Realism is a mode of representation that purports to depict contemporary society objectively and in its entirety. By contrast, modernist artists are often regarded as having turned away from external reality to represent subjective states and to emphasize the artistic (versus mimetic) qualities of art. Building on recent scholarship that has demonstrated that Spanish realist authors were mindful of the limitations of the realist project, this study examines frames as devices through which both realist and modernist authors and artists working in fin-de-siècle Spain signal the limits of perception and representation. / Romance Languages and Literatures

Syftet med uppsatsen är att diskutera om rekordårens bebyggelse kan med hjälp av en DIVE-analys betraktas som en del av kulturarvet. En kvalitativ metod har använts där observationer och historisk såväl som samtida litteratur varit grunden till empirin. Detta i enlighet med DIVE som undersökningsmetod. En kvalitativ analys med ett etnologiskt perspektiv har sedan gjorts. Uppsatsen utgår ifrån Grundad teori och behandlar således tidigare forskning kring kulturarvet, som begreppets karaktär och kulturarvets värden, i det avslutande kapitlet. Studien har resulterat i en analys av Hagalund i Solna stad, Stockholms län, vilket mynnar ut i ett resultat att Hagalund som en förort från rekordåren är ett kulturarv, dock enbart ur ett kunskapsperspektiv. Ur ett upplevelseperspektiv krävs helt andra metoder än DIVE för att utröna om Hagalund är ett kulturarv. Dessutom diskuteras DIVE-analysens förhållningssätt till kulturarvet och kulturarvet som objektivistiskt eller konstruktivistiskt betingat. Studien väcker flera nya frågeställningar kring kulturarvet och rekordårens bebyggelse.

Bertram Charles Binning's depiction of British Columbia coastal scenes in his drawings and paintings of the mid 1940s to the early 1950s present images of sunlit seascapes in recreational settings; they are scenes of leisure and pleasure. The concern for leisure and pleasure was central to the artist's modernism, even after he began painting in a semi-abstract manner around 1948. In this particular construction of modernism, Binning offered pleasure as an antidote to some of the anxieties he observed in postwar culture. Binning also thought that art could contribute to life in a direct way. In the mid to late 1940s, Vancouver saw a series of artistic community projects which explored the possibility of art as a social force; the Art in Living Group, of which Binning was a member, believed that art could have a therapeutic value in relation to housing projects and community planning. In certain ways, the Art in Living Group was a response to rapid changes in the social matrix of Vancouver. Binning's personal artistic practice, however, appears to have existed outside of what was embraced in his participation in those community projects. His essentially personal, self-authenticating expression in the form of drawings may be seen to resist the idealism of his more 'public' production, that is, his own idealism, his demand for an art thoroughly harmonized with the public sphere. Moreover, in this more personal body of work, his choice of leisurely scenes, rendered in a style reminiscent of Matisse, can be seen as far removed from the urban tensions of the time. It also seems to suggest that the leisure-and-pleasure idealism which finds expression in these works was not only class-and gender- specific, but also antithetical to his strong desire to democratize art. Binning's preoccupation with personal expression took a turn when he shifted his concern from representational drawings to semi-abstract paintings. The shift coincided with his career move to the University of British Columbia as a professor of Art History in 1949. From then on, Binning's interest in regional cosmopolitanism became more pronounced in his work. In this sense, it is significant that Binning looked for guidance to Herbert Read's ideas about modern art and art education. At the same time, his reputation expanded beyond the West Coast. In 1954, Binning was chosen to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale. Binning's particular modernism, as represented by this range of work, all of which presents a pastoral version of Utopia , was in some ways profoundly at odds with the social circumstances of the time. Why was the interest in leisure and pleasure significant to his practice? What did it mean to promote this kind of idealism in the local context? And in what ways did it relate to the international art scene — for example, to the work of Matisse or to contemporary concepts of art? My thesis addresses these questions by situating Binning's work both regionally and internationally.

The purpose of this study was to prove that Saul Bellow‘s characters are questing heroes and to show how human quest is reflected in Bellow‘s novels „Herzog“ and „Henderson the Rain King“. Different forms of human quest in literature have been investigated referring to Ihab Hassan‘s „Selves at Risk. Patterns of Quest in Contemporary American Letters“. The method of textual analysis has been chosen for the study. The research demonstrated that both Herzog and Henderson are questing heroes searching for identity, social assertion, communication, love, understanding, self-worth and the meaning of life. The main heroes undergo a series of difficulties, loss and recovery, and finally they create identity and learn to be human��to tolerate and accept human behaviour, to live here and now.

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This dissertation rethinks textual images of the other’s beauty, depicted in works by D. H. Lawrence, Muriel Spark, and Virginia Woolf, whose fascination with the other, called by this dissertation the beloved, urged them to inscribe the beloved’s original beauty in texts. Their works make perceptible the singularity of the beloved, while revealing the writers’ predicament in translating the beloved’s ineffability in texts. Taking the untranslatability of the beloved into consideration, this dissertation traces the ways in which these writers’ texts capture the beloved’s original beauty at moments of revelation, related to epiphanies entering the terrain of literary modernism. My study thereby scrutinizes the dynamics of images of beauty and their impacts on art and politics in the context of modernism. In doing so, I argue that the texts I consider express the beloved’s singularity in challenge of the beautified images that many other artists invented for self-directed purposes in the early and mid-twentieth century. First, I explore Lawrence’s creation of aesthetic spaces in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) in keeping with his desire for making palpable visual spectacles through the text. Analyzing how this ambition helped to create the novel’s aesthetic scenes, I would like to define Lawrence as an aesthete whose aspiration lay in expressing the beauty of things. Then, I discuss Spark’s affection for her characters and her desire to visualize the figure’s originality in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and The Girls of Slender Means (1963). Considering Spark in relation to both modernists and Fascists, I propose that her making of the image of her character breaks away from Fascism’s aestheticization of human figures. Finally, I investigate Woolf’s love for words by focusing on “The Duchess and the Jeweller” (1938), a short story written for expressing various modes of beauty in words. Drawing to the represented link between words and smell, considered the most “wasteful” sense, I examine how the sensory medium makes perceptible intrinsic qualities of words, and argues that her depiction of words, linked to smell, reveals the anti-utilitarian nature of words, unconstrained by a craftsman’s manipulation of words.

This thesis analyses the function of the detective in Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. I argue that the modernist metropolis Berlin challenges the way in which crimes are solved by complicating the process of identifying those responsible for them. The ambivalence of life makes it impossible to get to the truth of crime. This ambivalence, partly created by the urban context, leads to the reinvention of the role of the detective. No longer located in the individual, the function of the detective is shared among author, narrator, protagonist, reader, and the city, whereby the protagonist Franz Biberkopf (on the intra-textual level) and the reader (on the extra-textual level) are the major players. However, neither Biberkopf nor the reader succeeds in this process, but are forced to accept the solution suggested by the text. The thesis adopts a narratological approach in analysing the narrative processes of veiling and unveiling facts and circumstances. It demonstrates how Biberkopf’s specific perception of urban space and his attempt to give it a particular shape in his imagination, as well as the complex relationship of story and discourse in the novel, contribute to the obfuscation of fact and fiction. / Thesis (Master, German) -- Queen's University, 2009-08-17 10:47:07.25

This thesis examines the entirety of Joseph Heller's career as a novelist and explores the various existential themes uniting a seemingly diverse body of work. Considering Heller's relationship to the philosophy of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, "Towards a Postmodern Absurd: The Fiction of Joseph Heller" suggests that the novelist promotes the same existentially authentic lifestyle of revolt originally articulated by the French existentialists. Refuting the critical assessment of Heller's fiction as formless, this thesis argues that Heller deliberately structures his fiction around the concept of dejd vu in order to buttress the author's existential concerns with the absurdity of human existence. Finally, in response to the recent debates over Joseph Heller's place in the postmodern American canon, the thesis identifies the author's use of such postmodern concepts as pastiche and paranoia as a further reinforcement of the relevance of an absurdist worldview in contemporary America.

This dissertation offers the first comprehensive examination of realism in English-Canadian fiction of the early twentieth century. It argues for the existence of a "modern-realist" movement that is Canada's unique and unacknowledged contribution to the collection of international movements that makes up literary modernism. This argument involves a detailed analysis of the aesthetics, aims, preoccupations, and techniques of the modern realists, a reexamination of the oeuvres of the movement's most prominent writers, and a critical reevaluation of the "modernity" of Canada's three most significant realist sub-genres—prairie realism, urban realism, and social realism. This study also provides a literary-historical overview of the movement as a whole, which begins with the inauguration of the Canadian Bookman in 1919, and concludes with the emergence of a contemporary Canadian fiction in the 1950s. The conclusions arrived at in this work are based upon a reading of dozens of novels and works of short fiction, many of them unpublished and/or critically neglected and forgotten. The findings in this study are also based on original research into archival materials from seven institutions across Canada.

Uppsatsen ämnar att 1. Utföra en nykritisk analys av dikten ”Konferensman” av Birger Sjöberg, 2.Etablera och diskutera begreppet bildorienterad modernism, 3. identifiera ”Konferensman som ettuttryck för bildorienterad modernism. För att utföra en nykritisk analys på ”Konferensman” har dennykritik som etablerats av teoretikerna Cleanth Brooks och William K. Wimsatt använts. Dennykritiska analysen har försökt att identifiera olika typer av metaforiska och symboliskarepresentationer av sinnlighet och andlighet i ”Konferensman”. Bildorienterad modernismdefinieras i uppsatsen som den typ av modernistiska poesi som huvudsakligen är intresserad avmetaforen eller symbolen. Vidare definieras nykritiken som en typ av modernistisk bildorienteradanalysmodell. Två andra teorier identifieras också som bildorienterade analyser. Dessa är KjellEspmarks själsöversättande analys av modernistisk poesi, samt metaforkollage, ett begrepputvecklat av uppsatsförfattaren. Dessa två teorier, tillsammans med nykritiken, ses i uppsatsen somolika sätt att analysera bildorienterad modernism på. Uppsatsen identifierar avslutningsvismöjligheten att applicera dessa olika teorier på ”Konferensman” som ett tecken på att dikten kan sessom ett uttryck för bildorienterad modernism.