This thesis focuses on the career of Philip Weiss in the furniture industry in Winnipeg, Manitoba, from 1950-1975, as the exemplar of a larger paradigm of émigré or foreigner culture, with a strong affinity to alienation, intellectualism, and Modernism. The thesis contends that the Jewish émigré was attracted to Modernist principles because of its abstract structure, rejection of tradition, and avant-garde framework. Jewish individuals became prominent in the arts associated with Modernism, such as design, architecture, photography, and painting. Modernism enabled artists to express themselves without adopting conventional subjects, forms, attitudes, and techniques, and made it well-suited for the émigrés’ position in the twentieth century. Modernism, with its attachment to intellectualism and exploration of new technologies and materials, was a natural fit for Weiss. Weiss arrived in Canada as a Holocaust survivor and immigrant, and began to reshape the narrative of his life through the furnishing of his identity. He became a furniture designer and manufacturer, and acquired status and respect in his community. Modernism played a significant role in his personal and business life, and initiated a lifelong connection with its tenets of progress, innovation, and creativity.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1984. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 379-407).

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Thesis advisor: Marjorie Howes / <italic>Rough Crossings</italic> investigates the efforts of Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Paul Muldoon to read and revise anti-imperial narratives from across the Atlantic. Drawing on transnational, modernist, and post-colonial studies, this dissertation features texts that are themselves bound up with texts from other national literary traditions. In other words, I look carefully at the ways in which these authors are themselves Atlantic readers. In their writing about empire and its local effects on their homelands, these writers find surprising ways to figure the material conditions of colonial contact at specific historical moments while bringing other times and other places to bear on their representations of those circumstances. While redrawing new spaces of belonging, the texts that compose my version of the Atlantic world also map a space imbued with experiences of loss: Ireland's decimated population after the Famine, housing crises for Catholics in Northern Ireland, the dispossession and removal of Native Americans from their lands, and the retreating national border of Mexico after the U.S.-Mexican War. Rather than being simply deferred until a later time, the dislocation of colonial trauma is worked out spatially in these authors' work. These stories take us to another place in addition to another time in order to witness and break out of the traumas of colonial and racial oppression. In substituting for or recovering from the forgotten, repressed, or dislocated blank spaces of traumatic experience, the texts at the heart of this dissertation begin to imagine new transatlantic revisions to the master narratives of empire. Building on the work of Irish Studies scholars like Seamus Deane and Luke Gibbons, and American Studies scholars like Shelley Streeby and Amy Kaplan, the readings I present in my dissertation offer an alternative view of the imperial thrust of American exceptionalism. Instead of viewing the West as the inevitable extension of America's growing empire, I figure the land beyond the frontier as an exceptional site of overlapping metropolitan and colonial spaces with crucial parallels to Ireland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rough Crossings thus brings regional literature into postcolonial discussions that have often struggled to find room for places like Cather's Prairie, Fitzgerald's Middle West, Bret Harte's California, and Muldoon's rural borderlands in Northern Ireland. This dissertation suggests that the contours of these contested spaces are best understood when seen from both sides of the Atlantic. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

This study will look at fantasies of the mechanical body in a series of close readings of key modernist and contemporary texts. It will argue that these texts are sites of resistance or repression, in which unconscious and / or cultural narratives about the death drive have left their traces. Part One, Chapters 1-3, explores the links between war and fantasy, and between fantasy and gender. Chapter One looks at the art and writings of the Italian Futurists and English Vorticists, with the focus on Marinetti and Lewis, to consider how the rationalized bodies of the soldier and worker might be seen as the covert problems underpinning the fantasy, returning to it in the form of the repressed. Chapter Two concerns the writings of Ernst Jünger, where war, modern labour, the incursion of danger into everyday life, and photography are seen to provide signs of the emergence of the Typus, an organic construction, who has learnt to see himself as devoid of feeling, turning the death drive into the will to power in acts of aggression, and for whom the function of the eye is the same as that of the weapon. Chapter Three investigates the problem of war-shock and the shocks of cinema in First World War film footage of shellshocked soldiers, Lang's Metropolis, and Chaplin's Modern Times. It shows how discourses of hysteria, feminization and commodity relations form the common ground between the cultural reception of both shelishock and cinema, and how film-makers and critics responded to both sets of debates. Part Two, Chapters 4-5, explores the links between the machine, the maternal body and the death drive in the Terminator and Alien films, and considers the question of affect, mourning, and identification in Cronenberg's Crash.

This thesis explores colour as a philosophical means of transit between literature and the visual arts. I explore a new way of thinking about the self and about thought, developmg the significance of colour alongside, and internal to, modes of representation in the modernist movement. The interaction of art and literature is crucial to much debate on modernist aesthetics. DevelopIng the debate into the history of colour phenomena, I argue that colour aHows a philosophical inflection to certain clich6s (such as stream-of-consciousness) that are attached to modernist writing. In the work of Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Dorothy Richardson and TS Eliot, I argue that the modernist preoccupation with the seeming unpasse between thought and representation can be seen to be 'made visible' through the theme of colour. Colour is a vehicle through which to explore the relation between thought and perception, subject and object, and offers a new way of engagement with recent research into theoretical comparisons between thinking, writing and visual arts.

This inter-disciplinary study explores the role of dress and fashion in the novels of Virginia Woolf, examining them in a chronological sequence. I will show how Woolf’s own concerns with dress are reflected in her work in the development of her Modernist method of writing which employs clothing as particularly apt imagery with which to evoke tensions of surface and depth, and perception and reality. The investigation begins with a summary of previous discussions regarding the historical, social and psychological significance of dress, noting that the role of clothing in fiction is a comparatively under-investigated area. This study makes the nine major novels its primary focus, together with selected short stories, and it draws upon analysis from the fields of costume history, socio-cultural studies and literary criticism to explore and evaluate Woolf’s use of clothes in her fiction. Woolf’s open criticism of the ‘materialist’ writing of Victorian and Edwardian novelists such as Arnold Bennett led her to adopt a more sparing and subtle use of dress as a means of portraying character, drawing not merely upon the visual aspect but also upon the symbolic, sensual and psychological dimensions of wearing a garment, culminating in a phenomenon she described as ‘frock consciousness’. In this acknowledgement of the potential of clothing to influence human consciousness and psychology Woolf simultaneously reflects concerns of her time and anticipates feminist ‘reclaiming’ of fashion and dress as legitimate areas of academic study by late-twentieth-century writers such as Elizabeth Wilson. Clair Hughes writes that “novelists do not send their characters naked into the world, though critics have often acted as though they do.” (6). By placing dress at the centre of a consideration of Woolf’s fiction it opens up these texts to new readings and interpretations, to see them ‘in Woolf’s clothing’.

This study analyses the oscillations between realism and romance in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out. In these novels, the shift from realism to romance is often mediated by scenes of female reading. This thesis explores the relationship between female reading and genre and argues that the conventional story patterns of past texts exert a strong influence on a woman’s ability to conceptualize her own identity and shape her life story.