This study will look at fantasies of the mechanical body in a series of close readings of key modernist and contemporary texts. It will argue that these texts are sites of resistance or repression, in which unconscious and / or cultural narratives about the death drive have left their traces. Part One, Chapters 1-3, explores the links between war and fantasy, and between fantasy and gender. Chapter One looks at the art and writings of the Italian Futurists and English Vorticists, with the focus on Marinetti and Lewis, to consider how the rationalized bodies of the soldier and worker might be seen as the covert problems underpinning the fantasy, returning to it in the form of the repressed. Chapter Two concerns the writings of Ernst Jünger, where war, modern labour, the incursion of danger into everyday life, and photography are seen to provide signs of the emergence of the Typus, an organic construction, who has learnt to see himself as devoid of feeling, turning the death drive into the will to power in acts of aggression, and for whom the function of the eye is the same as that of the weapon. Chapter Three investigates the problem of war-shock and the shocks of cinema in First World War film footage of shellshocked soldiers, Lang's Metropolis, and Chaplin's Modern Times. It shows how discourses of hysteria, feminization and commodity relations form the common ground between the cultural reception of both shelishock and cinema, and how film-makers and critics responded to both sets of debates. Part Two, Chapters 4-5, explores the links between the machine, the maternal body and the death drive in the Terminator and Alien films, and considers the question of affect, mourning, and identification in Cronenberg's Crash.

This thesis is based on the premise that questions about human affairs, including questions about art, need to be considered in the context of our deep history as a species. Darwinian theories of human existence have given scholars in evolutionary psychology the chance to analyze human cognition, emotions, and behaviour by considering the trajectory of our evolution and how that has shaped our current situation. Taking a Darwinian literary approach, this thesis tries to answer one of the main questions about James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses: What is the purpose behind a style that many find so difficult in this novel? In order to answer this question, I explore the adaptive purposes of literature (in general) and stylistic experimentation (in particular). I argue that art can be seen as a form of sexual display where stylistic difficulty and originality are ways of indicating fitness for survival. In this way, both the author and readers of Ulysses spend their time and energy to produce and consume the difficult style of Ulysses because they find pleasure in an activity that is adaptively useful. Furthermore, I suggest that earning social status could have been an evolutionary motive for both the authors and readers of difficult modernist texts, including Ulysses. To support this, I show how gaining social status is part of other sexual ornamentation that handicap the displayer by imposing excessive difficulty in terms of the time and energy needed to put on those displays of fitness. / Graduate / 2018-10-23