This study examines the idea of escape in the lives and fiction of Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, addressing how these individuals embraced an ethos of escape that had continuously developed in Western society at least since the Enlightenment. Specifically, it explores the disassociation, displacement, and angst characterizing aesthetic modernism, feelings greatly affecting these authors and shaping their literary characters. As traditional life markers lost significance during the first quarter of the twentieth-century, authors (and their characters) found it more difficult to distinguish themselves in a world where previous value systems seemed dead and new beliefs powerless to be born. / A Dissertation submitted to the Program in Interdisciplinary Humanities in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2014. / May 16, 2014. / American, Escape, Feminism, Freedom, Literature, Nada / Includes bibliographical references. / John Fenstermaker, Professor Directing Dissertation; David Johnson, University Representative; William Cloonan, Committee Member; Eric Walker, Committee Member.

This project establishes how the struggles of modernist artists, such as James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, and Witold Gombrowicz create culture as an artistic experience, which happens in the political space in-between the artist and the audience. I argue that "politics" and "action" are necessary for this creation of culture to happen. Following Hannah Arendt's philosophy, "politics" depends on "action" and "action" is creation. At the same time, creation is evolution, in the Bergsonian sense. Following not only Arendt's philosophy but also Henri Bergson's philosophy of becoming, this dissertation explores how politics creates a culture through "action." Even though Bergson does not name action as one of his main concepts, such as durée, "action" becomes part of his philosophy regarding the struggle of the creative mind. For Arendt, "action" detaches life from a life of habit, or a life that rejects creation. Creation by these two philosophers is understood as freedom to create and to perform, and as openness to other possibilities within language, including its deformation and evolution all of them able to create a political scenario that, according to Arendt, disseminate differences. Thus, the existence of culture is only possible through politics. / A Dissertation submitted to the Program in Interdisciplinary Humanities in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2014. / March 28, 2014. / Franz Kafka, Henri Bergson, James Joyce, Modernism, Politics, Samuel Beckett / Includes bibliographical references. / S. E. Gontarski, Professor Directing Dissertation; Aimee Boutin, University Representative; Ralph Berry, Committee Member; William Cloonan, Committee Member.

Thesis (B.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Humanities, 1988. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Kyoung Soo Paik. / Thesis (B.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Humanities, 1988.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Humanities, September, September, 2020 / Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 13-16). / The Gulf of Maine is warming at a faster rate than 99.9 percent of the world ocean, a trend with uncertain implications for the last great maritime fishery: American lobster. Every year, fishermen, scientists, and managers wait to see if the fishery reverses its fantastic growth, which has been a salutary effect of climate change over the past three decades. The gulf has as many horizons as it has islands, and nobody knows the whole thing. Like the story of the blind men and the elephant, every person you ask, even the most expert, will describe a different gulf to you, and a different crisis. What's clear is that the ecosystems of the region have been shaped by many different pressures: domesticated by management, depleted by overfishing, shuffled by natural climatic cycles. The future of the gulf will depend not just on the trajectory of ocean warming, but on whether people can rethink the way we use the environment, and adapt to a changing world. / by Lucy Jakub. / S.M. / S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Humanities

Thesis (S.B. in Literature)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Humanities, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 63-64). / Introduction: James Joyce is perhaps the most talked about and least read major writer in the English language. Virtually every modernist class and every book or article on Joyce eventually reaches a point where the professor or author admits this adverse truth. Joyce's dense prose demands a reader's unwavering attention and acuity; the complicated symbolism expects the reader to be perceptive (and oftentimes knowledgeable) enough to recognize connections and ideas which the author refuses explicitly to state. This inaccessibility is doubly unfortunate. It is unfortunate first because, as one of the towering figures in the modernist movement, Joyce made invaluable and innovative contributions to literature. Second, because Joyce's art meticulously draws from the experiences he had growing up in turn-of-the-century Ireland, it vividly evokes a country oppressed from without by imperialistic Great Britain and from within by strict religious conservatism, a nation wracked by bitter political division and tired from centuries of battling British rule. Trevor Williams writes in Reading Joyce Politically that a student once asked him why it was important for a modern world plagued by its own troubles of impoverished third world countries to read Joyce: "We must study Joyce today, I said, because his life and work, originating from a colonialist context, address intimately the problems caused by unequal relationships, whether spiritual or material." In Joyce's bildungsroman A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man he explores the problem of competing identities in a colonized, oppressed culture; the book's message, however, only fully emerges once we examine not just the words Joyce uses for his story but also the order in which they come in-that is, the novel's structure. When looking at Portrait's structure, the fifth and final chapter of the book seems, upon first reading, unnecessary. Edward Garnett, the literary advisor for the publishing firm Duckworth and Company, to whom Joyce first submitted his novel, advised the publishing firm to decline the manuscript, noting that "at the end of the book there is a complete falling to bits; the pieces of writing and the thoughts are all in pieces and they fall like damp, ineffective rockets" (Joyce 320). In the century of Joyce criticism which has followed Garnett's review, countless critics have speculated why Joyce did not end his novel with the climactic close of Chapter IV, at which point Stephen stands at the edge of the shore, looks out over the waves, and discovers his calling to be an artist; they have come to vastly different conclusions. Harry Levin sees the fifth chapter as "the discursive chronicle of Stephen's rebellion" in which Joyce painstakingly develops what Stephen's approach to art will be once he leaves Ireland (22). Conversely Hugh Kenner interprets the chapter as one in which Joyce clearly removes his support from Stephen and demonstrates that his protagonist is incapable of becoming a true artist. Kenner believes "it is quite plain from the final chapter of the Portrait that we are not to accept the mode of Stephen's 'freedom' as the 'message' of the book...The dark intensity of the first four chapters is moving enough, but our impulse on being confronted with the final edition of Stephen Dedalus is to laugh." My goal in this work is to explore the purpose of Chapter V and discover how it fits into the structure of the novel as a whole. Joyce separated Chapter V into four distinct sections, delineating each section with a line of asterisks. I will be referring to each of the segments as Section 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively. Section 1 opens as Stephen finishes drinking tea at home and prepares to leave for class at his university; the section concludes at the end of Stephen's discussion with Lynch, during which he expounds upon his aesthetic theory. Section 2 begins with Stephen having just awoken from a dream and ends with the villanelle he has composed piece by piece throughout the section typed out in full. The start of Section 3 finds Stephen standing on the library steps: he is watching a flock of birds flying above him, romantically trying to read his future in the patterns of their flight. The section follows Stephen's conversation with Cranly about his decision to leave the Catholic Church and finishes with Stephen's declaration that he is willing to accept complete isolation from his community-which he defines as home, fatherland, and church-in order to express himself as freely as he can and create true art. Section 4 comprises a series of journal entries, the first of which is a description of Stephen's talk with Cranly the day before and the last of which is a prayer to the pagan Dedalus to support Stephen as he leaves Ireland and follows his calling to become an artist. ... / S.B.in Literature

Thesis: B.S., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Humanities, 1969 / Bibliography: leaves 50-51. / B.S. / B.S. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Humanities

Thesis (B.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Humanities, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 52-54). / by Kristen Nummerdor. / B.S.

Thesis (B.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Humanities, 1961. / MIT copy bound with: Proust's style, a textual analysis / Thomas Knatt. 1961. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 38). / by D. Terence Langendoen. / B.S.

Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Humanities, February 2001. / Vita. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 106-110). / by Loreto P. Ansaldo. / S.B.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Humanities, 1969 / Vita. / Includes bibliographies. / Ph. D. / Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Humanities