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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 Resisting the Reader: Textual Recalcitrance in British Novels, 1917-2011(2021) Wei, Tung-An; Richardson, Brian; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In “Resisting the Reader: Textual Recalcitrance in British Novels, 1917-2011,” I focus on a radical, underexamined type of difficulty which presents irreducible interpretive dilemmas at fundamental narrative levels—for example, a reader may be required to fill in gaps to complete the narrative but is unable to. Unlike what James Phelan calls “the difficult,” recalcitrance does not yield to our interpretation. Existing scholarship has mostly focused on the canonical works of “the difficult” in modernist and postmodern literature. I intervene in the scholarship by investigating the wide appeal to recalcitrance across the century, including previously overlooked late modernist and contemporary literature. Moreover, I analyze various forms of recalcitrance in different types of fiction, not just canonical or highbrow. This large scope allows me to trace how later authors repurpose modernist techniques, including recalcitrance, for new ends. I argue that recalcitrance is an effective strategy to lay bare the workings of a text. For example, in Molloy, Samuel Beckett taps into the recalcitrant lists and catechism in James Joyce’s Ulysses to fashion his lists and in turn critique traditional emplotment. Moreover, in The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes uses unreliable narration to keep readers interested in tracing the narrator’s reevaluation of his past. Recalcitrance is equally powerful in foregrounding social issues that are so complex that they can never be fully solved. For instance, Joseph Conrad’s underappreciated wartime story “The Tale” uses recalcitrance to register the public’s antithetical attitudes toward wartime rumors of submarine attacks. In the afterword, I analyze how Malaysian-Taiwanese novelist Yong-Ping Li’s The End of the River critiques colonial exploitation of Indigenous women by reworking Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Through my afterword, I gesture toward future work on 1) additional sites of recalcitrance beyond British or Anglophone literature and 2) the transformations of modernist narrative techniques, including those bearing on recalcitrance, in global novels. My dissertation contributes to the New Modernist Studies by accounting for transnational exchange (such as Li’s rewriting of Conrad) and drawing attention to authors who are largely unfamiliar to American academia, namely Anna Kavan, Ann Quin, and Li.Item Translating the "Other": A History of Modernist Literature in the American Southwest, 1903-1945(2016) Horton, David Seth; Wyatt, David; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)William Carlos Williams wrote, “The classic is the local fully realized, words marked by a place.” There are now significant studies celebrating the “classic” regional literatures of Ireland, New England, and the American South. But what if the place is out-of-the way, and what if the words that mark it are difficult if not impossible to translate? The American Southwest is one such place, a literary region only recently coming into view. My dissertation forwards this project by focusing on how cultural work produced in the Southwest might represent the region despite the many difficulties of translation involved. Biographical, literary, historical, and archival materials allow for an interdisciplinary approach positioning Southwestern texts within the broader traditions of European and American modernism. My chapters explore the limits of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural understanding. As with Pound’s approach to translating Chinese poetry, which did not entail learning Chinese, Mary Austin argues that she need not master an indigenous language in order to translate Native American texts. Instead, she claims to mystically comprehend their essential meaning, thereby enabling and limiting her insights into the region. While Espinoza’s El sol de Texas emphasizes the challenges faced by immigrants fleeing the Mexican revolution, Venegas’s Las aventuras de don Chipote offers a model for how to cope with such challenges by a process I term “transnational mimicry.” The lexical switching between English and Spanish provides numerous opportunities to mimic and mock southwestern cultural traditions, a strategy linking the region to other colonized spaces throughout the world. The texts of Luhan and Lawrence constitute spectacularly failed attempts at translating otherness. Luhan romanticized the local cultural geography, whereas Lawrence interpreted it through a Eurocentric point-of-view. Together, their work represents the epistemological limits of a vision dominated by Anglo power structures. I conclude with Cather’s southwestern novels and suggest that while Death Comes for the Archbishop is a novelistic illustration of Benjamin’s argument that all translations are marked by at least some degree of incommunicability, it also illustrates Ricoeur’s contention that a belief in translatability is foundational to any act of interpreting a text produced by an “other” human being.Item Oral Storytelling in Modernism: Narration, Ideology, and Identity(2012) Wellman, Jennifer Jean; Richardson, Brian; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Oral storytellers abound in modernist texts - from T. S. Eliot's inarticulate J. Alfred Prufrock to Djuna Barnes' desultory Dr. Matthew O'Connor, from Joseph Conrad's loquacious Charlie Marlow and other men of the sea to Rebecca West's dainty Harriet Hume. This project theorizes the construction of orality and the figure of the oral storyteller in early to mid-twentieth-century literature, with a focus primarily - but not exclusively - on the British Isles. While the prevalence of such constructions has been surprisingly under-examined by modern literary critics, early to mid-twentieth-century writers were fascinated with oral storytelling, and this fascination provides vital insight into literary modernism's all-important efforts to redefine self and community through art and artistic innovation. Modernist authors employ written representations of oral storytelling to explore and attempt to negotiate the relationship between cultural authority and the formation of modern subjectivities. I examine modernist representations of oral storytelling in works such as Walter Benjamin's essay "The Storyteller" (1936), Joseph Conrad's An Outcast of the Islands (1896), Rebecca West's Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy (1929), Virginia Woolf's The Waves (1931), and Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape (1958). By exploring how authors contextualize ideas of orality and the oral storyteller within discourses of nationalism, literary tradition, and technology, I show that the figure of the oral storyteller presents a contact site for the contesting forces that inflect the formulation of self in the early to mid-twentieth-century. These forces include: ideologies of gender and empire; narrative itself as a culturally-inflected schema for understanding experience; and new and recently emergent communication technologies, like the gramophone and radio, which shift early twentieth-century understandings of language, presence, and the limits of the body. Moreover, as inherently self-reflexive moments within texts, scenes of oral storytelling implicitly engage with the defining modernist struggle to both undermine and appropriate the authority of earlier writers and contemporary literary and social traditions. The writers examined in this study use oral storytelling scenes to explore and delineate the relationship between dominant cultural narratives, the material world, and embodied identity.Item Writing with Image: Verbal-Visual Collaboration in 20th-Century Poetry(2010) Helwig, Magdelyn Hammond; Loizeaux, Elizabeth B; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines verbal-visual collaboration in which a poet and a visual artist work cooperatively to produce a single book. Verbal-visual collaboration is a fertile genre that refigures the historically oppositional relationship between the sister arts and that anticipates today's hypertext experiments in interart forms. I confront the problem of reading a multi-media text and posit “integrated reading” as a constructive critical approach that privileges neither word nor image. Integrated reading stresses relationships and asks questions about how the verbal and visual elements interact, what they say to and about each other, and how they work together to interrogate issues of representation. Examining the nature of poetry from the stance of images, and vice versa, means questioning the nature of representation itself. A central concern of verbal-visual collaborations, and modern poetry, is representation. My integrated readings consider issues of representation demonstrated in the process, presentation, and meaning-making of verbal-visual collaborations. My dissertation has two other goals: to begin to write the history of modern verbal-visual collaboration and to develop a taxonomy of such projects. I focus on three texts: Ted Hughes and Leonard Baskin's Capriccio (1990), Frank O'Hara and Larry Rivers' Stones (1957-1960), and C.D. Wright and Deborah Luster's One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana (2004). I trace the specific histories of these works to position each within the history of verbal-visual collaboration and to show how the creative process bears on reading a collaborative text. I describe categories of collaboration based on the working proximity of artist and poet and their relationship to material production, and my taxonomy provides a beginning for classifying the various ways in which poets interact with visual images.Item The Makings of Digital Modernism: Rereading Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans and Poetry by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven(2009) Clement, Tanya E.; Kirschenbaum, Matthew G.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, I argue that digital methodologies offer new kinds of evidence and uncover new opportunities for changing how we do research and what we value as objects for literary study. In particular, I show how text mining, visualizations, digital editing, and social networks can be applied to make new readings of texts that have historically been undervalued within academic research. For example, I read Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans at a distance by analyzing large sets of data mined from the text and visualized within various applications. I also perform close readings of the poetry of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven differently by engaging online social networks in which textual performance, an ever-changing interpretive presentation of text, is enacted. By facilitating readings that allow submerged textual and social patterns to emerge, this research resituates digital methodologies and these modernist works within literary studies.Item Playing for the "Center:" "Marginal Modernism" in Sh. An-sky's "Der Dybuk" and Zora Neale Hurston's _Polk County_(2004-05-03) Jablon, Rachel Leah; Isaacs, Miriam; Comparative LiteratureBoth Sh. An-sky's "Der Dybuk" and Zora Neale Hurston's _Polk County_ epitomize the concept of "marginal modernism." Marginal literature is literature written by a member of a community that is in some way disenfranchised from the dominant, mainstream society in which the community resides--and in a language other than that which is used by the dominant, mainstream society. It often articulates the needs, desires, values, and nuances of the community. Marginality, in certain ways, is the ultimate indicator of modernism, in that the margin challenges the conventions established by the center, just as modernist literature challenges literary conventions. An-sky's and Hurston's styles, techniques, and goals match those of the modernist movements of their times and locations: An-sky's the Russian revolutions of the early 1900s and Hurston's the African American arts movement of the Harlem Renaissance.