http://hdl.handle.net/1974/773 Fri, 24 May 2013 23:33:50 GMT 2013-05-24T23:33:50Z http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7851 Title: Colonial Anxiety and Primitivism in Modernist Fiction: Woolf, Freud, Forster, Stein Authors: Kalkhove, MARIEKE Abstract: From W.H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety to Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, modernists have frequently attested to the anxiety permeating members of modern civilisation. While critics have treated anxiety as a consequence of the historical circumstances of the modernist period—two World Wars and the disintegration of European empires—my aim is to view anxiety in both a psychoanalytical and political light and investigate modernist anxiety as a narrative ploy that diagnoses the modern condition. Defining modernist anxiety as feelings of fear and alienation that reveal the uncanny relation between self and ideological state apparatuses which themselves suffer from trauma, perversion, and neurosis—I focus on the works of four key modernist writers—Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and Gertrude Stein. These authors have repeatedly constructed the mind as an open system, making the psyche one of the sites most vulnerable to the power of colonial ideology but also the modernist space par excellence to narrate the building and falling of empire. While the first part of my dissertation investigates the neurosis of post-war London in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the second part of my thesis discusses the perverse demands of the colonial system in Forster’s A Passage to India and Woolf’s The Waves, arguing that Woolf and Forster extend Freud’s understanding of repetition compulsion by demonstrating that the colonial system derives a “perverse” pleasure from repeating its own impossible demands. The concluding section of my dissertation discusses Woolf and Stein’s queer primitivism as the antidote to anxiety and the transcendence of perversity. My dissertation revives Freud’s role in the modernist project: Freud not only provides avant-garde writers with a theory of consciousness, but his construction of the fragmented psyche—a construction which had come to dominate modernist renditions of internality by the early-twentieth century—functions as a political stratagem for an imperial critique. Description: Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2013-03-11 16:48:57.865 Wed, 13 Mar 2013 04:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7851 2013-03-13T04:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7680 Title: Ethics and Love in the Aesthetics of Alice Munro Authors: McIntyre, Timothy Abstract: Whether classified as realist, modernist, or postmodernist, the fiction of Alice Munro combines a strong mimetic impulse with a recognition of the limitations of mimesis. This dissertation examines the ethical dimensions of the balance between mimesis and the recognition of its limits. Chapter one provides an overview of Munro scholarship and brings particular attention to the manner in which this balance between mimesis and metafictional self-reflexivity has been analyzed since the earliest days of Munro criticism. Chapter two draws on the Munro scholarship of Naomi Morgenstern, Robert McGill, and Robert Thacker to argue that Munro’s fiction is connected, though not reducible to, her experience of reality. This connection, however imperfect, gives her aesthetics its ethical weight, particularly when the subject of her writing is the human Other. Munro’s combination of a sense of alterity with a powerful feeling of reality reflects a desire to understand and represent the Other without compromising the Other’s radical alterity. The tension that arises from this desire can find a resolution in an aesthetics of love akin to eros as described by Emmanuel Levinas and refigured by Luce Irigaray: a representation, inscribed in each story’s form, of the possibility of a subject-to-subject relationship that preserves difference and ends in mutual fecundation. Chapter three compares the ethical vision in “The Ottawa Valley,” which ends on a moment of continuing, uncompromised alterity, with the feeling of love and catharsis produced in “The Moons of Jupiter.” Chapter four reads “Material” as an oblique gesture at the possibility that literature can open a relationship to the Other that is a kind love. Chapter five examines “Deep-Holes” as an attempt to reconcile the ethical tensions inherent in writing by representing a collaborative mode of meaning-making linked to love and fecundity. This dissertation also, however, follows Derek Attridge and Munro herself in observing some distinction between the self-Other dynamic as a face-to-face relation and this dynamic as a problem of literary representation, even if the two cannot be neatly separated. Description: Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2012-12-04 20:14:50.513 Thu, 06 Dec 2012 05:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7680 2012-12-06T05:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7358 Title: Reconstructing William Blake's Bible of Hell: Diabolical Inversion and Biblical Revision in the 1790-95 Illuminated Books Authors: Smith, Jordan Rendell Abstract: What did William Blake mean when he threatened the world with a “Bible of Hell” in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)? A critical survey of the history of scholarship on the topic reveals a variety of unsupported Bible of Hell canon theories among 180 critics. The most plausible theory (though not the most popular) among them is that the Bible of Hell comprises Blake’s eight core 1790-95 Illuminated Books—The Marriage, the Continental Prophecies (1793-95), and the Urizen Books (1794-95). My thesis supports this theory from several angles. Part I examines how The Marriage establishes a Bible of Hell program with four inclusion criteria by which the works of 1793-95 abide: (1) a rhetoric of diabolical revision, which reclaims the Devil as a Christological redeemer and exposes Yahweh as the Antichrist; (2) organization by contraries; (3) mock-biblical revision; and (4) illumination. Chapters 3-6 examine these criteria in their literary-historical contexts, first by tracing the genealogy of diabolical revision in satirical diabologies and mundus inversus literature and art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Chapters 4-5 examine aspects of biblical revision in the context of early Christian heresies, modern sects, Enlightenment biblical scholarship, speculative mythography, and biblical parodies. Chapter 6 considers Blake’s Bible of Hell in the context of the illustrated Bible market of the 1790s. Part II (Chs. 7-10) assesses Blake's works of 1788-95 according to these criteria, showing that the works of 1788-89 develop Bible of Hell features that culminate in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and continue in the 1793-95 mock-biblical prophecies. Here the dissertation’s focus shifts to the conceptual evolution of the Bible of Hell in response to the failure of the French Revolution and its authoritarian backlash in England. Whereas The Marriage prophesied apocalypse as the righting of the upside-down world by a revolutionary, antinomian Christ, its 1793-95 sequels lose faith in revolution but critique biblical monotheism as the basis of historical tyranny. The final chapter examines conceptual tensions within the works of 1793-95 to hypothesize why Blake abandoned the Bible of Hell. Description: Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2012-07-31 12:36:56.964 Thu, 09 Aug 2012 04:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7358 2012-08-09T04:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7355 Title: Marked Men: Sport and Masculinity in Victorian Popular Culture, 1866-1904 Authors: Smith, SHANNON Abstract: In Marked Men: Sport and Masculinity in Victorian Popular Culture, 1866-1904 I examine the representation of the figure of the Victorian sportsman in different areas of nineteenth-century popular culture – newspapers, spectacular melodrama, and series detective fiction – and how these depictions register diverse incarnations of this figure, demonstrating a discomfort with, and anxiety about, the way in which the sporting experience after the Industrial Revolution influenced gender ideology, specifically that related to ideas of manliness. Far from simply celebrating the modern experience of sport as one that works to produce manly men, coverage in the Victorian press of sporting events such as the 1869 Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race, spectacular melodramas by Dion Boucicault, and series detective fiction by Arthur Conan Doyle and Arthur Morrison, all recognize that the relationship between men and modern sport is a complex, if fraught one; it produces men who are “marked” in a variety of ways by their sporting experience. This recognition is at the heart of our own understandings of this relationship in the twenty-first century. Description: Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2012-08-01 15:16:09.384 Thu, 09 Aug 2012 04:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7355 2012-08-09T04:00:00Z