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[Truncated abstract] This thesis is concerned with the representation of madness in three texts by modernist women: Dorothy Richardson' Pilgrimage, Leonora Carrington's

This thesis offers an analysis of selected works by Virginia Woolf through the theoretical framework of technology of place. The term “technology”, meaning both a finished product and an ongoing production process, a mode of concealment and unconcealment in Martin Heidegger's sense, is used as part of this thesis's argument that place can be understood through constant negotiations of concrete place perceived through the senses, a concept based on the Heideggerian notion of “earth”, and abstract place perceived in the imagination, a concept based on the Heideggerian notion of “world”. The term “technology of place”, coined by Irvin C. Schick in The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alteritist Discourse (1999), is appropriated and re-interpreted as part of this thesis's adoption and adaptation of Woolf's notion of ideal biographical writing as an amalgamation of “granite” biographical facts and “rainbow” internal life. Woolf's granite and rainbow dichotomy is used as a foreground to this thesis's proposed theoretical framework, through which questions of space/place can be examined. My analysis of Flush (1933) demonstrates that place is a technology which can be taken at face value and, at the same time, appropriated to challenge the ideology of its construction. My analysis of Orlando (1928) demonstrates that Woolf's idea of utopia exemplifies the technological “coming together”, in Heidegger's term, of concrete social reality and abstract artistic fantasy. My analysis of The Years (1937) demonstrates that sense of place as well as sense of identity is ambivalent and constantly changing like the weather, reflecting place's Janus-faced function as both concealment and unconcealment. Lastly, my analysis of Woolf's selected essays and marginalia illustrates that writing can serve as a revolutionary “place-making” technology through which one can mentally “make room” for (re-)imagining the lives of “the obscure”, often placed in oblivion throughout the course of history.

Being an integral part of cultural modernity, literary modernity is an on-going, self-negating, and self-rejuvenating process. It has always been engaged in a dialectical relationship with tradition and is inseparable from the quest for reality based on artistic autonomy and communicative intersubjectivity. In the first half of my thesis, I attempt to show how and why literary tradition has played a decisive role in the process of literary modernity, how and why the Chinese literary tradition is different from its Western counterpart; how and why Chinese literary modernity is influenced by, but different from Western literary modernity; and what is the specific path that Chinese writers have been taking to achieve literary modernity, as is distinct from the route that has been followed in the West, i. e., from romanticism to realism to modernism and to postmodernism. The second half of my thesis comprises a detailed study of two of China's foremost writers, Lu Xun and Shen Congwen, by way of illustrating my arguments. The first two chapters investigate some core concepts in the Western and Chinese literary traditions and the formative roles that they have played respectively in. shaping the process of literary modernity in the West and China. In our study of Chinese literary modernity and modern Chinese writers, we should pay special attention to the important role of the Chinese literary tradition, while taking into consideration the impact of Western literature and China's historical contingency. The interactions between these three factors constitute the special character of China's literary modernity. The third and the fourth chapters deal with respectively the fiction of Lu Xun and Shen Congwen, as well as their conceptions of literature. Through a close investigation of a few selected stories by these two writers, I wish to demonstrate how their works embody the general ideas of literary modernity, and at the same time reveal the peculiar features of China's own literary modernity. In conclusion, I suggest that modernity and tradition have always been intertwined in a complex, dynamic, and dialectic relationship, which has proved to be not only the motive force, but also the unfailing source for the achievements of modern literature, both Chinese and Western; and subjective reflection should be integrated with the lifeworld, and combined with inter subjective communication.

This dissertation situates literary modernism in the context of a nascent form of globalization. Before it could be fully acknowledged global encroachment was, by virtue of its novelty, repeatedly experienced as a kind of shattering or disintegration. Through an examination of three modernist novels, I argue that a general modernist preoccupation with space both expresses and occludes anxieties over a globe which suddenly seemed to be too small and too undifferentiated. Building upon recent critical work that has begun to historicize modernist understandings of space, I address the as yet under-appreciated ways in which globalism and its discontents informed all of the locales that modernist fictions variously inhabited. For Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, the responses to global change were as diverse as the spaces through which they were inflected. / I begin by identifying a modernist predilection for spatial metaphors. This rhetorical touchstone has, from New Criticism onward, been so sedimented within critical responses to the era that modernism's interest in global space has itself frequently been diminished. In my readings of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Joyce's Ulysses, and Woolf's To the Lighthouse, I argue that the signs of globalization are ubiquitous across modernism. As Conrad repeats and contests New Imperialist constructions of Africa as a vanishing space, that continent becomes the stage for his anxieties over a newly diminished globe. For Joyce, Dublin's conflicted status as both provincial capital and colonial metropolis makes that city the perfect site in which to worry over those recent world-wide developments. Finally, I argue that for Woolf, it is the domestic space which serves best to register and resist the ominous signs of global incursion. In conclusion, I suggest that modernism's anticipatory attention to globalization makes the putative break between that earlier era and postmodernity---itself often predicated upon spatial compression---all the more difficult to maintain.

This dissertation is a recovery project, and as such it introduces Adrián del Valle, a prolific Spanish-born literary modernista and anarchist activist who dedicated his life to social reform in in turn-of-the-century Cuba and beyond. In addition to a critical introduction, this project includes my translation of his 1907 collection of integrated short stories Por el camino [Along the Way], which, as all of his works, is long out of print. Por el camino complicates critical models grounded in nationality and therefore invites us to construct and apply an alternative model better suited to handling a transnational epistemology of space, which allows for the constant flow of people, ideas, and texts, as well as commercial and political influences, across borders. In developing this epistemological framework, I blend two theoretical concepts—“multitude” and “imagined communities”—to situate del Valle in his dynamic historical moment. Del Valle wrote Por el camino in the throes of the Second Industrial Revolution, the Age of Synergy, which I argue can be understood as an early age of globalization. Por el camino also stands at the crossroads of Latin American modernista short fiction and the international anarchist movement, thus challenging critical positions that treat modernismo as an apolitical and socially apathetic literary movement obsessed with elitist aesthetics and escapism and anarchism as a mutually exclusive movement wholly concerned with achieving practical social and political reforms. Through my reading of del Valle’s work, I demonstrate that modernismo and anarchism are two manifold and simultaneous responses to the complex socio-political, economic, cultural, and spiritual crises that grew out of Latin America’s transition into modernity. / Globalization -- Anarchism -- Modernismo -- On the translation -- Along the way. / Department of English

This thesis is an exploration of the links between modernist literature and film and society at a period of historical crisis, in Gramscian terms a moment of national 'popular will'. In general, these works are informed by a greater organicity of form, replacing the previous avant-garde model of a serial or mechanical structure. This organicity, however, maintains an element of disjunction, in which, as with filmic montage, the organicity is constituted on the level of the work seen as a totality. Herbert Read's aesthetics are shown to develop with these changes in the Thirties and the war years. The work of H.D. and T.S. Eliot is explored in the light of these new structural elements, and the formal questioning of the subject through the interplay of 'we' and montages of location and address in the poems. The pre-war years are portrayed in these works as a time of shame, and the war as a possible means of redemption, perhaps through suffering, or through the new subjectivity of the wartime community. The documentary movement provides an opportunity to trace these formal changes in a historical and institutional context, and with the work of Dylan Thomas, the relations between mass and high culture, film and poetry, are investigated, as well as the representation of the Blitz, in which guilt is sublimated into celebratory transcendence. These aspects, and the adaptation of a European avant-garde to meet British cultural needs, are examined in the work of the Apocalyptic movement. The last structure of feeling is reconstruction, which is related to Herbert Read's thought, but shown to inform all these other works and to be a linking-point between ideology and the structure of the text, formed as an organic unity that promises a reconstructed post-war society.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of English, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (doctoral)--Technische Universität, Berlin, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 385-396).

Ao longo dos últimos séculos Angola passou por um processo sistemático de exploração, o qual desencadeou consequências nas instituições e organizações sociais do país. Nesse sentido, o presente trabalho propõe-se a investigar de que forma se aplicam os conceitos de modernidade, especialmente a modernidade tardia, conforme apresentada por Giddens (1991, 2002), e de identidade, para analisar de que maneira essas reflexões são construídas na prosa angolana contemporânea de José Eduardo Agualusa e Ondjaki. Para tanto, exploramos os romances Teoria Geral do Esquecimento (2012) e Os Transparentes (2013). / Over the last few centuries Angola has undergone a systematic process of exploitation, which has had consequences in the country’s social institutions and organizations. In this sense, the present work proposes to investigate the concepts of modernity, especially the late modernity, as presented by Giddens (1991, 2002), and of identity, in order to analyze how these reflections are built on contemporary Angolan prose of José Eduardo Agualusa and Ondjaki. To do so, we explore the novels A General Theory of Oblivion (2012) and Os Transparentes (2013).