Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1950. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 97-99).

Thesis (doctoral)--Université de Paris III. / Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

The critical attention that has been given to Vita Sackville-West’s travel literature has primarily focused on the relationships between these texts and the novels of Virginia Woolf on account of the intimate relationship that existed between the two writers. I argue in this paper that Sackville-West’s travel accounts are worthy of study in and of themselves. This report explores the ways that the genre of travel literature was changing in the early twentieth century through Vita Sackville-West’s Passenger to Teheran (1926). Critics such as Marie Louise Pratt have noted that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British travel accounts had been used as a way to transmit technical knowledge of, and authority over, the East. Sackville-West’s text throws this tradition of the genre into question through its focus on the traveler’s subjectivity. Working from Michel de Certeau’s ideas regarding railway travel and incarceration, I want to demonstrate that the traveler’s subjectivity is augmented by her position as a passenger in various modes of mobility. Ultimately I argue that the privileging of imagination and subjectivity over scientific knowledge found in Passenger to Teheran unravels the traditional epistemology of travel writing which positions the traveler as an authority figure on the East, and instead positions Sackville-West as a traveler-aesthete. This shift in the role of the travel writer reveals that while Pratt’s description characterizes some travel writing, Sackville-West’s travel project is more concerned with discovering the creative potential that travel can stimulate in the mind rather than purporting to reveal facts about the outside world. / text

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ix, 182 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / My dissertation analyzes the overlooked short works of authors and auteurs who do not fit comfortably into the conventional category of modernism due to their subtly experimental aesthetics: the versatile British author Vita Sackville-West, the Anglo-Irish novelist and short-story writer Elizabeth Bowen, and the British emigrant filmmaker Charlie Chaplin. I focus on the years 1920-1923 to gain an alternative understanding of modernism's annus mirabulus and the years immediately preceding and following it. My first chapter studies the most critically disregarded author of the project: Sackville-West. Her 1922 volume of short stories The Heir: A Love Story deserves attention for its examination of social hierarchies. Although her stories ridicule characters regardless of their class background, those who attempt to change their class status, especially when not sanctioned by heredity, are treated with the greatest contempt. The volume, with the reinforcement of the contracted short form, advocates staying within given class boundaries. The second chapter analyzes social structures in Bowen's first book of short stories, Encounters (1922). Like Sackville-West, Bowen's use of the short form complements her interest in how class hierarchies can confine characters. Bowen's portraits of classed encounters and of characters' encounters with class reveal a sense of anxiety over being confined by social status and a sense of displacement over breaking out of class groups, exposing how class divisions accentuate feelings of alienation and instability. The last chapter examines Chaplin's final short films: "The Idle Class" (1921), "Pay Day (1922), and "The Pilgrim" (1923). While placing Chaplin among the modernists complicates the canon in a positive way, it also reduces the complexity of this man and his art. Chaplin is neither a pyrotechnic modernist nor a traditional sentimentalist. Additionally, Chaplin's shorts are neither socially liberal nor conservative. Rather, Chaplin's short films flirt with experimental techniques and progressive class politics, presenting multiple perspectives on the thematic of social hierarchies. But, in the end, his films reinforce rather than overthrow traditional artistic forms and hierarchical ideas. Studying these artists elucidates how the contracted space of the short form produces the perfect room to present a nuanced portrayal of class. / Committee in charge: Paul Peppis, Chairperson, English; Michael Aronson, Member, English; Mark Quigley, Member, English; Jenifer Presto, Outside Member, Comparative Literature