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Food and Pleasure in Modern American Literature is a study of the dynamics of pleasure in literary scenes of food, eating, and hungering in American poetry and novels from the early 20th century to the present. From infamous poetic instances of plums and memorialized moveable feasts in the early twentieth century to present-day preoccupations with overdetermined foods and bodies, food scenes in literature help develop character, play out cultural or social dynamics, or dramatize appetite and desire. In many instances, pleasure (or its absence) is what gives such scenes weight and dimension. I apply tools and concepts from both structuralism and phenomenology to explore the tensions between seemingly opposing ideas introduced in food-focused texts, which have been selected from a broad range of genres and eras. Chapters 2 through 6 focus specifically on poetry, which offers the opportunity to explore specific structuralist and phenomenological concepts within the space of a few lines, for closer attention. Chapters 7 through 10 examine fiction and non-fiction prose at lengths which permit many more layers of conflict and desire in regard to food and pleasure. The culminating chapters examine contemporary food writing and recent novels that shed light on the food issues of the present day. / English

This thesis investigates the transatlantic manifestation of the debate regarding the aesthetics of commitment in the modernist literary and theatrical tradition. Within the debate theatre occupies a privileged position since (because of its two-fold roles both as theory and performance) it allows a critique both of performative conventions and methods and also a dialectical consideration of the audience’s socio-political consciousness. The debate, often referred to as form versus content – schematically re-written as ‘autonomy’ versus ‘commitment’ – and its transatlantic evaluation are central to modernist aesthetics, as they bring into question the established modes of perceiving and discussing the issue. A parallel close reading will reveal the closely related development of the European and the American traditions and evaluate their critical strengths and shortcomings. The first part of the thesis discusses the positions of Georg Lukács and Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin in tandem with those of the New York Intellectuals, especially as expressed in the latters’ writings in the Partisan Review. The second part extends this transatlantic dialogue through a consideration of the theatrical works of the New York Living Newspaper unit of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) in the USA and Bertolt Brecht’s vision of and relationship with ‘Americana’ as revealed through such plays as In the Jungle of Cities, Man Equals Man, St Joan of the Stockyards and the 1947 version of Galileo. The Federal Theatre and Brecht’s respective dramaturgies demonstrate differences in the articulation and application of the aesthetics of commitment and politics of engagement. A close reading of four plays by the Living Newspaper unit will not only reveal the influence of the Russian Blue Blouse groups and Meyerhold’s theatrical experimentations, but also how the unit’s playwrights and administration attempted to re-write this aesthetic. Hallie Flanagan (the director of FTP), recognising the limitations of Broadway and having sensed the audience’s need for a new kind of theatre, realised early on the importance of ‘translating’ the European aesthetics of commitment to conform with the American New Deal discourse. Brecht’s plays manifest not only the differences with respect to the European aesthetics of commitment, but also its highly complicated development. His American experiences revealed that the failings of the FTP’s attempt to establish a viable national theatre with a social agenda prohibited a more powerfully theatrical connection (theoretical and performative) between the two traditions. Both the European and the American modernist aesthetics are informed by Marxist cultural and literary theory, particularly by the writings centred on the political efficacy of a work of art with respect to its reception and its modes of production. The politico-aesthetic encounter of the Marxist tradition of engagement with a commitment to aesthetic formalism (often associated with the autonomy position) led to a confrontational and polemical rather than dialectical argumentation. However, this thesis maintains that the arguments were not simply articulated by theorists at opposing ends of the political spectrum. At the same time, Brecht and the Federal Theatre Project’s interest in the advancements of the European avant-garde and fascination with the notion of ‘Americana’ demonstrate the necessity to examine the issue of commitment in a more dialectical manner. While their notion of the aesthetics of commitment differed, this thesis argues for the necessity, not only of revisiting some of the fundamental premises regarding the role and function of this aesthetics in modernist political theatre, but also of reading the two traditions in conjunction.

in English The papers contain a finding of the national literature in between novels in the Central Europe at the age of modernism in 20s and 30s o 20th century. The idea definition of national novel in the literatures of Central Europe is difficult and complicated process. This papers work with literal texts as a part of national literature with polish novel Przedwiośnie by Stefan Zeromsky, hungarian novel Édes Anna by Deszo Kosztolanyi, slovakian novel Cesta životom by Ladislav Nádasi-Jégé, czech novel Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka by Jaroslav Hašek and austrian novel Mann ohne Eingeschafen by Robert Musil. The finding is divided into two parts - first is finding of national novel - second is about national character. Both situations are actualized with new terms - novel of the nation and character of the nation. Both literary terms correspond to objects that are not directly denouncing the life of the nation, but produces its main ideas and identification. The slovakian and the hungarian novel focus on the struggle of individual characters with society and their new status. In the contrary to the austrian and the czech novel reveal the principle of applying national characteristics in literary philosophical swirl. The polish novel is stranded somewhere in between these two types of novel. Key...

in English The papers contain a finding of the national literature in between novels in the Central Europe at the age of modernism in 20s and 30s o 20th century. The idea definition of national novel in the literatures of Central Europe is difficult and complicated process. This papers work with literal texts as a part of national literature with polish novel Przedwiośnie by Stefan Zeromsky, hungarian novel Édes Anna by Deszo Kosztolanyi, slovakian novel Cesta životom by Ladislav Nádasi-Jégé, czech novel Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka by Jaroslav Hašek and austrian novel Mann ohne Eingeschafen by Robert Musil. The finding is divided into two parts - first is finding of national novel - second is about national character. Both situations are actualized with new terms - novel of the nation and character of the nation. Both literary terms correspond to objects that are not directly denouncing the life of the nation, but produces its main ideas and identification. The slovakian and the hungarian novel focus on the struggle of individual characters with society and their new status. In the contrary to the austrian and the czech novel reveal the principle of applying national characteristics in literary philosophical swirl. The polish novel is stranded somewhere in between these two types of novel. Key...

The early- to mid-twentieth century criticism surrounding E. E. Cummings often dismisses his poetry in Eliotic terms. In analyzing Cummings’s critics’ arguments and methodologies, I attempt to reveal the ways in which Cummings has been unfairly labelled, and also the strains in modernist criticism that have continued up through to today. I compare the modernist approaches to the text to the way recent critics talk about Cummings in order to shed light on our critical inheritance from modernism. Finally, I analyse Cummings’s poetry in terms of one of the more recent discussions of modernist texts, that of relationship between commodity and advertising culture and modernist poetry. My project seeks, by using Cummings as a case study, to articulate not only how certain literary values came to be established, but also how certain methods of persuasion in literary criticism can undermine and even silence certain aspects of a text.

This thesis examines representations of sensation within modernist novels alongside contemporary philosophical debates over the concept of qualia. Concentrating on the work of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Percy Wyndham Lewis, and Samuel Beckett, it confronts a longstanding critical tradition that has tended to obscure or misunderstand the implications of arguments made by philosophers of mind in relation to literary descriptions of sensation. That the mind is a thing, and that modernist narrative fiction is particularly successful at representing that thing, has become a critical commonplace. In this thesis I argue that interpretations of modernism’s supposed ‘inward turn’ are founded on a mistaken notion of ‘cognitive realism’, a critical position endorsing the idea that it is both possible and desirable to describe the mind (conceived of as a stable and unchanging object) without loss through the development and judicial deployment of new literary techniques. The myth of the inward turn in its various incarnations – the psychologised modernism described by many literary critics in the 50s and 60s, and the neuromodernism subscribed to by many contemporary critics – is, I argue, largely the result of a set of inter-linked misconceptions which attend the cognitive realist paradigm. The notion of qualia is central to my thesis. Defined as the ineffable, irreducible, and subjective properties of conscious experience, qualia emerge concomitantly with modernism, developing out of G. E. Moore’s definition of ‘sense-data’ and Bertrand Russell’s category of ‘sensibilia’. Though still disputed within contemporary philosophy, qualia create huge problems for materialist theories of consciousness, threatening to undermine critical approaches to literature which contend that formal literary strategies can ever hope to transcend the limitations of symbolic language in conveying sensation. The ‘problem’ of qualia referred to in this thesis, therefore, is the problem the concept poses for symbolic descriptions (either mathematic, psychological, or literary) of mental states, especially when those descriptions make special claims (or are interpreted as making special claims) of mimetic veracity. The problem emerged within philosophy at precisely the point at which the representative claims of literature came under direct attack. This thesis argues, therefore, that it is a profoundly literary problem, and that the absence of ‘sensation’ from the written is simply a manifestation of the inherent limitations of language. A critical tendency to re-insert sensory experience into the process of reading – through phenomenological interpretations of modernism, or in contemporary ‘neuroaesthetic’ approaches to literature – thus point to a general anxiety that manifests itself most forcefully in relation to modernist fiction’s ability to ‘write’ sensation. This thesis employs the concept of qualia as a way of contextualising narratives of the mind – philosophical, literary and scientific – from the period. In doing so it seeks to historicise modernism’s ‘crisis of the senses’; locating this argument in a broader theoretical space and questioning the relevance (and novelty) of contemporary approaches to reading the senses in modernism.

This thesis investigates the rise of aviation and its influence on modernist literature in the first half of the twentieth century, arguing that the emergence of heavier-than-air flight facilitated experimentation and innovation in modernist writing in order to capture the new experience of flight and its impact on the modern world. Previous critical discussions largely focus on militarist and nationalist ideas and beliefs regarding the uses of the aeroplane, and in doing so overlook the diversity of attitudes and approaches towards aviation that had greater influence on modernist thought. Through a historicist reading of a selection of modernist texts, this study extends scholarly debates by linking alternative views of aviation and modernist literary and narrative experimentation. I begin my study by exploring how H.G. Wells's calls for the establishment of a world government (necessitated by the emergence of aviation) led to an increasingly assertive and urgent tone in his later writings. His works serve as a useful starting point to read the more experimental, modernist prose forms that follow in his wake. While Wells's texts were affected on a pragmatic level, those of the modernists were affected in a more imaginative, perceptual, and sensory way, which highlights the deeper extent to which aviation influenced modernist thought. For Virginia Woolf, the all-encompassing aerial view offered a new way of seeing the connections between living things, leading to an expanded narrative scope in her later writings. For William Faulkner, flight as aerial performance and spectacle was a liberating experience and became a metaphor for escape from an increasingly capitalistic and creativity-deprived world. John Dos Passos, in contrast, saw the effects of air travel as harmful to the human senses and perceptions of the world around, leading him to incorporate aspects of flight into his fast-paced, multi-modal narratives in order to convey and critique the disorienting and alienating experience of flight. Collectively, these chapters show that as much as the aeroplane was capable of causing mass destruction, it was also constructive in the way that it enabled these new ways of thinking, and it is this complex and paradoxical nature, this thesis proposes, that makes the aeroplane an important modernist symbol.

Esta dissertação versa sobre a análise do discurso da poesia erótica de Manuel Bandeira, Carlos Drummond de Andrade e João Cabral de Melo Neto. A pesquisa usa a teoria desenvolvida pela escola francesa de análise do discurso mais especificamente a Semântica Global, termo proposto por Dominique Maingueneau para a integração de sete planos básicos de um discurso. A semiótica, o estilo e o conceito de ethos discursivo ajudam a complementar esta pesquisa cujo objetivo é mostrar como o erotismo é visto por cada autor. / Esta dissertação versa sobre a análise do discurso da poesia erótica de Manuel Bandeira, Carlos Drummond de Andrade e João Cabral de Melo Neto. A pesquisa usa a teoria desenvolvida pela escola francesa de análise do discurso mais especificamente a Semântica Global, termo proposto por Dominique Maingueneau para a integração de sete planos básicos de um discurso. A semiótica, o estilo e o conceito de ethos discursivo ajudam a complementar esta pesquisa cujo objetivo é mostrar como o erotismo é visto por cada autor.

Esta dissertação tem como objetivo investigar as casas modernas de arquitetos que contribuíram na formação e transformação do viver urbano, onde estes objetos de estudos podem ser utilizados como fio condutor para a discussão do ensino da disciplina de projeto de arquitetura. Também é analisado as principais escolas de arquitetura, tanto européias como as brasileiras que consolidaram um novo modo de compreender o programa de ensino das disciplinas e do curso de arquitetura no ensino moderno e contemporâneo, onde a Bauhaus, na Alemanha, influenciou muitas escolas no Rio e São Paulo, como a FAUUSP e FAUUBC, esta última elemento norteador da pesquisa geradora dos estudos de caso nos anos de 2001 e 2002, onde lecionei como professor assistente e posteriormente como responsável na disciplina de Projeto de Arquitetura, consolidando um conjunto de material para a análise do que chamo de experiência didática vivenciada. / The present dissertation aims to study and analyze the modern house projects which have contributed to new living architecture and urban concepts, and the acknowledgement of these intentions and purposes is used as guideline for the development of didactical orientations. Different projectual concepts that belong to the Twentieth Century architecture history are also compared in order to set up an internationally constructed scenario which will include brazilian didactical teaching experiences (FAUUSP and FAUUBC) as well as historical european examples such as the BAUHAUS experience in Germany. The faculty teaching carreer of the author shall help the construction of the concept he names as shared didactical experience.