Thesis advisor: Marjorie Howes / Epistolary Modernism reads British and Irish writing of the 1920s through the 1950s with a focus on the way authors use fictional letters and verse epistles to communicate a renewed sense of literature as public speech, even as they saw privacy curtailed and surveillance increased. Letters enable late modernist writers to call attention to the way literature straddles the gap between private experience and public declaration. Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen all use letters to reveal a late modernist belief in literature as an exchange between an author and a reader -- a bridge between times and perspectives -- even as they trouble the possibility of any clear communication or meaning. The implied exchange in letters requires a sense of correspondence: a letter demands both interpretation and a reply. But a letter is always already too late. Epistolary Modernism reads letters as a stand-in for the literary period of late modernism itself, an epoch of writing characterized by a sense of coming too late to history and to literary tradition. The project considers fiction and poetry published in the 1920s through the 1950s in relation to historical and cultural events of the period, arguing that the sense of belatedness and temporal disjuncture letters create fundamentally links the structure and materiality of the text to the social and political concerns of its author. These writers composed literature attuned to historical events and the simultaneously occurring ordinary moment, leading to an increasingly interconnected, and socially-responsible art borne from the historical impasse of the thirties, the Second World War and its political legacy. Letters enable these writers to continue aesthetic experiments while simultaneously addressing politics, society, and the purpose of literature itself. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

<p>This dissertation analyzes the period of late modernism (roughly 1930-1965) by attending to an understudied subgenre: fictions that depict the experiences of the dead in the afterworld. The project originated from my observation that a number of late modernist authors resorted to this type of writing, leading to the question of what made them do so. Such a project addresses the periodization and definition of late modernism, a period that has received relatively little critical attention until recent years. It also contributes indirectly to the study of European culture before and after the Second World War, identifying clusters of concerns around common experiences of belief and time during the period. </p><p>To approach this question, I adopt a situational approach. In this type of reading, I attempt to reconstruct the situations (both literary and extra-literary) of specific authors using historical and biographical material, then interpret the literary work as a response to that situation. Such a methodology allows me to ask what similarities between situations led to these convergent responses of afterlife writing. My primary objects are afterlife novels and plays by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Wyndham Lewis, Flann O'Brien, and Samuel Beckett.</p><p>I find that the subgenre provided late modernists with the literary tools to figure and contest changes in experiences of belief and time in mid-20th century Europe. The situation of modernism is marked by <italic>the loss of belief in the world</italic>, a failure in the faith in action to transform the world, and <italic>the serialization of time</italic>, the treatment of time as static repetition and change as something that can only occur at the individual rather than the systemic level. While earlier modernists challenged these trends with the production of idiosyncratic private mythologies, late modernists encountered them as brute facts, leading to a shift in aesthetic sensibilities and strategies. Belief was split between private opinion and external submission to authority, and change reappeared under the figure of catastrophe.</p> / Dissertation

This dissertation corrects the notion that fiction written in the late 1920s through the early 1940s fails to achieve the mastery and innovation of high modernism. It posits late modernism as a literary dispensation that instead pushes beyond high modernism's narrative innovations in order to fully express individuals' lived experience in the era between world wars. This dissertation claims novels by Elizabeth Bowen, Evelyn Waugh, and Samuel Beckett, as exemplars of a late modernism characterized by invocation and redeployment of conventionalized narrative forms in service of fresh explorations of the dislocation, inauthenticity, and alienation that characterize this era. By deforming and repurposing formal conventions, these writers construct entirely new forms whose disfigured likenesses to the genres they manipulate reveals a critical orientation to the canon. These writers' reconfigurations of forms--including the bildungsroman, the epistolary novel, and autobiography--furthermore reveal the extent to which such conventionalized genres coerce and prescribe a unified and autonomous subjectivity. By dismantling these genres from within, Bowen, Waugh, and Beckett reveal their mechanics to be instrumental in coercing into being a notion of the subject that is both limiting and delimited. These authors also invoke popular forms--including the Gothic aesthetic, imperial adventure narrative, and detective fiction--to reveal that non-canonical texts, too, participate in the process by which narrative inevitably posits consciousness as its premise. I draw upon Tyrus Miller's conception of late modernism to explicate how these authors' various engagements with established forms simultaneously perform immanent critique and narrative innovation. This dissertation also endorses David Lloyd's assertion that canonical narrative forms are instrumental in producing subjectivity within text and thereby act as a coercive exemplar for readers. I invoke several critics' engagements with conventional genres' narrative mechanics to explicate this process. By examining closely the admixture of narrative forms that churns beneath the surfaces of these texts, I aim to pinpoint how the deformation of conventionalized forms can yield a fresh and distinctly late modernist vision of selfhood.

The key issue in recent debates of Christian apologetics is whether there is any common ground of data and criteria between believers and unbelievers. Two main schools are divided on this issue, namely: evidential and presuppositional apologetics. The evidential apologists claim that a common ground exists, and that objective proofs of theism are possible from this common ground. In contrast, the presuppositional apologists argue that there is no common ground; and they maintain that theoretical arguments (including apologetic ones) are unavoidably prejudiced by religious presuppositions. In this study, both sides are claimed to have their own flaws. The former apologetics has the flaw that its epistemic foundation (i.e., “classical foundationalism”) is fatally defective; and it is criticised by the reformational philosophical tradition, as well as secular contemporary (postmodern) epistemology. In contrast, the latter apologetics has the flaw that when the existence of common ground is entirely denied, the problems of circular reasoning (hence, relativism) and total communication breakdown are unavoidable. In order to clarify and deepen the issue, the tradition of reformational philosophy, which is represented by Kuyper, Dooyeweerd and Van Til is first examined; and it is shown that all three scholars struggle with the tension between antithesis and common ground; and they attempt their own solution. Secondly, the contemporary anti-foundationalist epistemology is examined; and it is shown that the same tension exists between “radical” and “moderate” postmodern (anti-foundationalist) epistemologies; and their debate is on-going – without any satisfactory conclusion. As a solution, it is suggested that the notion of common ground should be distinguished by the ontological and epistemological dimensions. From the epistemological standpoint, all knowledge is prejudiced; and no objective conclusion (on the issue of e.g., theism) can be arrived at by so-called “neutral” rational arguments. However, from the ontological standpoint, it is undeniable that all kinds of knowledge are made possible by certain universal (transcendental) conditions, which constitute the ontic common ground. In this distinction, the confusion is caused by the false assumption that the ontic common ground is meant to function as an epistemic neutral criterion. In contrast, this study argues that the ontic common ground functions only as the condition for the possibility of legitimate knowledge (including apologetic arguments). As a result, this study claims that traditional apologetics, based on objective theistic proofs should be abandoned, and that (radical) presuppositional apologetics needs to be modified. Therefore, as an alternative approach, a new “integral apologetics” is proposed – on the basis of Dooyeweerd’s modal theory of reality. This approach emphasizes the need to utilize different types of knowledge, which together could strengthen the apologetic persuasion towards Christian theism, and take into consideration of the whole context of apologetic dialogue. / PhD (International Trade), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

The key issue in recent debates of Christian apologetics is whether there is any common ground of data and criteria between believers and unbelievers. Two main schools are divided on this issue, namely: evidential and presuppositional apologetics. The evidential apologists claim that a common ground exists, and that objective proofs of theism are possible from this common ground. In contrast, the presuppositional apologists argue that there is no common ground; and they maintain that theoretical arguments (including apologetic ones) are unavoidably prejudiced by religious presuppositions. In this study, both sides are claimed to have their own flaws. The former apologetics has the flaw that its epistemic foundation (i.e., “classical foundationalism”) is fatally defective; and it is criticised by the reformational philosophical tradition, as well as secular contemporary (postmodern) epistemology. In contrast, the latter apologetics has the flaw that when the existence of common ground is entirely denied, the problems of circular reasoning (hence, relativism) and total communication breakdown are unavoidable. In order to clarify and deepen the issue, the tradition of reformational philosophy, which is represented by Kuyper, Dooyeweerd and Van Til is first examined; and it is shown that all three scholars struggle with the tension between antithesis and common ground; and they attempt their own solution. Secondly, the contemporary anti-foundationalist epistemology is examined; and it is shown that the same tension exists between “radical” and “moderate” postmodern (anti-foundationalist) epistemologies; and their debate is on-going – without any satisfactory conclusion. As a solution, it is suggested that the notion of common ground should be distinguished by the ontological and epistemological dimensions. From the epistemological standpoint, all knowledge is prejudiced; and no objective conclusion (on the issue of e.g., theism) can be arrived at by so-called “neutral” rational arguments. However, from the ontological standpoint, it is undeniable that all kinds of knowledge are made possible by certain universal (transcendental) conditions, which constitute the ontic common ground. In this distinction, the confusion is caused by the false assumption that the ontic common ground is meant to function as an epistemic neutral criterion. In contrast, this study argues that the ontic common ground functions only as the condition for the possibility of legitimate knowledge (including apologetic arguments). As a result, this study claims that traditional apologetics, based on objective theistic proofs should be abandoned, and that (radical) presuppositional apologetics needs to be modified. Therefore, as an alternative approach, a new “integral apologetics” is proposed – on the basis of Dooyeweerd’s modal theory of reality. This approach emphasizes the need to utilize different types of knowledge, which together could strengthen the apologetic persuasion towards Christian theism, and take into consideration of the whole context of apologetic dialogue. / PhD (International Trade), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

Reading David Jones’s The Anathemata, William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, and Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems as epics, this doctoral dissertation challenges the old but persistent notion that epic poetry ceased being written at a particular point in the past and instead examines the particular formal, philosophical and political difficulties writers of this genre had to confront in the second half of the twentieth century. Twentieth-century epic poetry will primarily be defined in terms of its purpose or function, which is the representation of the identity of a ‘community’, while the literary period beginning with the end of the Second World War will be defined as late modernism. Chiefly inspired by Anthony Mellors’s Late Modernist Poetics: From Pound to Prynne, late modernism will be discussed as an aesthetico-political challenge with which writers had to come to terms in the wake of twentieth-century European totalitarianism. Georges Bataille’s philosophy of community, it will be argued, paradigmatically illustrates these aesthetico-political difficulties in philosophical terms, and the discussions of the three epic poems are therefore preceded by an analysis of Bataille’s Summa Atheologica, which constitutes the core of his philosophy of community.

This dissertation argues that a number of works of Canadian fiction usually designated as modernist fit more properly into the category of “late modernism”: a category that has only recently begun to emerge as a bridge between post-war modernism and emergent postmodernism. These works are aligned by their use of abstract, absurdist, or surrealist narrative structures and consequently by their refusal to adhere to conventional strictures of social realism. Because of this refusal, literary critics have identified the late-modernist emphasis on narrative form as necessarily ahistorical or apolitical. Conversely, I argue, these works are socially and politically engaged with the historical contexts and material conditions of their inception, composition, and consequent reception. I argue herein that the works of Sheila Watson, Elizabeth Smart, Malcolm Lowry, and John Glassco tend towards non-representational narrative forms, and in doing so, they engage in modes of cultural critique. These critiques are focused by a negotiation of what has been multiply identified as a “contradiction” in modernist art: while on the one hand the texts break with traditional forms of social-realist narrative out of a need to find new forms of expression in an effort to rebel against conservative, bourgeois sensibilities, on the other hand they are always produced from within the self-same socio-political economy that they critique. Whether this position is identified as a “modernist double bind” (following Willmott) or a “central paradox” of modernism (following Eysteinsson), I have argued that each author negotiates these internal contradictions through the integration of autobiographical material into their writing. In reading these works as part of a unified late-modernist narrative tradition, this dissertation aims to destabilize critical and popular understandings of mid-century Canadian prose and argue for an alternate reading of artistic interpretation of the twentieth-century Canadian condition. Such a reading challenges current canon formation because it destabilizes traditional critical accounts of these texts as instances of eccentric expression or singular moments of genius. Instead, we are asked to consider seriously the tendency for play with subjectivity and autobiographical material as an interpretive strategy to express the mid-century, post-war condition.

<p>This dissertation focuses on a group of 20th and 21st century novelists writing in English - Samuel Beckett, J.M. Coetzee, and Kazuo Ishiguro - whose fiction is populated by figures of disconsolation: characters who resist, evade, or - in the case of Ishiguro's protagonists - assiduously attempt to conform to the constitutive social formations and disciplinary technologies of late modernity, among them, notably, the novel itself. These characters thus question the possibilities and limits of political critique and ethical life within a global modernity. I delineate a history of the disconsolate subject that cuts across the categories of modernist, postmodernist, and postcolonial literatures in order to reveal a different literary genealogy, in which an exilic postcoloniality becomes the paradigmatic sensibility for a global late modernist novel.</p><p>Georg Lukács argued that the transcendental homelessness of modernity is registered most emphatically in the novel, a form he imagined functioning as a surrogate home for rootless modern subjects. The tradition I describe, whose characters trouble the representational technologies of the novel, disrupts an easy identification with the textual realm as home. I borrow from the critic Neil Lazarus the notion of a vital modernist literary practice that persists after the death of modernism, "a writing...that resists the accommodation of what has been canonised as modernism and that does what at least some modernist work has done from the outset: namely, says `no,'; refuses integration, resolution, consolation, comfort; protests and criticises." This is a writing whose project, he suggests, following Adorno, is "disconsolation." With this in mind, I depart from the conception of an emergent cosmopolitan literature and examine instead a global literature of disconsolation, a literature that allegorizes a radically reconfigured global space whose subjects are no longer at home in the familiar world of nation-states. </p><p>A discontentment with the parameters of late modernity was already apparent in the high modernists, many of whom responded by embracing political positions on the radical right or left. However, the catastrophic political experiments of the century led to a sense that attempts to either refine or resist modernity had been exhausted. The works I examine mount critiques of such large-scale nationalist projects as the Irish Free State, the Japanese Empire, or apartheid South Africa - projects that emerged in opposition to a regnant world-system and saw themselves in utopian or liberatory terms. Yet these fictions are unable to affirm more than provisional or imaginary alternatives. A doubly exilic position consequently emerges in these novels, in which a rupture with the nation-state finds no compensation in another form of community such as a global cosmopolitan order. Through their attention to the gaps and fissures opened by the alterity of these disconsolate subjects, these texts function as waiting rooms or holding spaces for a utopianism that is unrealizable in a world of political disillusionment.</p> / Dissertation

No description available.

This dissertation seeks to identify, contextualize, and explain the achievement of late modernist novelists. Late modernism represents a significant, under-examined chapter in the development of the twentieth-century novel. Unlike the majority of their peers in the decades after modernism’s height, novelists such as Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Elizabeth Bowen—and the best-known, Samuel Beckett—continue to innovate in prose rather than returning to realism. Unlike their predecessors, late modernists move towards doubt, eschewing the sometimes ultimately redemptive ethos of high modernism. They do so without the insistence of later postmodernists, however, or their playful mood. The result is something new, strange, and “in between.” The aims of this study are to specify the nature of late modernist style, place it in its aesthetic and historical context, and explain its significance. Each chapter is a close reading of key works by one writer: each novelist uses different techniques to add to the late modernist aesthetic, but they all move in the same direction. The first chapter explores Henry Green’s work, analyzing the textual omissions and narrative construction that make his novels so evasive. In Compton-Burnett’s case, the focus is on how dialogue creates a constantly shifting moral world in which nothing can be taken for granted. The chapter on Beckett explores repetition, both as a microscopic stylistic tool and an organizing device that prevents the text from reaching conclusion. In examining Bowen, the centre is how her syntax circles continually around various kinds of “nothingness” and self-reflexively suggests ways to explore it. This study arranges late modernist novelists in a new continuum alongside Samuel Beckett, with the result that Beckett seems less a unique genius, and the other late modernist writers seem less eccentric and more profoundly challenging. They all seek ways to go on writing when doing so seems impossible. Late modernists bring something new to the novel. Through the smallest stylistic gestures, their works make and unmake themselves, refusing to allow the reader finality. They avoid the aesthetic and philosophical associations of either consolation or utter uncertainty; late modernists matter by refusing to matter in a familiar way.