<p>Literary modernism followed a century during which philosophical speculations about the mechanistic basis of human life found experimental validation in the work of physiologists, who stressed the power of environment to shape and delimit thought and action. By the late 19th century, the hypothesis that humans were "automata," as Descartes had conjectured, began to seem much more than philosophical speculation, as statesmen and industrialists appropriated blueprints of the human machine originally mapped by the sciences. So dominant was the conjunction of politics and habit that, writing in 1890s, the American psychologist William James would call the automatic operations of body and mind the very engine of political life: "Habit," he declared, "is the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor." But James was only anticipating the wide range of thinkers who would associate physiological automatism with politics in the coming years. By century's end, the belief that habit determined social action and circumscribed individual volition was to find wide currency in a variety of cultural fields, including literary modernism.</p><p>Situating literary modernism in relation to this emergent sense of political modernity, <italic>Automatic Modernism</italic> argues that modernists reconfigured the discourse of automatism for political and aesthetic ends. Wary of the new political environment in which government, political parties and industry exploited the science of conditioned reflex to ensure automatic responses from docile subjects, writers of this period turned to the resources of literature in order to both disrupt the clichés of thought and action enforced by environmental stimuli and to imagine forms of politics adapted to the physiologically automatic body. Looking in particular at the fiction and non-fiction work of D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Rebecca West, and Samuel Beckett, this dissertation attempts to understand the recurrent equation of automatic behavior and twentieth-century modernity. Even as modernists vigorously rejected habitual behavior as the very element of twentieth century life that imperiled authentic art and social belonging, they forged alternative notions of bodily being, investing in the potentialities of human automatism as the basis of aesthetic possibility and social coherence. The formal experiments of these modernists emerge, then, as efforts to foreground, manipulate, rupture, and mimic the political habits of readers.</p> / Dissertation

W. H. Auden represents an important example of a twentieth-century poet who has developed his style and technique under the influence of traditional and modernistic ideas. Though Auden's poetic stance is a modern one, he is an interesting example of a contemporary writer whose fascination for Romanticism is reflected in his work. This thesis looks at the influence of Romanticism and Modernism in his short poetry.

In 1907, Gustav Klimt finished Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. The portrait offers a strong opposition between the three dimensionality of the sitter's face and hands and the flatness of her ornamented dress and surroundings. Despite this opposition the portrait has not been discussed within the theoretical framework of portraiture, but is most often discussed, and grouped, with Klimt's other portraits and images of women. This paper argues that the lack of scholarly consideration of this portrait, and Klimt's portraits as a whole, might be due to his seeming lack of artistic program. By relating Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I to identity theory and to the scholarship on modern portraiture, this discussion will reveal that there are elements of interest in Klimt's portraits which warrant scholarly consideration.

This study explores how subjectivity has been represented in a selection of Sorani Kurdish novels from Iraqi and Iranian Kurdistan that were published in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Due to the statelessness and suffering of the Kurds caused by the political and cultural oppression, the first Sorani Kurdish novel emerged as late as 1961 and yet only established itself towards the end of the century. Within such an acute context, the novel became a tool in the hands of Kurdish authors which they utilised to preserve and promote Kurdish identity, culture and language. With the establishment of cultural centres and publishing houses in diaspora during the 1980s, the establishment of a quasi-independent Kurdish region in Iraq in 1991, and the Iranian government’s easing of publication in Kurdish by the mid-1980, the Sorani Kurdish novelists seized the opportunity to redefine the relationship between political commitment and aesthetics and to consider the possibilities for an analysis of different forms of subjectivity. All the twenty-first century Sorani Kurdish novels examined in this research have discarded, to one degree or another, the realist mode of writing which dominated the Sorani Kurdish novel until the early 1990s. That is, experimentation with new modes of writing and narrative techniques are the common feature of the novels examined here. By carrying out a close reading within a contextual framework and by drawing on Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s theory of the novel, narratology, and theories of subjectivity, this study intends to illustrate the newly emergent modes of wriring and discourses in selected twenty-first century Sorani novels and their implications for the representation of reality and subjectivity. This study demonstrates that the Kurdish novelists from both Iraq and Iran all focus their attention on recent events, relevant to each region, and how they changed the ways subjectivity could be imagined and depicted. The more modernist and postmodernist in form and narration the selected novels are, the more fragmented and passive subjectivity is; and the society that is represented in these novels appears to have separated from its high values and ideals.

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David Jones, Basil Bunting, Geoffrey Hill and Roy Fisher are major poets in the modernist tradition who have written long poems which incorporate and interrogate history. The Anathemata. Briggflatts. Mercian Hvmns and A Furnace all explore the poet's sense of identity and his relationship to the present by attempting to give order to the past. This thesis examines how this attempt, and the various ideologies, philosophies and aesthetics that have accompanied it, are given form in these poems. It relates detailed readings of the poems to their intellectual and historical contexts. The Introduction outlines the typical features of die modernist long poem and suggests that they are peculiarly suited to expressions of both history and nationalism. Chapter I is a critical assessment of the aesthetics of Wilhelm Worringer and Herbert Read. Chapter II shows how David Jones endeavours to give form to the various histories of The Anathemata by using these aesthetics in conjunction with the historical philosophy of Oswald Spengler, the analysis of myth and ritual of J.G. Frazer and Jessie Weston, and his own nationalism and Roman Catholicism. This chapter accounts for the poem's obscurity by investigating its conflicting ideas of form, and locating it in die context of the Second World War. Chapter III, on Briggflatts. argues that Basil Bunting combines the ideas of Worringer and Read with an autobiographical narrative and a structure derived from music, in order to give die poem a form mirroring both his melancholia and the harmony he perceived in nature. It contends that the histories in the poem are best read as relating to autobiography and not Northumbrian nationalism. Chapter IV shows how Geoffrey Hill refashions the English long poem in a manner close to that of the lyric sequence. It explores notions of empathy and historical continuity in Mercian Hymns. and analyses Hill's ambiguous evocation of his Anglo-Saxon roots in the context of contemporary political discourse. Chapter V discusses the ways in which Roy Fisher enacts different apprehensions of time and history in the dialectical structure of A Furnace, and relates them to the thought of John Cowper Powys. The Conclusion draws together the recurrent themes of the thesis: change and continuity, history and identity, time and timelessness.

No description available.

Neil Gunn was one of the principal writers of the Scottish Literary Renaissance movement, the earlytwentieth century flowering of modernist literature in Scotland. Although some commentators have noticed the frequent mentions of psychoanalysis in his work, until now no wider study has been undertaken. In this thesis, I look at Gunn's interest in psychoanalysis in a number of different ways. This is down with the two-fold aim of first, providing a modern assessment of Gunn's work, and second, examining more broadly the history of modernism in Scottish literature. In the introduction, I propose an understanding of modernism based on the literary exploration of new theories of, in this case the mind. I argue that a complex understanding of the interplay of these new theories and literature serves better than a more simple concern with either intellectual developments or changes in literary form alone. In the first section, I look at Sun Circle and The Serpent in the light of psychoanalytic theories of 'primitive' psychology and the history of religion. In the second, I look at Highland River and The Silver Darlings in the light of Freudian and Jungian theories of personal development, regression, and childhood. In the third, I look at the way in which Gunn explores Freud's theories of the warring life- and deathinstincts in both The Shadow and The Lost Chart. I conclude by looking briefly at how Gunn's literary explorations of psychoanalysis link with the work of later writers such as Muriel Spark, Robin Jenkins, Alexander Trocchi, Alasdair Gray, Kenneth White and Alan Spence.

My work in painting and sculpture is an ongoing problem-solving activity in which the issues of how to present images or objects, and how to make a compelling piece of art, frequently clash. By combining a sense of earnestness in the means in which my work is made with self-conscious and deliberately awkward choices, my work occupies a place between pleasureful, visual abandon and the calculated, humorously abject. Through combinations of disparate elements, formal choices, and attitudes towards subject matter, I am making work that seeks to create new images within contradictions.

Thesis advisor: Marjorie Howes / This study examines how Irish and American writing from the early twentieth century demonstrates a continued engagement with the formal, thematic and cultural imperatives of the Irish Literary Revival. It brings together writers and intellectuals from across Ireland and the United States - including James Joyce, George William Russell (Æ), Alice Milligan, Lewis Purcell, Lady Gregory, the Fugitive-Agrarian poets, W. B. Yeats, Harriet Monroe, Alice Corbin Henderson, and Ezra Pound - whose work registers the movement's impact via imitation, homage, adaptation, appropriation, repudiation or some combination of these practices. Individual chapters read Irish and American writing from the period in the little magazines and literary journals where it first appeared, using these publications to give a material form to the larger, cross-national web of ideas and readers that linked distant regions. Until recently, scholars have been disinclined to interpret the Revival in a transnational framework, preferring instead to emphasize the cultural work its literature and drama accomplished on behalf of nationalist politics in Ireland. Yet, as this study demonstrates, the movement was imbricated in a process of cultural exchange extending well beyond Ireland's borders, resulting in a variety of revivalist afterlives that testify to the movement's extra-national influence. I use the term "afterlife" to describe the versions of revivalism produced when the movement's original impulses and strategies were, in W. H. Auden's words, "modified in the guts of the living," in some cases long after the peak of revivalist activity was supposed to have passed. The word confers a spectral quality to the movement, describing the Revival's re-emergence in new locations and at later dates. Writers in both countries engaged with revivalism, re-animating many of the debates over questions of identity, belonging and cultural authenticity that had originally motivated the movement's leaders. In doing so, such writers granted the Revival a vital afterlife, demonstrating the relevance of these debates in other national and historical contexts. The relationship this dynamic describes is one of both cross-cultural affiliation, in which intellectuals and writers are actively inspired by the example of the Irish Revival, and one of reverberation - a kind of textual haunting, where the defining features of revivalism echo in later works. The movement survived, in other words, and multiplied, finding new life in Irish and American modernists' experiments with tradition. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.