English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item The Multistable Material of Modernism: Perception, Objects, and Identity(2021) Harr, Kayla; Walter, Christina; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues that modernist writers channeled the transformative potential of multistability, a popular concept among twentieth-century theorists of perception, into politically charged literary practices whose goals continue to reverberate in recent antiracist and decolonial theory. In the first half of the twentieth century, psychologists used the concept of multistability to explain human perception and captured this concept in paradoxical images that appear first as one thing and then another, through a shift in what the viewer perceives as figure and ground. Writers as different as H.D., Virginia Woolf, Amos Tutuola, and Wilson Harris adapted multistability into literary practices that sought to dismantle the bounds of patriarchal, imperialist, and anthropocentric hierarchies. These writers infused their representations of perception, objects, and power dynamics with a multistability that ceaselessly troubles the divide between subject and object and its related structures of social exploitation. Moreover, placing these writers’ efforts to expand what counts as a subject or agent alongside recent theories of extrahuman ontologies that seek empowering alternatives to the exclusions of Western subjectivity offers a compelling link between modernist literary experiment and contemporary antiracist and decolonial theory concerning objects, identity, and ecology.Item An Editor in Israel: The Periodicals of Ahad Ha'am in the Development of Modern Hebrew Literature(2021) Fabricant, Noah L; Zakim, Eric; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues for a reevaluation of the significance of Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginsberg) in the development of modern Hebrew literature on the basis of his work as an editor of periodicals. Critics commonly portray Ahad Ha’am as rigid and didactic, enforcing his own literary norms while excluding aesthetic and humanistic literature in favor of literature with explicit Jewish themes. Reading the periodicals edited by Ahad Ha’am shows that this reputation is exaggerated; his work is in fact characterized by significant heterogeneity and flexibility.This dissertation introduces the critical perspective and methodology of periodical studies to Hebrew literature. The first chapter shows how Ahad Ha’am as an editor brings diverse ideologies and Hebrew styles together in an organic whole, the “Odessa nusach,” in the literary collection Kaveret (1890). The second chapter argues that Yehoshua Ḥana Ravnitsky, editor of Pardes (1892-1896), lacks the editorial skill and vision of Ahad Ha’am, and as a result Pardes is divisive and lacks the unity of Ahad Ha’am’s periodicals. The final two chapters are devoted to Ha-Shiloah, the most prestigious outlet for Hebrew literature of its era, founded and edited by Ahad Ha’am from 1896 to 1903. Chapter Three traces the history of the critical reception of Ahad Ha’am’s controversy with Micha Yosef Berdichevsky over the boundaries of Hebrew literature, showing the development of a polarized standard account of the dispute that discredits Ahad Ha’am. Reading the original essays of the dispute in context shows that Ahad Ha’am’s resistance to belles lettres and humanistic literature is far from absolute, and in a sense Ahad Ha’am authors the entire controversy by collaborating with and publishing Berdichevsky and his supporters. Finally, the dissertation uses the belletristic literature published by Ahad Ha’am in Ha-Shiloah to show that his selections as an editor were not as narrow as critics claim or even as Ahad Ha’am himself prescribes in his essays. As a periodical editor, Ahad Ha’am fostered diversity and dialogue, and this should be accounted for in evaluating his influence on the development of Hebrew literature.Item Harbor(2011) Young, Martha A.; Plumly, Stanley; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The speaker confronts both her ambiguous relationship with her father and becoming a parent herself, moving from fear and anger to a tentative reconciliation. Specific topics also include motherhood, the author's younger sister and brother, her son and daughter, as well as miscarriage, strokes, and death.Item As Thread(2013) Dyche, Jessica Kathryn; Collier, Michael; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As Thread is a collection of poems which keeps account of the categories and modes of loss, using the death of my father as the catalyst, and how memory, as replacement, unravels, tangles, and mends--as thread does.Item Candidates for the Redemption Machine(2013) Gannon, Shaun Patrick; Collier, Michael; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This collection takes the concept of the "stunted individual" from grotesque fiction and applies it to surrealist prose poetry, where only traces of standard logic can be found; through this, the contrast between impossible events and innately human behavior becomes exaggerated. The melding of these forms forces the struggling individuals in these poems to represent humanity, where it is found wanting, despite artificial hope.Item British Modernist Narrative Middles(2013) Rosenberg, Michael Eli; Richardson, Brian; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Middles play a key role in shaping narrative form. However, while Edward Said has shown how beginnings shape the novel and a wide range of intellectual endeavors in Beginnings: Intention and Method, and Frank Kermode has explored the pull of the ending on Western narrative in The Sense of an Ending, there has been no comparable study of the middle. Defining the narrative middle as a central piece of text that has a transitional or transformational function, British Modernist Narrative Middles draws attention to the ways narrative middles have been used to construct distinctly modernist narratives through transformations of narrative form and technique. The various techniques employed in modernist narrative middles are demonstrated through close readings of three canonical modernist texts: Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, Henry James's The Golden Bowl, and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse; as well as three British neo-modernist texts: Rayner Heppenstall's Saturnine, B. S. Johnson's The Unfortunates, and Brigid Brophy's In Transit. While not all modernist texts employ prominent narrative middles, when they do, these middles can be crucial to our understanding both of these novels' narrative form and how they grapple with the major thematic and poetic concerns of modernism.