This thesis examines the complex intersections between Derek Walcott’s Omeros and modernist versions of the epic. Critics generally acknowledge the pervasive presence of modernist allusions in Walcott’s early work, but see the relevance of modernism diminishing as Walcott develops his “mature” poetic strategies of mimicry and hybridity. I challenge this reading of Walcott, arguing that the modernist practices of Ezra Pound in The Cantos, T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land, and Hart Crane in The Bridge are crucial to illuminating the central theme of cultural healing in Walcott’s most ambitious work, Omeros. These four authors share the goal of creating an epic poem that encapsulates the experiences of modernity (the modern epic). Walcott adopts and transforms elements from The Cantos, The Waste Land and The Bridge in order to articulate the complex relations among self, tradition, land, and language that can allow the postcolonial subject to overcome the traumatic legacy of imperialism in the Caribbean. I define the relation between Omeros and its modernist intertexts according to this pattern of imitation and divergence (which Joseph Farrell calls the pattern of imitatio and aemulatio in the epic tradition). I organize my dissertation into four chapters, each focused on a particular issue: the process of redefining the epic, the construction of indigenous status by means of myth and imperialism, the search for alternative modes of understanding the past that would resist the hegemony of chronological history, and the mystical process of cultural healing that synthesizes the human, the divine, and the natural world. This study demonstrates the tremendous utility and ideological ambiguities generated by the specific practices of ii literary modernism when Walcott deploys them to articulate his cultural vision. My approach to Omeros provides a corrective to the critical tendency to view modernism in the postcolonial milieu as either the postcolonial artist’s response to the conditions of modernity or as a tradition whose form and meaning is radically transformed by a postcolonial vision. Walcott’s relation to modernism suggests that this postcolonial cultural vision is itself shaped by modernist poetics in ways that both empower and constrain. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2007-08-27 11:56:30.559

The purpose of this thesis is to study the poetry written by H.D. between 1912- 1925 in relation to two Romantic categories: beauty and sublimity. I shall attempt to show how H.D. subverts and revises the Romantic sublime offering alternatives that can be identified with a "female sublime". A direct consequence of such revision will be her commitment to beauty, which acts in her poems as a generative drive. Her understanding of beauty will be shown to have its roots in Sappho, Plato and the Victorian Hellenists, among others, and to have undergone analogous transformations to those of sublimity. Chapter I reopens the debate around Imagism and Imagist poetry showing that the problem of defining what Imagism is or was originates in the overwhelming authority of theory versus praxis. My goal is to deconstruct the critical fallacies on which Imagism has been built and to free the poetry which it represents. This allows me to question the myth of H.D. as "Imagiste" and to open her early poetry to new readings and interpretations. In Chapter n, I review the theoretical background to the aesthetics of the sublime represented by Longinus, Burke, Kant and Wordsworth. I also establish the critical frame within which this research will take place, drawing on Thomas Weiskel, Patricia Yaeger and Joanne Diehl. I initiate a study of sublimity in H.D.'s first volume, Sea Garden, and show the alternative treatment that this Romantic genre receives from this female poet. H.D.'s revisions of the Romantic sublime take us in Chapter m to a study of her poetics, as presented in her essay "Notes on Thought and Vision". I discuss a variety of sources for the composition of these "Notes", such as Havelock Ellis' influence, H.D.'s letters to John Cournos and her friendship with D.H. Lawrence. I show how H.D. understands artistic and poetic creativity as 'vision' and how the recovery of the abject female body allows her to formulate a notion of creativity that transcends gender. Chapter IV, pursues H.D.'s transformations of the Romantic sublime in Hymen, and presents Sappho as a model for the fusion of sublimity, love and eroticism in the poems of this volume. Chapter V begins with a theoretical discussion surrounding the aesthetics of the beautiful in relation to Chapter II. It continues with H.D.'s understanding of beauty within her essays, in particular, "Responsibilities", "Notes on Thought and Vision" and "Notes on Euripides, Pausanius and Greek Lyric Poets". In the light of recent work on Pater's masculine model of Hellenic beauty, I discuss H.D.'s own configuration of beauty.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, 1997. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 321-336).

Women's fight for the franchise in both America and England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was accompanied by scrutiny of women's relationship to the State by those with varying perspectives on the suffrage battle. In the industrial, post-agricultural age, motherhood defined a woman's place in western society, as well as her rights under and service to the State; if the normative role of the male citizen was the soldier, the normative role for women was the mother. Yet for all of the ways an embrace of maternalism limited women's access to the public realm, it also laid the groundwork for the women's movement, and motherhood was often seen as a route to citizenship by those on both sides of the suffrage battle. As women began to re-imagine themselves as enfranchised citizens, many social theorists, politicians, and novelists continued to debate the rights and roles of women across the body of the mother; thinkers as varied as Theodore Roosevelt, H. G. Wells, and Emma Goldman all wrote tracts about motherhood and the future of the nation. Rather than entering the old debates on the value or liability of maternalism for feminism, my dissertation will argue that the modernist period introduced a new and still-overlooked figure: the anarchic mother. In their essays and novels, Goldman, Rebecca West, John Galsworthy, and Virginia Woolf turned away from the emblem of the Republican Mother and toward a radical new figure. Rather than sacrificing her individual needs to the Republic, the anarchic mother's individual pursuit of liberty challenged the authority of the State and its cultural institutions. An important group of modernist novels and essays employs the figure of the mother to represent not tradition and unity but rebellion, separatism, abstention, or statelessness. This undertheorized figure in modernist and feminist thought clarifies Virginia Woolf's call, in Three Guineas, for allegiance to no country. If Woolf and many other artists were ambivalent as they linked motherhood and anarchy, contemporary feminists inherited both the possibilities and contradictions of the anarchic mother as they reexamine women's relationship to citizenship in the 21st century.

Thesis (B.A.)--Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-01

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<p>This thesis examines the societal forces which have helped shape the present-day form of the institutionalization, criticism, and appreciation of art. Specifically, it examines the influence of modern thought on our present understanding of art. First, we examine how modernists have typically 100ked at art. Both the enlightening aspects as well as the deficiencies of modernist aesthetics are uncovered. Also, with the help of Jurgen Habermas, we examine a modernist societal approach to aesthetics. Second, the fundamental philosophical presuppositions of modernity are uncovered so that the societal forces that have helped to make art an autonomous institutionalized field of expertise can be examined. In passing, we discuss the concept of "lifeworld". We then examine the explanatory powers of considering the arts as forms of language. Third, as Habermas's social theory indicates, an excursion into the theory of argumentation provides indications of the mechanisms involved in the understanding of art. We consider the rhetorical, dialectical, and logical aspects of both non-verbal and linguistic argumentation. This provides us with a forum for discussing Habermas' s notion of an ideal speech situation, Gadamer's concept of the various modes of iii experiencing tradition and its parallel with the experiencing of art, and Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy of translation and what it implies for non-verbal forms of art. Fourth, we examine the implications and explanatory powers of Habermas's three-world distinction, which is, in turn, derived from the modernist presupposition of the distinction between subject and object. With these distinctions, we can see that the existence of a highly specialized field of expertise surrounding art and notions such as "art for art's sake" are not accidental. To conclude, we examine emotional life and its implications for modern notions of art.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

It is a little-known fact that several modernists wrote for children: this project will focus on T.S. Eliot‘s Old Possum‟s Book of Practical Cats, James Joyce‘s The Cat and the Devil, Gertrude Stein‘s The World is Round and Virginia Woolf‘s Nurse Lugton‟s Curtain. While not often thought of as a modernist, I contend that Walter de la Mare‘s short stories for children, especially The Lord Fish, take part in this corpus of modernist texts for children. These children‘s stories, while scarcely represented in critical circles, have enjoyed a wide popular audience and have all been translated into French. Modernism is often considered an elitist movement, but these texts can contribute to its reassessment, as they suggest an effort towards inclusivity of audience. The translation of children‘s literature is a relatively new field of study, which builds from descriptive translation studies with what is unique to children‘s literature: its relation to pedagogy and consequent censorship or other tailoring to local knowledge; frequently, the importance of images; the dual audience that many children‘s books have in relating to the adults who will select, buy and potentially perform the texts; and what Puurtinen calls ‗readaloud- ability‘ for many texts. For these texts and their French translations, questions of children‘s relations to place and space are emphasised, and how these are complicated in translation through domestication, foreignisation and other cultural context adaptations. In particular, these modernists actively write against Rousseau‘s notion of the ―innocent‖ boy delighting in the countryside and learning from nature. I examine the international dialogue that takes place in these ideas of childhood moving between France and England, and renegotiated over the span of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This study thus seeks to contribute to British modernist studies, the growing field of the translation of children‘s literature, and children‘s geographies.

The present study looks at the influence that two of the major cultural forces of the twentieth century had on the output of Carlo Emilio Gadda. It grew out of a search for ways of discussing Gadda and in particular his 1957 novel Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana that would be accessible to the widest possible audience. Ten chapters in length, the study treats first the influence that Christianity and in particular Italian Catholicism had on the avowedly atheist writer over five chapters, paying attention to the saints and holy places used in Gadda’s output, then moves on to consider the importance of his scientific training as an engineer and his interest in physics in the second half. Aside from examining the text of Quer pasticciaccio and other works such as Cognizione del dolore and La Madonna dei filosofi, I have used biographical information and in particular data gleaned from research in Gadda’s own personal library. The aims of the study are to introduce the reader unfamiliar with Gadda to his work, to offer a new framework by which the Gadda scholar may consider the Gran Lombardo, and to suggest new solutions to the unending puzzle that is Quer pasticciaccio.

This thesis investigates the ways in which literary and artistic modernism interpreted the Spanish institution of the corrida, or the bullfight. The sheer volume of modernist intellectuals who engaged with the corrida is startling. From Joyce to Picasso, Stein to Hemingway, Leiris to Lawrence, the bullfight provided inspiration to so many of the writers and artists of canonical modernism. Indeed, the relevance of the corrida to modernist intellectuals is perhaps captured best by Michel Leiris’s lucid metaphor of the bullfight as a mirror revealing ‘certain dark parts of ourselves’. In other words, in addition to providing the content of literature of the early twentieth century, many of the writers we identify as modernist used the corrida in a metaphorical capacity too. In light of this, it seems significant that the peak of modern interest in the corrida occurred in the context of a cultural crisis in western civilization in the first half of the twentieth century. Thus the key questions that this thesis seeks to address are as follows: why did the modernist gaze rest so intently upon the corrida? Why did so many European intellectuals cling to bullfighting and insist upon its enduring relevance given the apparent paradox between its own lack of adaptation to modern conditions and the very ‘newness’ that modernism championed? To what extent did the corrida act as a mirror to many of the cultural tensions problems addressed by modernism? How did modernism’s engagement with bullfighting, and the easy manner in which Hemingway’s body of work came to stand alone for that rich engagement, affect subsequent works that focussed on the bullring? These phenomena are examined in the context of the anomic cultural landscape of the era, taking into consideration the artistic, sexual and archaeological revolutions that informed and affected writers of the time.