Drawing on criminological history, visual studies, modernist scholarship, sociological treatises, and theories of archives and collection, this study proposes that literary texts of the early twentieth century approached the problem of knowing and representing others through collections. Inspired by the supposed divide between the city and the small town, modernist writers depict—but also resist—a vision of the group and the individual as inscrutable. The criminological apparatus of the turn of the century attends to both urban and provincial modes of existence, promising the small circles, close study of individuals, and knowability of the small town while also acceding to the urban vision of people in vast unknowable quantities and a perpetual psychic distance from others. Criminology was positioned, and positioned itself, as decidedly modern in its data-driven approach to managing the presumed unknowability of the individual and the group. The texts in this study continually grapple with accessing individual identity amidst the masses of modern humanity, and articulate this struggle through representation of small groups, circles, and coteries. It is through the enclosed set of people that Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, and Carl Van Vechten demonstrate a fixation on both the individual and the group, and the relationship between the two. Their literary output and personal associations—which center on observation, portraiture, and collection—are fundamentally criminological in their efforts to negotiate the distance and intimacy of modern life.

The thesis begins by exploring Stein’s autobiographical connections to the Jamesian concepts of bottom nature and habit, in an attempt to demonstrate that both, in the pen of Gertrude Stein, are as connected to classical virtue theory and the development of character as a moral state and characters as created persons within her creative oeuvre, as they are connected to psychological experiments in William James’ laboratory. In wading through what may seem to be muddy waters of Stein’s slippery definitions and circular sentences, the thesis shows that Stein uses the discourse of classical virtue theory to achieve her goal—breaking down clear barriers to the virtuous life as classically understood and subverting the very building blocks of Western thought generally. Lastly, “Melanctha: Each One As She May” will become a case study through which the thesis wrestles in detail with Stein’s complicated virtue and character project as she pulls virtuous action into a separate sphere from the virtuous person in order to explore what human nature is, or, as she says, “the whole thing about men and women that is interesting.”

Thesis (M.A.)--Bowling Green State University, 2008. / Document formatted into pages; contains v, 93 p. Includes bibliographical references.

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.

Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 217-233). Also available online in ProQuest, free to University of Oregon users.

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

<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

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / O escopo desta tese é a relação entre a prosa-poética da escritora norte-americana Gertrude Stein, através de seus retratos e peças, e traduções intersemióticas para dança contemporânea. O corpus analítico articula os retratos Orta or One Dancing, If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso, A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson, e as peças Four Saints in Three Acts, Listen to Me e Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters de Gertrude Stein e os espetáculos de dança [5.sobre.o.mesmo], Shutters Shut, Always Now Slowly, ,e[dez episódios sobre a prosa topovisual de gertrude stein]. A natureza dos campos colocados em comparação literatura & dança demandou a conjugação de duas vertentes de estudo ligadas às especificidades performática e tradutória dos objetos selecionados: de um lado, seguimos encaminhamentos surgidos de uma derivação específica da Comparatística tradicional, os Estudos Interartes ou Artes Comparativas; de outro, os Estudos de Intermidialidade, relacionados aos Estudos das Mídias. A abordagem dos exemplos analisados sob a perspectiva comparativa baseia-se em Estudos de Tradução, com especial referência à noção de transcriação de Haroldo de Campos, e na semiótica de Charles S.Peirce. No primeiro capítulo, definimos nossa abordagem teórica; a seguir, apresentamos a obra de Gertrude Stein e as principais propriedades que transformaram sua obra em uma das principais referências literárias e estéticas do século XX; e, para finalizar, analisamos as traduções, com especial atenção para a transcriação da percepção do tempo e da construção sintática steineanas. Concluímos sugerindo que as traduções para dança são modos de interpretação e leitura dos textos literários, bem como formas radicais de crítica de arte ou literária / The scope of this dissertation is the relation between the poetic-prose of American writer Gertrude Stein, through her portraits and plays, and its intersemiotic translations to contemporary dance. The analytic corpus articulates Gertrude Steins portraits Orta or One Dancing, If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso, A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson, and plays Four Saints in Three Acts, Listen to Me and Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters and the dance performances [5.sobre.o.mesmo], Shutters Shut, Always Now Slowly, ,e[dez episódios sobre a prosa topovisual de gertrude stein]. The nature of the compared fields literature and dance demanded the combination of two strands of study related to the performative and translational specificity of the selected objects: on one hand, we follow a derivation from the traditional comparatistic, the Interart Studies or Comparative Arts; on the other hand, Intermediality Studies, related to Media Studies. The approach applied to the examples under a comparatistic perspective is based on Translation Studies, with special reference to Haroldo de Camposs notion of transcreation, and it is also based on Charles S. Peirces semiotics. On the first chapter, we define our theoretical approach; following, we present Gertrude Steins oeuvre and its major properties that transformed it in the one of the main literary and aesthetic references of the twentieth century; and, to finish, we analyze the translations, with special regard to the transcreation of Steins time perception and syntactic constructions. We conclude suggesting that the translations to dance are interpretation and reading modes of the literary texts, as well as radical forms of literary and artistic critic

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / O escopo desta tese é a relação entre a prosa-poética da escritora norte-americana Gertrude Stein, através de seus retratos e peças, e traduções intersemióticas para dança contemporânea. O corpus analítico articula os retratos Orta or One Dancing, If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso, A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson, e as peças Four Saints in Three Acts, Listen to Me e Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters de Gertrude Stein e os espetáculos de dança [5.sobre.o.mesmo], Shutters Shut, Always Now Slowly, ,e[dez episódios sobre a prosa topovisual de gertrude stein]. A natureza dos campos colocados em comparação literatura & dança demandou a conjugação de duas vertentes de estudo ligadas às especificidades performática e tradutória dos objetos selecionados: de um lado, seguimos encaminhamentos surgidos de uma derivação específica da Comparatística tradicional, os Estudos Interartes ou Artes Comparativas; de outro, os Estudos de Intermidialidade, relacionados aos Estudos das Mídias. A abordagem dos exemplos analisados sob a perspectiva comparativa baseia-se em Estudos de Tradução, com especial referência à noção de transcriação de Haroldo de Campos, e na semiótica de Charles S.Peirce. No primeiro capítulo, definimos nossa abordagem teórica; a seguir, apresentamos a obra de Gertrude Stein e as principais propriedades que transformaram sua obra em uma das principais referências literárias e estéticas do século XX; e, para finalizar, analisamos as traduções, com especial atenção para a transcriação da percepção do tempo e da construção sintática steineanas. Concluímos sugerindo que as traduções para dança são modos de interpretação e leitura dos textos literários, bem como formas radicais de crítica de arte ou literária / The scope of this dissertation is the relation between the poetic-prose of American writer Gertrude Stein, through her portraits and plays, and its intersemiotic translations to contemporary dance. The analytic corpus articulates Gertrude Steins portraits Orta or One Dancing, If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso, A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson, and plays Four Saints in Three Acts, Listen to Me and Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters and the dance performances [5.sobre.o.mesmo], Shutters Shut, Always Now Slowly, ,e[dez episódios sobre a prosa topovisual de gertrude stein]. The nature of the compared fields literature and dance demanded the combination of two strands of study related to the performative and translational specificity of the selected objects: on one hand, we follow a derivation from the traditional comparatistic, the Interart Studies or Comparative Arts; on the other hand, Intermediality Studies, related to Media Studies. The approach applied to the examples under a comparatistic perspective is based on Translation Studies, with special reference to Haroldo de Camposs notion of transcreation, and it is also based on Charles S. Peirces semiotics. On the first chapter, we define our theoretical approach; following, we present Gertrude Steins oeuvre and its major properties that transformed it in the one of the main literary and aesthetic references of the twentieth century; and, to finish, we analyze the translations, with special regard to the transcreation of Steins time perception and syntactic constructions. We conclude suggesting that the translations to dance are interpretation and reading modes of the literary texts, as well as radical forms of literary and artistic critic