Browsing by Subject "Modernism"
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Item Dance on the Page, Poetry on Stage: Encounters between Modernist German Poetry and Dance(2019-09) Tripp, MeaganThis dissertation examines themes of identity, kinesthetic empathy, movement and rhythm, materiality, and corporeality in texts and performances, past and contemporary, that stage encounters between German-language modernist lyric poetry and dance. While prominent traditions of scholarship look at the intermediality of art forms as a defining feature of modernism, dance has received significantly less scholarly attention than other art forms. This is particularly remarkable given the fact that many modernist authors were drawn to dance and that the writings of early modern dancers repeatedly called for the establishment of dance as an art form level with music and poetry. Dance of the early 20th century and the field of dance studies offer literary and cultural studies a unique system of knowledge production, by which I mean practices that contribute to the development and circulation of new concepts and methods. By taking an interdisciplinary approach to examining instances of dance in modernist German poetry, this project aims to provide insight into why the dancer was such an attractive subject for poets as well as to highlight the gaps and tensions between dancing and writing. With the trope of dance in lyric poetry as a point of departure, I bring well-known dance poems and less commonly discussed poems of the period into dialog with the theories of poetics and theories of modern dance that emerged during the early part of the 20th century. In an effort to further work against a text/performance dichotomy, the final chapter undertakes a study of contemporary choreographic works of the past few decades that stage a modernist poetic text. Combining analyses and close readings of poetry, poetic theories, archival materials, performances, and theoretical conversations that intersect literary and dance studies, the project seeks to broaden the ways in which people view and discuss the role of dance in and for modernist German poetry as well as poetry within contemporary dance performances. An interdisciplinary look at the modernist dance-poetry intersection demonstrates that many questions and concepts of interest to modernists receive renewed or continued attention today.Item Modernism's Critique du Coeur: the Novelist as Critic, 1885-1925(2013-05) Pistelli, JohnModernism's Critique du Coeur: The Novelist as Critic, 1885-1925 provides a new account of the modernist novel's famous inward turn toward subjectivity and language. This turn makes the novel of modernism not politically quietist, as prior scholars have assumed, but rather a unique resource for the robust criticism of ideologies that manifest themselves in language and consciousness. My thesis on the critical power of modernist novels promises to renew the theory that aesthetic autonomy is the keynote of modernist innovation. In this, I join the current re-examination of literary aesthetics' potential to do more than serve as an ideological pretext for vested social interests, as post-structuralist and Marxist theory had argued. I claim instead that the aesthetic has the potential to make its adherents critical and self-critical subjects of modernity. In two theoretical chapters, I survey the theory of the novel as it has addressed two primary issues: the cognitive power of novels to encapsulate a society's self-conception and the affective power of novels to move their readers toward social reform. In chapters that treat the writings of Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, I show how the modernist novel, by withholding obvious political referents and inhabiting the subjectivity of a central character, forces its readers into the position of textual critics. My approach to the texts of modernism is also meta-critical, examining not only their works but the body of criticism their works have generated in support of my argument that modernist fiction calls for its own critique. These theoretical and critical approaches allow me finally to make a literary-historical argument: by emphasizing aesthetic autonomy as the modernist novel's mode of radical critique, I am able to identify the under-analyzed novels of British Aestheticism's founders, Pater and Wilde, as the key Anglo novels of the late Victorian period. Their fictions of Aestheticism inaugurated the novelistic project of modernism.Item Po Mo: modernism and the politics of Gothic adaptation.(2010-06) Curtright, LaurenThis dissertation demonstrates that images of Edgar Allan Poe have shaped his position in the literature and popular imaginary of the United States, that Poe's writings evidence his interest in photography and anticipate cinema, and that Poe's function as a technology has enabled politically diverse, international adaptations of his works and themes. To evaluate the politics of works of "Poe modernism," I interpret their engagement with what Walter Benjamin famously identified as the dual potential of technological reproducibility, or the ways in which photographic imaging has been alternately used to serve reactionary or progressive ends. At the turn of the twentieth century, American journalist Thomas Dimmock and film directors D. W. Griffith and Charles Brabin used technologies of reproducibility to remake Poe from his tarnished image. Narrative accounts of photographic images of Poe published in The Century Magazine and romanticizations of Poe in the films The Avenging Conscience, or 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' and The Raven transform Poe into a model of white, middle-class masculinity. Tracing the etiology of this reconstruction of Poe to the work of William Abbott Pratt, a Gothic Revivalist architect and daguerreotypist, who served as Confederate emissary to England, I historicize and theorize the reproduction of racism within a largely unacknowledged strain of the Southern gothic. Into his fiction, Poe incorporates techniques modeled on the first form of photography. Like other nineteenth-century writers, Poe characterized the daguerreotype as both more "magical" and more "truthful" than previous media. He took advantage of this paradoxical conception of photography to equivocate about the reality of race. Poe's stories suggest that daguerreotypy increased anxiety about the tenability of racial categories in the United States at the same time as they indicate that this arguably protocinematic technology was used to reconfigure a racial hierarchy based on invisible properties. Poe's recognition of the significance of photography to ideology ensured attention to his works by filmmakers committed to social critique. European émigrés Robert Florey and Edgar G. Ulmer adapted Poe's writings to counter both Nazism and American racism. Similarly, reconfigurations of Poe in modern Japan link imaging technologies to constructed hierarchies of nation, race, gender, and sexuality. Specifically, I analyze Poe's influence on Japanese gothic from ero guro nansensu (erotic grotesque nonsense)--specifically, Midori Ozaki's fiction--to Ishiro Honda's Gojira to Nagisa Oshima's Max mon amour to the contemporary Ring cycle, adapted from Koji Suzuki's novel series. Finally, I consider the consequences of the modernist fascination with instantaneity as manifested in, among other texts, Poe's "The Man of the Crowd" and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum's multimedia exhibits on the first atomic bombing. The Peace Museum adapts gothic tropes to represent the horrific instantaneity of nuclear attack and to resist the racism that informed the United States' rationalization for deploying atomic bombs on Japan. In sum, this dissertation places Poe within a nexus of creators of textual and visual media all of whom are concerned with technology's effects on human life, perception, and representation.