (challenging a polarized critical approach to the age), and in the interaction of concurring perspectives (derived from ads, newspapers, public debates, and literary and visual sources). By exploring the singular contrast between the social phantasmagoria surrounding these newly mass-produced items, and their striking symbolization in art as antiques, this study highlights a hidden moment of tension in the negotiation of modernity, which finds intellectual expression in the deliberate affinity of these objects with Baroque poetics. In reading the meaning of this reference to the 17th century, this work advances two main arguments. First, on an intellectual level, such allusions indicate not only, against the background of the coeval recovery of the 17th century, an important trait d'union between European and Italian Modernism, but also, against the background of the Italian scholarly debate regarding the Baroque (leading De Sanctis and Croce to equate it with their 'decadent' present), a significant instance for re-evaluating the vital or 'positive' aspect of the fin de siecle, challenging its established definition as Decadentism. Second, on a socio-cultural level, the experimental Baroque epistemology of these objects envisions, on a micro-scale, a peculiarly Italian quest for a singular modernity, which embraces the excitement of modernization while either containing it within the influence of the nation's past heritage, or re-elaborating it in new solutions. / Romance Languages and Literatures

Quotation, the placing of found material into a new context, always involves transforming that material. The modernist poets who first incorporated extensive quotation into poetry prioritized hierarchy, aesthetic excellence, and formal license, values that encourage us to measure a poet’s genius by the audacity with which he transforms found material. This conception of poetry as masterful arrangement proved inadequate, however, in the wake of the Great Depression, as Marxist politics, a trend toward collectivism, and a vogue for documentary forms inflected the words of others with ethical status and social significance. In Others’ Words traces the effect of the Great Depression on the quoting practice of six poets, each of whom seeks to quote in a way that sufficiently honors other voices and other experiences, selecting material for its authenticity of experience as much as for its linguistic aptness. Ezra Pound imagines a “common sepulcher” of evidence and alternates between lyric and documentary expressions of the same ideas to represent the growing conflict between his early theorizations of his quotation method and his changing sense of his quotations’ purpose. In Marianne Moore’s poems, collective, error-prone speech and a plural speaking voice denote a transition, in her career, from a poetics based on exceptional discernment to a poetics based on participation and social connection. William Carlos Williams’s most important work with quotation, not published until the 1940s, developed out of his struggle throughout the 1930s to reconcile his commitment to rendering the “American idiom” with his growing doubts about his own ability to fully comprehend others’ experience. Finally, Charles Reznikoff, Muriel Rukeyser, and Louis Zukofsky each embarks, during the 1930s, on a documentary project that emphasizes the limitations of a poet’s power to shape the meaning of his or her poem.