In recent years there has been a body of studies relating nostalgia and fiction in political, sociological, feminist, or historical ways. This thesis, instead, sets out to perform an unusual textual study of nostalgia in modern fiction in order to work towards a poetics of nostalgia. Although the experience of emotion is private, the object of analytical discourse must be to approach this experience with objective tools. The thesis therefore develops a method for analyzing the experience of nostalgia in literary texts and then uses this method to study how nostalgia can be evoked in readers. The method works through close textual readings, developed through reader-response and narratological theories and validated through a thorough investigation of modern nostalgia in general. The result is a taxonomy of nostalgic strategies that possibly create nostalgic reactions in readers.

In the history of intercultural relationships, no country has exercised so great an influence on the English geographical imagination as Russia. From its humble beginnings as the kingdom of Muscovy, to the sprawling expanse of the U.S.S.R., Winston Chruchill’s famous “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” both captivated and repulsed English audiences. Cartographically split between Europe and Asia, the ambiguous nature of Russian culture not only undermined absolute “Orientalist” binaries separating East from West, but also contributed, through the epoch-making fin de siècle influx of Slavic aesthetic forms, to the birth of English modernism. The idea of “Russianess,” for pre-war audiences, proved crucial to unsettling received notions of art, ideology, and identity. This destabilizing effect is especially evident in the work of Wyndham Lewis, T.S. Eliot, and D.H. Lawrence. Despite having largely been dismissed as “reactionary” and “xenophobic” in their political stances, the complex and variegated way in which each author engages with Russia, as this study demonstrates, suggests an underlying ambivalence in their writing. Rather than reflecting a geographic reality, Slavic society, in their hands, appears as a collective fantasy, an external manifestation of their own internal doubts, anxieties, and pre-occupations concerning “Englishness,” which serves to elucidate the conflicted and uncertain politics of twentieth-century avant-garde art.

This study explores the idea that the Western adaptation of Tibetan Buddhism is in fact a continuum of the Protestant Reformation. With its inhospitable terrain and volatile environment, the geography of Tibet has played an important role in its assimilation of Buddhism. Demons, ghosts and gods are a natural part of the Tibetan world. Yet why is it that Tibetan Buddhism often downplays these elements in its self portrayal to the West? Why are Westerners drawn to an idealistic view of Buddhism as being rational and free from belief in the supernatural when the reality is quite different? This thesis will show that in its encounter with Western modernity Tibetan Buddhism has had to reinvent itself in order to survive in a world where rituals and belief in deities are regarded as ignorant superstition. In doing so it will reveal that this reinvention of Buddhism is not a recent activity but one that has its origins in nineteenth century Protestant values. While the notion of Protestant Buddhism has been explored by previous scholars this thesis will show that rather than solving the problems of disenchantment, Buddhist Modernism ignores the human need to find meaning in and to take control over one’s surroundings. In doing so it will argue that rather than adopting a modern, crypto-Protestant form Buddhism, Westerners instead need to find a way to naturally transplant Tibetan Buddhism onto their own surroundings.

Writers of golden age crime fiction (1920 to 1945), and in particular female writers, have been seen by many critics as socially and politically detached. Their texts have been read as morality tales, theoretically rich mise en scenès, or psychic fantasies, by necessity emerging from an historical epoch with unique cultural and social concerns, but only obliquely engaging with these concerns by toying with unstable identities, or through playful, but doomed, private transgressions. The thesis overturns assumptions about the crime novel as a negation of the present moment, detached and escapist, by demonstrating how crime narratives responded to public debates which highlighted some of the most pressing legal and philosophical concerns of their time. Grounded in meticulous historical research, the thesis draws attention to contemporary debates between antagonistic psychological schools – giving equal space to debates within psychoanalysis and adaptive neuroscience – and charts how these debates were reflected in crime writing. Chapter two explores the contestation of the M’Naghten laws on criminal responsibility in light of Ronald True’s case (1922), followed by readings of crime narratives in which perpetrators have ambiguous and controversial legal status in regard to criminal responsibility. At the intersection of psychiatric discourse and the popular literary imagination, a critical and ethical perspective developed which not only conveyed a version of psychological discourse to a wider public, but profoundly reworked the foundations of the genre as the ritual unveiling of deviancy and the restoration of the rational institutions of society. In similar vein, chapter three explores the status of the ‘Born Criminal’ in law and medicine, and looks at crime writer Gladys Mitchell’s efforts to expose both the pitfalls of categorisation, and competing discourses’ limitations in adequately accounting for crime. Chapter four, whilst maintaining close medical-legal focus, opens up the study to consider how understandings of deviant selfhood in modernist writing inflected crime writers’ representations of unconscious and epileptic killers. Finally, chapter five continues this intertextual approach by asserting that certain crime novels express an exhaustion with the genre’s classic rational and scientific heroes, and turn instead to the affective epistemologies and notions of subconscious synthesis concomitantly being celebrated in modernist writing. Altering the position of the authoritative detective in ways that profoundly alter the politics of the form, the chapter and the thesis in total propose a reading of golden age crime fiction more responsive to cultural, psychological and legal debates of the era, leading to a reassessment of the form as neither escapist nor purely affirmative of the status quo.

The problem addressed by the student was the creation of private, separate spaces within a larger area. It was determined that folding screens could be utilized in a variety of settings and situations thereby providing a flexible solution.As the creation of the folding screens progressed, the student was exposed to ideas and motivating concepts within the artworld which influenced him to consider a more sculptural response to the problem. A shift of the emphasis from the purely functional to a viewer oriented. perceptual interaction with the sculptural space was the result; although the sculptures did not have the obvious usefulness of the folding screens, the student found the sculptures to be personally useful in his artistic development.The primary method of constuction utilized was welding. Several of the sculptures were the result of combining wooden elements and assemblages with welded steel. Sevendifferent artworks were created, three being folding screens and four being sculptural barriers. / Department of Art

This case study examines the new media presentation system in Alby public library. The aim is to explore if the contemporary Zeitgeist, wich according to the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, could be described as liquid modernity, has affected how the system was formed. The purpose is to find out how that would affect users and staff of public libaries of the contemporary. Interviews were conducted with the library staff, and plans and documents concerning the media presentation system was examined. The empirical part of this thesis starts with a study of the process that resulted in the new presentation system while the second part examines the system as such. I discovered that both the media presentation system, and the process which preceded it, contained aspects that could be traced to liquid modernity. However, I also found lingering signs of solid modernity, wich is the term Bauman uses to denote the modern era. The media presentation system could thus be described as a combination of solid and liquid modernity. I argued that the new media arrangment is a compromise with several disadvantages for both users and the library staff. The interplay between solid and liquid modernity in the contemporary public library results in a divergent situation for users and staff. On the one hand, it gives more freedom to use the library according to their own ideas. However, old structures, such as classification systems, sets limits for this development.

I uppsatsen undersöker jag hur huvudkaraktären Mimmi, under vägen att etablera sig som författare och i mötet med Hugo, söker nå balans mellan intellekt och kropp. Utifrån Julia Kristevas teori om abjektionen utforskar jag på vilka sätt Mimmi förhåller sig ambivalent till viljan att vara å ena sidan innesluten, å andra sidan avgränsad, och hur i sin tur synen på kroppen, dess samverkan med själen samt synen på andra kroppar präglas av begär och äckel. Som metodisk språngbräda använder jag paradoxen utifrån Kristina Fjelkestams definition. Med hjälp av den jag fokuserar på motsättningar och dubbeltydigheter hos karaktären och i texten utifrån frågeställningen: hur ser spelet ut mellan Mimmis förhållande till kroppen (Kvinnan) respektive själen (Konstnären), och är det möjligt för henne att förena kropp och själ i något som skulle kunna bli en fullbordad Människa?

Across continents and independently of one another, Marianne Moore (1887-1972) and Francis Ponge (1899-1988) both made names for themselves in the twentieth century as poets who gave voice to things. Their entire oeuvres are dominated by poems that attempt to reconstruct an external thing (inanimate object, plant or animal being) through language, while emphasizing the necessary distance that exists between the writing self and the written other. Furthermore, their thing poetry establishes an “essential otherness” to the subject of representation that (ideally) rejects an objectification of that subject, thereby rendering the “thing” a subject-thing with its own being-for-itself. This dissertation argues that the thing poetry of Marianne Moore and Francis Ponge successfully challenged the hierarchy between subject and object in representation by bringing the poet’s self into a dialogue with the encountered thing. The relationship between the writing self and the written other is akin to what Maurice Merleau-Ponty refers to in Le visible et l’invisible when he describes the act of perceiving what is visible as necessitating one’s own visibility to another. The other becomes a mirror of oneself and vice versa, Merleau-Ponty explains, to the extent that together they compose a single image. The type of reflection involving self and others that Moore and Ponge employ in their thing poetry invokes the characteristically modern symbol of the crystal with its kaleidoscopic reflective properties. Self and other are distinct yet indissolubly bound, and rather than a hierarchy between subject and object there are only subjects who exist for-themselves and for-each other, reflecting the kind of reciprocal Pour soi that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology envisioned.

Across continents and independently of one another, Marianne Moore (1887-1972) and Francis Ponge (1899-1988) both made names for themselves in the twentieth century as poets who gave voice to things. Their entire oeuvres are dominated by poems that attempt to reconstruct an external thing (inanimate object, plant or animal being) through language, while emphasizing the necessary distance that exists between the writing self and the written other. Furthermore, their thing poetry establishes an “essential otherness” to the subject of representation that (ideally) rejects an objectification of that subject, thereby rendering the “thing” a subject-thing with its own being-for-itself. This dissertation argues that the thing poetry of Marianne Moore and Francis Ponge successfully challenged the hierarchy between subject and object in representation by bringing the poet’s self into a dialogue with the encountered thing. The relationship between the writing self and the written other is akin to what Maurice Merleau-Ponty refers to in Le visible et l’invisible when he describes the act of perceiving what is visible as necessitating one’s own visibility to another. The other becomes a mirror of oneself and vice versa, Merleau-Ponty explains, to the extent that together they compose a single image. The type of reflection involving self and others that Moore and Ponge employ in their thing poetry invokes the characteristically modern symbol of the crystal with its kaleidoscopic reflective properties. Self and other are distinct yet indissolubly bound, and rather than a hierarchy between subject and object there are only subjects who exist for-themselves and for-each other, reflecting the kind of reciprocal Pour soi that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology envisioned.

Nathanael West is typically considered to be a “major minor” American writer of the late modernist period. Best known today for Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of the Locust (1939), West wrote four dark novellas that excoriated mainstream American culture of the 1930s. Earlier critics viewed his writing mainly as an existentialist exploration of universal human suffering; more recently, critics have claimed West as an avant-garde devoted to the criticism of Depression-era capitalism and consumer society. This thesis represents something of a return to the earlier, humanist study of West’s fiction, which he himself regarded primarily as moral satire. What differentiates this project from earlier studies, however, is its style of criticism. Since the 1980s, a new revitalized and reoriented ethical criticism has emerged, as evidenced by the proliferation of scholarly works and journal special issues on the topic of literature and ethics, the growing number of readers like Todd Davis and Kenneth Womack’s Mapping the Ethical Turn (2001), and the general trend toward linking moral philosophy and literary criticism, as carried out by Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty, among others. The new ethical criticism tends to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive. Using approaches inspired by the scholarship of this late-twentieth century wave of ethical critics, including Wayne Booth and Daniel Schwarz, this dissertation provides a new critical illumination of West the implied author’s unique system of ethics, as dramatized through his narrative explorations of particular lives. It attempts to answer the question that has puzzled Americanist scholars contemplating his works since their initial publication: how can a fictional world so sordid and savage still evoke feelings of compassion and humanity in so many readers? The answer, I will argue, lies in the very ferocity of the author’s depictions of universal human suffering, which ultimately inspire empathy and solidarity despite West’s very real misanthropy.