Browsing by Subject "Modernism (Literature)"
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Item Between the muses and the mausoleum: museums, modernism, and modernity(2006) Schwartz, John Pedro; Friedman, Alan WarrenFor both modernists and the museum establishment the museum functioned as a privileged site for the articulation of modernity. At one extreme, those like the futurist F. T. Marinetti, who experienced modernity as a rupture with the past—completed by a gesture of total forgetting—condemned the museum as a mausoleum devoid of contemporary relevance and called for its destruction. At the other extreme, those like the Director of the British Museum, Sir Frederic Kenyon, who located modernity in “an ordered progress based upon tradition” – facilitated by an act of selective remembering – defended the museum as a temple of the muses vital to the “soul” of the “nation” and promoted the spread of the “modern” exhibition gallery. While they differed in their methods, opponents and proponents of the museum shared a common goal, constructing modernity, and a common seat or scene, the (ruins of the) museum. If modernity was in part both product and prize of the battle over the museum, then the strategies modernists pursued in the course of this battle were crucial to the rise of modernism. The first two chapters of this dissertation analyze the critical and creative work of Ruskin, Marinetti, de Quincy, Nietzsche, Valéry, Adorno, Benjamin, Borges, and the first and second avant-gardes to reveal the range of strategies they used to construct modernity through, within, or against the museum. Modernism could not have arisen without these strategies. The next two chapters look at how Henry James, William Morris, and Virginia Woolf challenged the British Museum’s ability to fulfill its stated aim of “help[ing] the nation to save its soul.” Chapters five and six analyze James Joyce’s intervention in the discourses of Irish cultural and political nationalism in his satire of monuments’ and museums’ power as an instrument of cultural politics and identityformation in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Mining the intersections of museum, composition, and media studies, the final chapter proposes a paradigm for teaching multiliteracies through the museum.Item I, modernist: male feminization and the self-construction of authorship in the modern American novel(2005) Onderdonk, Todd David; Barrish, PhillipAn unexplored peculiarity of the male modernist novel is the frequency with which we find some version of the author himself in its pages, speaking, thinking and experiencing. Diagnosing this tendency as a symptom of cultural strain, this dissertation analyzes literary self-constructions in the works of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ralph Ellison. These key modernists, plagued by anxieties about manhood, race and the literary marketplace, used their works as implicit self-portraiture to suggest their own achievement of exclusive forms of masculine authorship. Central to this aim is the use of author surrogates, first-person narrators or protagonists who evoke the author himself in the act of attaining “literary manhood,” a form of masculine identity distinguished not by physical or sexual dominance, but by intellectual and emotional superiorities. Yet the surrogate attains these qualities through shocking humiliations and defeats; he is wounded and laid low by mediocrity, by women, “lesser” men, and by modern life itself. Critics have argued that so many feminized protagonists were a sign that modern men felt threatened by the rise of women in the public sphere. But male woundedness—even to the point of castration—emerges in this study as the very condition of modern authorship. As Hemingway wrote, the true artist “impersonally” turned his feminization into art: “We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist.” Scientifically turning “damned hurts” into difficult new forms of modern knowledge, modernists redressed cultural and professional anxieties by converting trauma into intellectual mastery, agency, and social authority. To privilege certain traits, however, is to reject others. The epistemological victories modernists attained through their defeats rely on a repudiation of the “feminine,” whether portrayed in women, in male homosexuals, or in racial others. This study thus implicates highly influential concepts of modern authorship with broader cultural attitudes toward race, gender and ethnicity, investigating a crucial node of aesthetics, epistemology and identity politics at the heart of the modern novel.Item The permeability of history and literature in Santa Evita and La fiesta del Chivo(2005) Ruiz, María Regina; Fierro, Enrique H.The present study provides an analysis of two New Historical Novels: Santa Evita (1995) by Tomás Eloy Martínez and La Fiesta del Chivo (2000) by Mario Vargas Llosa. I will approach these novels from the perspective of Postmodernism. Both works deal with the topic of history and literature. How history and literature relate is a focal component of this project. The “writing” and “rewriting” of history are essential topics. Therefore, a revision of the historical reading and writing processes requires more than a unilateral vision of past events. In fact, numerous points of view are essential in order to understand how those in power have influenced the recording of history. The power of knowledge then introduces the idea of the legitimization of history. This project also reviews the differences between Modernism and Postmodernism. Several critical views are covered. Tomás Eloy Martínez’s novel Santa Evita illustrates a variety of postmodern characteristics. Since Postmodernism allows the artist to revise and question conventional and dogmatic structures, then parody and myth are explored. At the same time, examples of myth show how Martínez constructs his narrative and how history portrayed Eva Perón. Fiction and history therefore open the discussion of the use of the documents in Martinez’s novel. On the other hand, an explanation of simulacra and simulation shed light on the different ways in which Eva created herself and the ways in which others recreated her. In contrast, La Fiesta del Chivo is a novel about a dictatorship, it is important then to understand how dictatorships have controlled and molded societies for years in Latin America. I approach this novel from the perspective of the postmodern text. The way in which reality and fiction come together will introduce the topic of metafiction. Vargas Llosa´s novel shows how memory and myth play an important role in literature. In the case of the Dominican Republic, it is clear how history has perpetuated myths. The author also includes a variety of voices, which do not fall in the category of the official history. These voices shed light onto previous ideas about the past and our understanding of it.