The scores here collected represent all the music heard in the recital of 3 April, 1995 (programme on p. iii), save "Shimmering Reflections on a Dark Carrall Street Night." This is an electroacoustic piece which does, however, appear on the accompanying recording.

The scores here collected represent all the music heard in the recital of 3 April, 1995 (programme on p. iii), save "Shimmering Reflections on a Dark Carrall Street Night." This is an electroacoustic piece which does, however, appear on the accompanying recording. / Arts, Faculty of / Music, School of / Accompanied by sound cassette of recital. / Graduate

This dissertation asks how literature relates to practices of self-formation. In search of a way to describe this relation with greater concreteness, it examines how specific literary genres mediate formative practices and how literary texts appropriate those genres. Three case studies focus on works written by canonical German-language authors in the years after 1900, when the established relations between literature and practice were breaking down. Rilke's Stunden-Buch revives the devotional prayer book; Kafka's Betrachtung looks back to literary contemplation and meditation; and Walser's “Der Spaziergang” draws on the tradition of literary walking journals. Close readings show how these texts transform the practices regulated by their source genres when those genres began to lose the self-evidence they once enjoyed. The study seeks to strengthen our critical vocabulary for describing literature’s claim on everyday life by demonstrating how practices of self-formation manifest at the textual level. The texts studied can no longer reproduce their source genres’ unambiguous relation to practices (respectively, devotion, reflection, and walking). However, they incite new forms of aesthetic activity to overcome endemic problems with modern social life.

Cette thèse interroge le sens du mythe orphique dans la poésie de six auteurs européens du début du XXe siècle (Valéry, Rilke, Trakl, Apollinaire, Campana, Goll), et le sens de la poésie orphique dans la modernité. En partant du double constat d’une crise de la Weltanschauung signant la désertion de la transcendance et du sens, et d’une crise du langage héritée de Mallarmé, cette thèse définit la poésie orphique comme une tentative de ré-enchantement visant à refonder la place de l’être dans le monde, le sens de la mort et la profondeur ontologique de la poésie. La thèse pose la question de l’unité ou de l’éclatement d’un lyrisme orphique moderne. Elle propose une mise au point historique sur les sources de l’orphisme jusqu’au début du XXe siècle, puis un parcours analysant le passage de la mythologie à des poétiques orphiques parfois opposées dans leur aboutissement (réharmonisation de soi et du monde, catabase sans fin, démembrement du sujet, incarnation par l’orphisme de l’idée d’une poésie parfaitement composée). Cette thèse s’attache aussi à définir l’orphisme dans ses dimensions musicales et picturales, interroge les liens entre orphisme et union des arts, et étudie la langue musicalisée et picturalisée des poètes, ainsi que plusieurs œuvres vocales et plastiques (Honegger, Poulenc, Webern, Weill, Delaunay, Dufy, Klee, De Chirico). Enfin, considérant le mythe selon sa dimension fondatrice d’une manière d’être au monde, cette thèse envisage la poésie orphique du début du XXe siècle comme le signe et le moyen d’un désir de retour à une forme de rapport mythique au monde où l’être, dans le chant, coïnciderait avec le sacré et avec le dicible. / This thesis examines the meaning of the myth of Orpheus in the poetical works of six early twentieth century European poets, and the meaning of Orphic poetry within a context of modernity. Having taken into account a twofold crisis, both of the Weltanschauung – revealing that any sense, or transcendent reference, is missing – and of language (Mallarmé’s legacy), this thesis defines Orphic poetry as an attempt to re-enchant the world, in order to give new roots to the being, a new meaning to death, and a new ground to settle poetry’s ontological depth. The thesis tries to determine if such a lyricism is unique or manifold. It makes a historical mise au point from the sources of Orphism up to the twentieth century; then, it tries to describe the transformation of mythological elements into poetical principles – from which may even have issued contradictory achievements (setting back harmonious links between the world and the self; endless katabasis; dismemberment of the I; Orphic embodiment of a perfect poetry). Our thesis also tries to describe how Orphism is conveyed through music and painting: it questions the link between Orphism and the union of the arts, and studies the poet’s music-like and picture-like language, as well as some vocal or painted works (Honegger, Poulenc, Webern, Weill, Delaunay, Dufy, Klee, De Chirico). At last, as it considers myth as the settling of a new way of being-in-the-world, this thesis pictures early 20th century Orphic poetry both as the symptom and the way of a desire to get back some kind of mythical relationship to the world, in which the being, the sacred and the sayable, through the poetical song, would prove coextensive.

My D.Phil, dissertation sheds new light on German literary decadence around 1900, its universal concepts, plurality of discourses and poetic transformations. The heuristic value of my dissertation is a refined differentiation of Dekadenz which reconstructs the literary history of the concept and for the first time proposes specific poetic constellations. In chapter 1, decadence is reviewed with its rich research heritage and introduced as a decisive concept and discourse of aesthetic modernism. Although much has been written on decadence, the concept is clearly in need of scholarly reconsideration. I argue that decadence is not only a vague epochal construct and an ensemble of motifs, but also encompasses discourses, universal concepts and a versatile literary style. In view of the stylistic eclecticism around 1900, I argue that decadence is a dynamic and malleable concept which can be combined with other aesthetic styles, movements and philosophical contexts depending on the specific author. Chapter 2 contextualizes Dekadenz from its etymology and central discourses to its universal concepts. Etymologically derived from the Latin verb de-cadere decadence signifies a downward movement and a figure of fragmentation. It evokes cultural and political decline especially that of the Roman Empire (décadence romaine) and undergoes various aesthetic transformations (1857-1894). After touching upon the precursors Baudelaire (1857), Bourget (1883) and Bahr (1889-1894), I dwell on Nietzsche to demonstrate the philosophically complex German double evaluation of decadence. I derive three universal concepts from Nietzsche (health vs. sickness, endings vs. new beginnings, fragmentation vs. wholeness) which are crucial to my literary analysis. My comprehensive literary analysis centers on three specific poetic constellations of decadence between late realism and aesthetic modernism. Chapter 3 illuminates Mann's spätrealistische Dekadenz (1894-1924) with his (Nietzschean) double evaluations. Transformations of decadence are shown in his early novellas, Buddenbrooks, Der Tod in Venedig and Der Zauberberg. Chapter 4 illustrates Hofmannsthal's ästhetizistische Dekadenz (1891-1902) in his early essays, his prose fragment Age of Innocence and Das Märchen der 672. Nacht. A significant transformation of decadence is illuminated in Ein Brief (1902), where Nietzschean decadence is concentrated and tentatively overturned. In chapter 5, Rilke's modernistische Dekadenz (1898-1910) is shown from his early fragment Ewald Tragy to his only novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge. His novel attempts a poetic 'revaluation of all values' and culminates in the emergence of a genuinely modernist decadence.

This dissertation examines how transgender feelings and gender variation emerged as a vital motivator for scientific and aesthetic explorations of human personhood and social experiences of marginality in German-speaking culture in the early twentieth century. My research illustrates how concepts of gender variation served as a generative problem for modernist practitioners of sexual science and as a creative impulse and figural resource for modernist literary and artistic innovations. The feedback between these fields allowed for novel social categories to develop in a period where designations like “transgender” or “transsexual” were not yet in use as stable public identities or diagnoses, but nevertheless circulated in response to experiences of embodied difference and social alienation. By reading for “transgender feeling” as a heuristic that unites multiple historical categories of gender and sexual variation, I argue that transgender phenomena were instrumental for the development of German modernist movements at large. Building on affect studies, trans and queer studies, and German literary and cultural studies, my project intervenes in limited contemporary understandings of transgender history and identity as a minority political and diagnostic discourse. Instead, I argue for a more expansive, “democratized” notion of transgender feeling that encompasses diverse historical forms of gender variation, some of which have disappeared or become “obsolete,” and show how narratives of gender intermediacy and incongruence are essential to modernist aesthetic practices. Chapter One examines theories of sexual intermediacy in the sexological work of Magnus Hirschfeld and Otto Weininger, who both suggested that a transgender condition underlies “normal” human sexual development. I show that trans feelings cut across Hirschfeld’s sexological categories and, in particular, his deployment of the case genre, troubling stable taxonomies of sexual affect and allowing for promising forms of coauthorship and “trans genre writing” to emerge in sexology. Chapter Two takes up Rainer Maria Rilke’s writing in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and Das Stunden-Buch, as well as his early childhood experience, to argue that dysphoria and intermediacy are key to understanding the social alienation that Rilke expressed in his modernist work alongside personal attachments to femininity and a feminine poetic voice. Chapter Three on Else Lasker-Schüler illustrates how trans feelings, the masculine persona of Jussuf and appropriations of racial and ethnic difference significantly frame the novel Mein Herz and become enduring features of Lasker-Schüler’s literary and artistic production. I highlight how scholarly reception of Rilke and Lasker-Schüler’s work have intentionally disavowed these expressions as transgender and argue for a reassessment of trans feeling as a creative impulse in German modernism through their texts and images. My last chapter explores how modernist periodical media served as a vital tool for crafting trans intimate publics in the Weimar period and for negotiating the shared norms of gender and social participation for a novel class of gender-variant people under the category of transvestism. In my conclusion, I turn to the unfinished business of sexual and gender definition that continues to frame LGBTQ politics in Germany and abroad today, and I link contemporary questions of trans aesthetics to modernist dynamics of gender and sexual multiplicity.

Part 1: ‘True Receivers': Rilke and the Contemporary Poetics of Listening In this part of this thesis I argue that a contemporary ‘poetics of listening' has emerged in the UK, and explore the writing of three of our most significant poets - John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie and Don Paterson - to find out why they have become interested in the idea of the poet as a ‘listener'. I suggest that the appeal of this listening stance accounts for their engagement with the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, who thought of himself as a listening ‘receiver'; it is proposed that Rilke's notion of ‘receivership' and the way his poems relate to the earthly (or the ‘non-human') also account for the general ‘intensification' of interest in his work. An exploration of the shifting status of listening provides context for this study, and I pay particular attention to the way innovations in audio and communications technology influenced Rilke's late sequences the Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus. A connection is made between Rilke's ‘listening poetics' and the ‘listening' stance of Ted Hughes and Edward Thomas; this establishes a ‘listening lineage' for the contemporary poets considered in the thesis. I also suggest that there are intriguing similarities between the ideas of listening that are emerging in contemporary poetics and Hélène Cixous' concept of ‘écriture féminine'. Exploring these similarities helps us to understand the implications of the stance of the poet-listener, which is a counter to the idea that as a writer you must ‘find your voice'. Finally, it is proposed that ‘a poetics of listening' would benefit from an enriched taxonomy. Part 2 of the thesis is a collection of my poems entitled ‘Small Weather'.