Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Sydney, 2006. / Title from title screen (viewed 19 March 2008). Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Dept. of English, Faculty of Arts. Degree awarded 2006; thesis submitted 2005. Includes bibliographical references. Also issued in print.

Zugl.: Frankfurt (Main), Univ., Magisterarbeit, 2001

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Notre Dame, 2004. / Thesis directed by John C. Cavadini for the Department of Theology. "July 2004." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 211-225).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1973. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliography.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Prenant pour point de départ le corps pour l’examiner au prisme de la technologie, cette études’intéresse aux représentations du corps dans quatre textes majeurs de Djuna Barnes et de GertrudeStein. Dans The Book of Repulsive Women de Barnes, les corps fragmentés décrits dans les poèmesdialoguent avec les représentations mécanomorphiques du corps féminins chez les Dadaïstes. Lerecueil s’apparente à une série de tableaux vivants exhibant des corps mécanisés vus depuis les ramesdu métro aérien new-yorkais. La discussion envisage ensuite Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights de Stein etles connections entre la métaphore de l’électricité et l’écriture cinématique de Stein. Le lien entre cespratiques est l’automatisme que Stein a étudié chez William James et qui transforme son texte en corpsautomate. Dans cette perspective, Wars I Have Seen de Stein constitue une expérience linguistique àcomparer avec l’écriture conceptuelle de Bob Carlton Brown. Chirurgienne littéraire, Stein opère letexte à l’aide de prothèses verbales. La dernière oeuvre étudiée dans cette thèse est The Antiphon deBarnes, qui est lue à l’aide de la relation conceptuelle entre le corps violenté de Barnes et le corps dutexte autobiographique, et peut être décodée à l’analyse de ses procédés métadramatiques. Dans ledernier chapitre, les deux auteurs sont repensées à l’aulne de leur incarnation personnelle dans leurstextes et des diverses manifestations de la notion du corps et de celle de la technologie. / Having as a starting point the theme of the body and exploring it through the prism oftechnology, this study depicts its representations in four major texts by Djuna Barnes and GertrudeStein. Starting with Barnes’s The Book of Repulsive Women, the fragmented bodies depicted in thepoems come in dialogue with Dadaists’ mechanomorphic representations of female bodies. Thecollection is seen as a series of tableaux vivants displaying mechanized bodies through the alteringpresence of the El. The discussion, then, moves on to Stein’s Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights andconnections are drawn between the metaphor of electricity and Stein’s cinematic writing. The linkingaspect of this association is the practice of “automatism” that Stein explored through William James,which leads to the point that her work is an “automaton” body of text. Following this, Stein’s Wars IHave Seen, is examined as a linguistic experiment compared to Bob Carlton Brown’s conceptualwriting. Stein as a linguistic surgeon operates on the text’s body with the help of word prosthesis. Thelast work in this study is Barnes’s The Antiphon, which is explored via the conceptual correlation ofBarnes’s violated body with her autobiographical textual body, examined through decoding Barnes’smetatheatrical devices. In the final chapter, these two writers are reexamined through their personalembodiment in the texts and through the various manifestations of the themes of body and technology.

This thesis examines the publishing career of Gertrude Stein, an American expatriate writer whose experimental style left her largely unpublished throughout much of her career. Stein’s various attempts at dissemination illustrate the importance she placed on being paid for her work and highlight the paradoxical relationship between Stein and her audience. This study shows that there was an intimate relationship between literary modernism and mainstream culture as demonstrated by Stein’s need for the public recognition and financial gains by which success had long been measured. Stein’s attempt to embrace the definition of the author as a professional who earned a living through writing is indicative of the developments in art throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, and it problematizes modern authorship by reemphasizing the importance of commercial success to artists previously believed to have been indifferent to the reaction of their audience. / iv, 89 leaves ; 29 cm

The purpose of this study is to show transitions between verbal and visual meaning in ordinary language, based on philosophical concepts and conceptual artworks. It offers models for artistic research and collaboration in arts and science. Shared experiences in ordinary language are fundamental to this thesis and make it an accessible and trans-disciplinary study. Language as such, is approached from different practices and disciplines and becomes the central object of investigation. The research introduces a general set of mechanisms in language, stemming from the Wittgensteinian notion of the language-game. The study examines the possibility of a meeting between the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and the writer Gertrude Stein in a linguistic, biographical and poetic sense. The main claim is that Wittgenstein and Stein share the understanding of language as a game, which is a fruitful principle for artistic and poetic production. Gertrude Stein developed a dimension in her writing which partly succeeds in showing this notion of creating meaning-as-practice and making sense on the ‘edge’ of conventional meaning. In this way she augments Wittgenstein’s idea of the language-game and puts it into practice, tests its limits on her own language and on the reader’s habits. The artistic works represented in this thesis are equally experimental tests of Wittgenstein’s meaning-as-use hypothesis. They put his ideas into practice. They extend the research with strategies from the arts, poetry and fiction. The methodology of the research is based on Wittgenstein’s notion of meaning as context-dependent use. This concept defines the meaning of a word by the way it is used in a specific context. This perspective is then challenged with visual artistic work. This hypothesis is tested throughout the research by applying tools and concepts from several practices, like computer linguistic tools, collaboration with writers and artists from other fields and autonomous visual and poetic work to augment the study of facts. Conceptual artworks, often produced in collaboration, function as language experiments, or language-games. The Wittgensteinian differentiation between what can be shown and what can be said is examined. The context of the research lies in the practices developed as a conceptual artist in which theoretical research informs artistic practice. This thesis, on the border between verbal and visual language, is founded upon antecedent studies in philosophy of language and the practice of Fine Arts. Against this background the research focuses on the relationship between word, context and meaning: issues of communication, ordinary language, words and their composition, context-based meaning, naming visual phenomena, examination of word-and-world-relationships and vocabularies. Main sources are the major works and biographies of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gertrude Stein, the critical work of Marjorie Perloff, language philosophers concerned with ordinary language and the contrastive corpus linguistic approach. The results of this research are generated by several interdisciplinary productive methods. Artworks, poetic and scientific work, all of which employ modes of language, and whose their domains overlap. Additionally, the notion of meeting acts as model metaphor for the development of a solid trans-disciplinary methodology for research between science and the arts. One major result of comparing their ideas on language is reflected in the meeting of the language used by Wittgenstein and Stein. Their meeting is materialized in the computer generated Shared Vocabulary, which is a list of words which both Wittgenstein and Stein used in their writing. It applies linguistic tools from contrastive corpus linguistics to compare their vocabularies (corpora), which offers new methods for investigating the works of the philosopher Wittgenstein and writer Stein. Generally, this thesis may act as an introduction to language as ideal fundament for interdisciplinary study. The application of the principle of the language-game (Wittgenstein) is a significant of displaying possible strategies for artists and researchers who work transdisciplinarily. The research results directly inform practice and practitioners from other fields, which means that collaboration is central to the research. It implies that language permeates every sort of research, art and its discourse. It also suggests that the meaning of words and images depend on their use, which extends the Wittgensteinian meaning-as-use hypothesis to visual language. The findings of the research on vocabularies are quite specific, but they overlap with offering simple general mechanisms of the language-game. The consequent alliance of the discussion with the language of the everyday makes the research a general contribution to everyone who is genuinely interested in language and the arts.

From W.H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety to Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, modernists have frequently attested to the anxiety permeating members of modern civilisation. While critics have treated anxiety as a consequence of the historical circumstances of the modernist period—two World Wars and the disintegration of European empires—my aim is to view anxiety in both a psychoanalytical and political light and investigate modernist anxiety as a narrative ploy that diagnoses the modern condition. Defining modernist anxiety as feelings of fear and alienation that reveal the uncanny relation between self and ideological state apparatuses which themselves suffer from trauma, perversion, and neurosis—I focus on the works of four key modernist writers—Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and Gertrude Stein. These authors have repeatedly constructed the mind as an open system, making the psyche one of the sites most vulnerable to the power of colonial ideology but also the modernist space par excellence to narrate the building and falling of empire. While the first part of my dissertation investigates the neurosis of post-war London in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the second part of my thesis discusses the perverse demands of the colonial system in Forster’s A Passage to India and Woolf’s The Waves, arguing that Woolf and Forster extend Freud’s understanding of repetition compulsion by demonstrating that the colonial system derives a “perverse” pleasure from repeating its own impossible demands. The concluding section of my dissertation discusses Woolf and Stein’s queer primitivism as the antidote to anxiety and the transcendence of perversity. My dissertation revives Freud’s role in the modernist project: Freud not only provides avant-garde writers with a theory of consciousness, but his construction of the fragmented psyche—a construction which had come to dominate modernist renditions of internality by the early-twentieth century—functions as a political stratagem for an imperial critique. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2013-03-11 16:48:57.865

A key term in the cultural criticism of Walter Benjamin is his notion of "reception in distraction" as an antidote to ideology's domination over the mass society in the modern age. This dissertation attempts to illuminate this idea by offering case studies of three projects that summon into existence a new kind of reader, one capable of a trained apperception we may describe as "distracted."; One objective of the mass society according to a Frankfurt model of culture is the erasure of the subject; reception in distraction serves at once to create a space for the social dream and to re-inscribe the subject at the moment of reception through an insistence on its unruly, embodied presence. "Reception in Distraction" creates a cognitive space for disengagement from ideology, modeling what Michael Denning called the "dream work of the social." Critical theory is thus available to the mass public in the form of the "dream of history" that is solely accessible to a distracted apperception and whose subject is the faint possibility that the crisis of the present may be redeemed and repaired in the future. This project attempts to locate this dream of history in the autobiographical writings of Gertrude Stein, the detective fiction of Kenneth Fearing and the late silent cinema of Charlie Chaplin, each of which illustrates clearly the manner in which "distraction" functions to generate contradiction in the face of ideology's mass cultural form. Stein's experiments with the autobiographical form call for exactly this manner of reception, for which "Alice B. Toklas" becomes a key model. Similarly, Kenneth Fearing's Marxist detective novel The Big Clock and Modern Times , Charlie Chaplin's final silent film, reflect on the possibility of a productive reception-in-distraction that may co-opt the social forms of capitalism into a project of resistance and counter-discourse. "Distraction" is therefore more than merely an attitude of reception: it occasions a cognitive distance from ideology that is a key form of critical theory in the modern period.