Doctor of Philosophy / This is a study of the composition of three Modernist first editions: Ulysses (1922), The Making of Americans (1925) and A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930). The bibliographical and figurative commitments made to being in print by Ulysses, A Draft of XXX Cantos and The Making of Americans set a coherent program for reading Modernist texts in their perfected form: in print. The editorial reception of the Modernist book has proceeded, however, with reference to the editorial and bibliographical principles established by the New Bibliographers. In deferring to the authors and manuscripts of Modernist books as the highest source of textual authority, the vital significance of being in print to literary Modernism is obscured. The figure of the ideal Book concentrates the central aesthetic, intellectual and bibliographic problem posed the Modernist book: the making of literature. The rhyme with The Making of Americans is appropriate: this book intensifies and consolidates the propositions made about objective and autonomous composition made more hesitantly by Ulysses and A Draft of XXX Cantos. These three books display a gradual refusal to equate inscription and intention; their composition effaces all traces of a sovereign creative subjectivity. The vision of the book guides Modernist composition, and requires a critical distinction be drawn between manuscripts and printed letters. Modernism must be read in print. The vestigial nostalgia for Romantic modes of textual production and creation in Ulysses is repeated on the placards and proof-pages for the book. Printed drafts are revised and reformed by the pen of the author. The finality asserted by the printed letter is only reluctantly ceded on the publication of Ulysses. The composition of A Draft of XXX Cantos represents a further transition away from the script economy of Romanticism. The interplay between authorial typescripts, early publications and the first edition of A Draft of XXX Cantos assert an intermediate order of Modernist textuality which takes the printed page as its foundation. The Making of Americans relies on the absolute objectivity and anonymity of its composition for the effect of its narrative. Objectivity is the intellectual and aesthetic strategy which produces literature rather than the personality and memory of the author. The impersonality of the apparently automatically written manuscripts and scarcely revised typescripts for The Making of Americans severs the visible links between the writing author and her page. In their unwillingness to corroborate the modes of textual generation described by the New Bibliographers, these three books thematise their own composition as the exemplary Modernist and modern mode of textual generation. The Modernist book attenuates or denies a Romantic connection between the creative hand of the author and the surface image of the page: the mechanisms of print deliberately detach the author from the literary text. The distance of the author from the scene of textual reproduction is measured by the printed book. The composition of this analytical object is not a fallacy but an actuality, commemorated in the archive, enacted by the book. Modernism is the literature of the imprimatur rather than of authorial inscription and accordingly it is towards the first editions of Modernist texts that the attentions of editors and textual scholars must be directed.

<p>This dissertation intervenes in the fields of modernist criticism and new media studies to examine an under-appreciated reciprocity between them. I argue that this reciprocity has not yet been adequately incorporated into a critical reckoning of the modernist period, a literary age too often neglected by new media studies as an epoch of "old media" productions. Even if modernist poets did create works largely intended for traditional book-bound channels, the imaginations that produced those works were forged in the combustible mix of new media and technologies that emerged in the early 20th century.</p><p>The argument focuses on the poetics of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, innovative poets who composed some of the most prescient, insightful writings on record about the connections linking technological and poetical developments. Through an examination of these poets' speculative writings, I argue that their experimental poetic methods emerged from their understanding of the challenges posed by new media and technologies. Among these challenges were new velocities of signification that emerged with the proliferation of the telegraph, new capacities for the storage of information that arrived with the introduction of the phonograph, an altered relationship to language itself with the externalized alphabet of the typewriter, and a new feel for how meaning could be generated through the montage logic of the cinema.</p><p>Drawing on a critical perspective derived from Martin Heidegger, pragmatist philosophers, Frankfurt School theorists and new media scholars such as Friedrich Kittler and Marshall McLuhan, I examine how modernist poetry, when framed as a media event, can help us understand how technological and media shifts influence our conceptions of our own inner and outer domains.</p> / Dissertation

<p>The first-person Hebrew narrative of the Persian courtier sent to be governor of Judah, the "Nehemiah Memorial" (or NM: Neh 1-2:20; 3:33-7:3; 13:4-31), is a crucial text for understanding how elements within ancient Judaism conceived of their relationship to the Persian Achaemenid Empire, which ruled over Judah from the 6th to the 4th centuries BCE. This dissertation investigates NM via the issue of genre. Scholarship on NM in recent years has reached an impasse on this topic, suggesting that NM resists identification with any one genre. Newer developments in genre theory, however, offer resources for understanding genre not simply as a classificatory matter but also as a malleable relationship between writers and readers that can be exploited for rhetorical effect. NM makes use of two main genres: a "foreign court narrative" (cf. Daniel, Esther, and the Joseph narrative) slowly transforms into a biographical inscription or "official memorial", a genre attested throughout the ancient Near East. The subtle combination of these different genres suggests that Nehemiah's pious advocacy for his people and his city carries over from his role as Judean courtier before the Persian king to his role as governor over the Persian province of Judah. It also, however, ultimately underscores the ideological incompatibility of these genres, just as the goals of the subversive courtier at the mercy of the Persian king are at odds with the goals of the governor representing that king. Early readers of NM responded to these contradictions. A literary investigation of Ezra-Nehemiah reveals that editors of that book incorporated Nehemiah's story, but subtly corrected it, whether by reframing his actions in terms of the work of community as a whole and the Torah (Neh 10, Neh 12:44-13:3) or by contrasting him to the superior reformer Ezra (Ezra 7-10). The book of Ezra-Nehemiah thus mutes the signals sent by NM's use of genre indicating that the authority for Nehemiah's reforms, which were essential to Jerusalem's restoration, derived not from Israelite tradition or from the will of the people, but from the power of Judah's imperial masters.</p> / Dissertation

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 176-199). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

The present report applies Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory to the study of ancient Judaean apocalypticism in its historical, socioeconomic, and political contexts. Its central thesis is that each Judaean apocalyptic discourse is waged against the dominant ideology of its society and its perceived sustainers and beneficiaries. The particular focus in this report is Flavian ideology—the dominant ideology of the Roman Empire in the last three decades of the first century CE—and its subversion by the apocalyptic discourse of the late-first century CE text Fourth Ezra. After the Romans quashed a revolt in the province of Judaea and sacked the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE, the soon-to-be Roman emperor Vespasian, and his sons Titus and Domitian, initiated and maintained an empire-wide discourse proclaiming Iudaea capta (‘Judaea captured’). By means of coins, monuments, statues, literary propaganda, and the institution of a new Judaean tax, the Flavian emperors magnified their successful suppression of this provincial revolt in order to legitimate their dynasty. This discourse, which quickly became misrecognized in society and persisted long after the tenure of the Flavian dynasty, marked all Judaeans throughout the empire as foreign rebels and barbarians. The author of Fourth Ezra challenged Flavian ideology, and the Iudaea capta discourse in particular, by “revealing”—that is, persuading his audience to believe—that Rome’s victory over Judaea is part of the divine plan, the glory of Rome is fleeting, and the righteous ones who keep God’s Law will still have an opportunity for redemption. A focus of the present analysis is the figure of a lamenting woman employed by both discourses. Whereas the Flavian discourse used a dejected Judaean woman to represent Judaea after the Roman victory, Fourth Ezra’s apocalyptic discourse reveals a similar figure of a lamenting Judaean woman to be Mother Zion, and has her transform into the new, eschatological Jerusalem. When these two discourses are viewed together, regardless of direct influence or dependence, it is clear that the apocalyptic discourse subverts Flavian ideology. In the process, the author of Fourth Ezra recycles power by simultaneously delegitimating the Flavian emperors and legitimating his own social circle of sage-leaders. / text

This dissertation is a study of four ancient stories about the creation and transmission of all or part of the Hebrew Bible: Moses and the stone tablets (Exodus 32-34), Josiah and the discovery of the law-book (2 Kings 22-23), the scroll of Jeremiah and Baruch (Jeremiah 36), and Ezra's legendary restoration of the entire Bible (4 Ezra 14). Each story is a variation on the common narrative pattern of textual loss and recovery, a fact that is noteworthy because this narrative theme stands in tension with one of the cardinal aspirations of scribal culture in antiquity, as it is known from colophons: the fixity, permanence, and inviolability of writing. When the scribal creators of biblical literature told stories about the texts they produced, they represented the text in its early history as vulnerable and threatened. The purpose of this dissertation is to account for that counter-intuitive choice. My central argument is that in each of the three biblical stories, the common narrative pattern of textual loss and recovery serves as the vehicle for a particular argument related to the textualization of divine revelation, and that the stories function in ways that a plotline of uninterrupted textual transmission would not. Stories of textual loss and recovery can be viewed as strategic transactions in which the ideal of the pristine text is sacrificed in order to express other arguments about divine written revelation. After discussing three texts from the Hebrew Bible, I discuss the legend of Ezra's miraculous restoration of the entire Bible after the exile, reconstructing the biblical-exegetical background of 4 Ezra 14 and tracing the meanings of the story in later Jewish, Christian, and Islamic literature. / Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

Abstract Not Available.

<p>This dissertation uses Nietzsche's writings on truth and metaphor as a lens through which to reconsider the contribution that modernist art sought to make to both the understanding and, ultimately, the reconstruction of everyday life. It begins with a consideration of the sentiment, first articulated on a wide scale by the artists and philosophers of the romantic era, that something essential to the cohesion of individual and social experience has been lost during the turbulent transition to modernity. By situating Nietzsche's thought vis-à-vis the decline of nineteenth-century idealism in both its Continental and Victorian forms, I demonstrate how his principal texts brought to an advanced stage of philosophical expression a set of distinctly post-romantic concerns about the role of mind and language in the construction of reality that would soon come to define the practice of modernism in philosophy and the arts. Nietzsche's contribution to moral philosophy is typically regarded as a skeptical, and even wholly negative, one. Yet a central element of his thought is obscured, I argue, when we fail to account for its positive conviction that "higher moralities are, or ought to be, possible." Because his philosophy attempts to diagnose "genealogically" the concrete social, historical, and psychological conditions under which truth-relations are generated and maintained within a given cultural framework, it is in fact every bit as constructive as it is deconstructive, involving a sustained and ethically significant reflection on the character of normativity itself.</p><p>This initial confrontation with Nietzsche's philosophy sets the stage for the studies of individual artists--the American poets Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, as well as the Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman--for whom these traditionally epistemological concerns about the nature of representation also shade naturally into the domain of ethics. In these chapters, I demonstrate how aesthetic modernism produces a range of sophisticated responses to the predicament of relativism that Nietzsche articulated while reaching sometimes radically different conclusions than Nietzsche about the nature and extent of human agency in the modern world. This enables us to see how modernism makes an essential contribution to what the philosopher Charles Taylor has characterized as the broader cultural effort to "overcome epistemology" by exploring the structures of intentionality and fostering in us a basic "awareness about the limits and conditions of our knowing"--a project to which modernist art and philosophy both make essential contributions.</p> / Dissertation

The essay examines Robert E. Park's theory of the role news and newspapers have in processes of social interaction, and of the role they consequently play in the constitution of society. Park's theoretical work is often cited for its appreciation of the dynamic aspects of social interaction. This perspective is evident in his analysis of news and newspapers. / In The Immigrant Press and its Control (1922), Park examined how immigrant groups responded to the experience of immigration and how their newspapers contributed to that response. / Park adopted from American pragmatism a definition of pragmatic or 'rational' social interaction and applied it to interaction over news. For Park, attention to newspapers and discussion of news tended not to favour adherence to tradition, but encouraged a pragmatic or rational attitude. In articles on news and public opinion written in the 1940's, Park saw attention to news as a potential threat to belief systems and as a source of social conflict. Challenges ta fundamental values lead to blind, defensive reactions and the behavior proper to a 'crowd'. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Doctor of Philosophy / This is a study of the composition of three Modernist first editions: Ulysses (1922), The Making of Americans (1925) and A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930). The bibliographical and figurative commitments made to being in print by Ulysses, A Draft of XXX Cantos and The Making of Americans set a coherent program for reading Modernist texts in their perfected form: in print. The editorial reception of the Modernist book has proceeded, however, with reference to the editorial and bibliographical principles established by the New Bibliographers. In deferring to the authors and manuscripts of Modernist books as the highest source of textual authority, the vital significance of being in print to literary Modernism is obscured. The figure of the ideal Book concentrates the central aesthetic, intellectual and bibliographic problem posed the Modernist book: the making of literature. The rhyme with The Making of Americans is appropriate: this book intensifies and consolidates the propositions made about objective and autonomous composition made more hesitantly by Ulysses and A Draft of XXX Cantos. These three books display a gradual refusal to equate inscription and intention; their composition effaces all traces of a sovereign creative subjectivity. The vision of the book guides Modernist composition, and requires a critical distinction be drawn between manuscripts and printed letters. Modernism must be read in print. The vestigial nostalgia for Romantic modes of textual production and creation in Ulysses is repeated on the placards and proof-pages for the book. Printed drafts are revised and reformed by the pen of the author. The finality asserted by the printed letter is only reluctantly ceded on the publication of Ulysses. The composition of A Draft of XXX Cantos represents a further transition away from the script economy of Romanticism. The interplay between authorial typescripts, early publications and the first edition of A Draft of XXX Cantos assert an intermediate order of Modernist textuality which takes the printed page as its foundation. The Making of Americans relies on the absolute objectivity and anonymity of its composition for the effect of its narrative. Objectivity is the intellectual and aesthetic strategy which produces literature rather than the personality and memory of the author. The impersonality of the apparently automatically written manuscripts and scarcely revised typescripts for The Making of Americans severs the visible links between the writing author and her page. In their unwillingness to corroborate the modes of textual generation described by the New Bibliographers, these three books thematise their own composition as the exemplary Modernist and modern mode of textual generation. The Modernist book attenuates or denies a Romantic connection between the creative hand of the author and the surface image of the page: the mechanisms of print deliberately detach the author from the literary text. The distance of the author from the scene of textual reproduction is measured by the printed book. The composition of this analytical object is not a fallacy but an actuality, commemorated in the archive, enacted by the book. Modernism is the literature of the imprimatur rather than of authorial inscription and accordingly it is towards the first editions of Modernist texts that the attentions of editors and textual scholars must be directed.