Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1972, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2024, English

Modernist artist novels by and about women complicate traditional understandings of the kunstlerroman genre by challenging the definition and status of the “artist” and presenting a broader range of options for women interested in the arts. Beginning with Wyndham Lewis's Tarr and with specific attention to the character of Bertha Lunken, an art student, and continuing with readings of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Mina Loy's Insel, and Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun, the dissertation analyzes representations of the female artist. Through their artist protagonists, these authors explore their ambivalence regarding the importance of talent, vision, and marketability. Their portrayals of amateur artists, students, and models focus on the social and material conditions that women in the period had to navigate in order to come to their own understanding of artistic success. Such portrayals also speak to the ways women participated in various modernist movements, both as visual artists and as writers. Ultimately, a reexamination of the female artist figure in these novels allows for an expanded definition of modernism by finding continuities between the Modernist period and the late Victorian period, interrogating regionalist specificity and transatlantic communication, and considering ways that high modernist experimental fiction relates to a commonly feminized and dismissed mass-market literature.

Committee: Keith Tuma (Committee Chair); Erin Edwards (Committee Member); Elisabeth Hodges (Committee Member); Madelyn Detloff (Committee Member); Mary Jean Corbett (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2024, English

This thesis aims to reexamine the works of Virginia Woolf and other Stephen family members through the lens of the supercrip concept first coined by crip theorists such as Alison Kafer and Eli Clare. Woolf has often been framed as a resourceful writer who converted the symptoms of her mental illness into sources of creative inspiration for her work. However, her life was also plagued by self-imposed, constant pressures to read and write in the face of the difficulties brought on by her symptoms. Letters between her father Leslie Stephen and Charles Darwin suggest that Leslie may have seen his literary talent as a way to justify his own disabled existence as a cyclothymic. This thesis traces how Leslie's supercrip-infused, evolutionary ideology was transmitted into three of his disabled descendants: his first daughter Laura, his nephew Jem, and his third daughter Virginia. All three of these Stephen family members were subjected to lofty expectations for their reading and writing ability. By exploring the lives of Leslie, Jem, Laura, and Virginia, it is possible to observe the damaging effects of Darwinian theories on Victorian people with disabilities and see how the supercrip stereotype informs Woolf's contributions to literary modernism.

Committee: Madelyn Detloff (Committee Chair); Erin Edwards (Committee Member); Mary Jean Corbett (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature; Science History

Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2023, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

With her body of work, Virginia Woolf joins a host of female novelists decrying the lack of power that women in general wield in a patriarchal society. Specifically, her novels To the Lighthouse and Orlando provide a hopeful response to the dismal depiction of the female artist in Victorian literature, namely Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Because of its subject matter of domestic abuse, unfortunately the experience of too many women in a society in which husbands are given too much power, Tenant was not regarded with respect in Bronte's lifetime. The novel so obviously portrays a woman without power in such dire circumstances it is indeed unsettling for most audiences. However, in her novel, Bronte's inventive techniques of using embedded and nonlinear narration to bring this mistreatment to light illustrates how the unbalance of power debilitated the expression of the female artist in her character Helen Graham. Although there is no direct evidence that Woolf read Anne Bronte's novel, Woolf responds to this hopeless depiction with modernist experimental and more nuanced strategies such as free indirect style and interrupted narration to paint a much more hopeful picture of the possibility of the female artist confronting the power of the patriarchy with success and freedom of expression. In doing so, she upends Victorian tropes and expected narrative structure to provide a scathing critique of the Victorian patriarchal culture in which she, herself, was raised.

Committee: Rachel Carnell (Advisor); Frederick Karem (Committee Member); Adam Sonstegard (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature; Modern Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, English

This project examines the relationship between music and literary modernism, arguing that modernist authors invoke music in their novels to critique and to imagine more equitable social structures. Using Theodor Adorno's theories on music's ability to model inclusive social structures through balanced part/whole, or detail/totality, relationships, I consider both formal and thematic musical connections in modernist novels. If, as Adorno argues, musical form can reflect current social structures and offer models for more equitable ones, then the modernist use of music can be understood as an attempt to critique social hierarchies and to imagine a more equitable future. My first chapter examines the works of E.M. Forster and his use of music in Howards End and A Passage to India. An extended engagement with Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and a brief reference to Indian raga allow Forster to consider issues of race, gender, and class through a musical lens. Through these musical references, Forster opens up possibilities for legibility of the individual within the whole. Ultimately, however, the individual is negated by the patriarchal and imperial whole. The second chapter turns to Virginia Woolf's late novels, The Years and Between the Acts, to argue that Woolf explores an expansive and democratic view of what constitutes music in an effort to undermine fascist communication. In my third chapter, I consider Trinidadian literature and its connection to calypso form. Using Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners and V.S. Naipaul's Miguel Street, I argue that the interactive and political aspects of calypso form, employed by Selvon and Naipaul in the ballad construction of their novels, allows for critique of the imperial power while offering alternatives to imperial narratives. Considering these author's engagements with music alongside Adorno's theories on equitable part/whole relationships in music, this project offers a new way to understand how music functions in modernist (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jesse Schotter (Advisor); Arved Ashby (Committee Member); Thomas Davis (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 0, English (Arts and Sciences)

In this lyrical childhood memoir, I reconstruct my experience of my parent's explosive divorce. The manuscript begins and ends in court, where at 12 I testified I no longer wanted to continue my relationship with my father. It is a moment that exists outside of linear time for me. To mimic the experience of trauma, I loop back to this scene throughout the book, each time getting closer to the moment I speak my truth. Between these courtroom sections, I flash back (and forward) to examine the relationship I had with both my parents and the relationship they had with each other, trying to make what sense I can of the way things fell apart. Written from the perspective of my younger self, I elevate the child's voice because, during all this, that voice was often not counted. As subtly as possible to avoid disrupting the reader's occupation of the child's point of view, I invite my adult perspective when necessary to provide context or future insight. At its heart, this book seeks to show that, while lacking language or the ability to articulate an experience, a child is a full person whose experience of situations is no less complex or human than that of the adults around her.

Committee: Eric LeMay (Committee Chair); Patricia Stokes (Committee Member); Patrick O'Keeffe (Committee Member); Carey Snyder (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Fine Arts; Gender; Language Arts; Literature; Modern Literature

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1955, English

Committee: Howard O. Brogan (Advisor) Subjects: British and Irish Literature

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1955, English

Committee: Howard O. Brogan (Advisor) Subjects: British and Irish Literature

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2022, English (Arts and Sciences)

“‘An Odd Monster': Essays on 20th Century Literature” focuses on intersections of history, place, gender, race, and imperialism in twentieth-century modernist literature. Within these discussions I assert that western conceptualizations of history or the past work to erase the non-white bodies and cultures pivotal to imperial success, to subsume women into patriarchal subordination, and to present a historical progression antithetical to the experience of those relegated to subalternity. In discussions of Jean Rhys, Tayeb Salih, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf, I argue that defiance to authoritarian containment—whether from within or without—often takes unlikely forms with seemingly feeble results. In analyses of characters who write back, talk back, rebel, do nothing, and/or commit small acts of violence, I contend throughout that insubordination to systemic oppressions for the purposes of prioritizing individual agency over moral triumph do not have to be “successful,” to be revolutionary. Utilizing foundational voices such as Sara Ahmed, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Michel Foucault, among others, I argue that these acts are transcendent despite little to no substantial change emerging because the characters and writers themselves make and claim their own autonomy and belonging. This work participates in and urges for a continuation of the work of “New Modernist Studies,” which seeks a more expansive understanding of modernism through collapsing the rigid (often exclusionary) spatial and temporal boundaries.

Committee: Ghirmai Negash (Advisor) Subjects: African Literature; American Literature; British and Irish Literature; Caribbean Literature; Literature; Modern Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2019, English

My dissertation reads key works of Victorian and modernist literature by Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Gaskell, H. Rider Haggard, David Jones, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf alongside contemporaneous scientific texts to illustrate how mass anthropogenic extinction became increasingly recognizable. By bridging periods, my dissertation examines the multiple and sometimes conflicting registers of meaning that extinction accrued throughout Britain's industrial and imperial history as the notion of anthropogenic mass extinction gained traction within the cultural imaginary. Literary critics who discuss the Anthropocene within the context of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tend to focus squarely on the question of climate, using the geohistorical moment of Britain's industrialization to trace the ideological, material, and scientific developments that gave rise to the notion of anthropogenic climate change within the public imagination, especially through representations of pollution and compromised atmospheres. My project attempts to reframe this conversation by considering the extent to which the Anthropocene became increasingly knowable to both Victorians and modernists through biological registers: as in the observable impacts of imperialist processes and technological modernity on biodiversity and global animal populations. These impacts were recognized in, for example, African species and subspecies that became critically endangered or extinct due to British hunting culture as well as avian species that sharply declined due to British consumer practices. I argue that mid-nineteenth-century authors from Tennyson to Gaskell were beginning to explore the degree to which geological frameworks called into question long-standing beliefs regarding humankind's placement within the natural world as well as the precarity of species within the context of deep time. I consider how such lines of inquiry continued throughout the century in adventure fiction investe (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Mary Jean Corbett (Committee Co-Chair); Madelyn Detloff (Committee Co-Chair); Erin Edwards (Committee Member); Andrew Hebard (Committee Member); Marguerite Shaffer (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Literature

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2019, French, Italian, and Classical Studies

This thesis, written in English, is a comparative analysis of Walter Benjamin's and Annie Ernaux's readings of 'A la recherche du temps perdu' by Marcel Proust. While Benjamin emphasizes Proust's storytelling capabilities and commends Proust for his descriptions of involuntary memory, Ernaux works more critically to reimagine a writing process removed of spontaneous experience. To develop this point, we apply Benjamin's definitions of `storyteller' and `experience'; to Ernaux's Les Annees (2008), an autobiography written almost entirely without the first-person singular pronoun. Using Benjamin's terminology, we question the relationship between writing and collectivity, not only asking `how is Les Annees a collective autobiography,' but also `how can one write collectively?' We conclude by unraveling the mechanics of the `collective image' at work in Les Annees: Ernaux's collective image does not speak for all people, nor does it claim to be an objective rendition of the past; rather, writing such an image is an ethical exercise, a social engagement with one's community and one's selves.

Committee: Audrey Wasser Dr. (Advisor); Elisabeth Hodges Dr. (Committee Member); Jonathan Strauss Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Comparative Literature; Literature; Modern Language; Modern Literature; Technology

Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2019, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

Although scholars have examined Mrs. Dalloway extensively in terms of gender performance, few critics of The Great Gatsby have explored Gatsby's masculinity through gender studies. Using Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity, I argue that Mrs. Dalloway and Gatsby represent both actors and directors rehearsing a new gendered identity of the twentieth century. Through their roles as staged performers, I emphasize how seemingly minute tasks connect to larger social and political stakes of memory, celebrity status, and reappraisals of gender identity. I further assert that while both Mrs. Dalloway and Nick Carraway experience revelations and heightened imagination through death, neither achieve non- heteronormative gender identities. Still, Virginia Woolf and F. Scott Fitzgerald draw upon their own image of the artist to playfully tease a new hybrid-femininity and masculinity of self-invention beyond the gilded cage.

Committee: Frederick Karem, Ph.D (Committee Chair); Rachel Carnell, Ph.D (Committee Member); Adam Sonstegard, Ph.D (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Comparative; Comparative Literature; Gender Studies; Literature

Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2018, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

TRUTH AND THE LANGUAGE OF WAR KELLY OMELIA ABSTRACT According to modernist Friedrich Nietzsche in On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense, language is a constructed system which fails to represent reality because of its inherent metaphorical nature. Modernist writer Virginia Woolf and postmodernist writer Tim O'Brien implicitly address Nietzsche's belief as they warn against and represent the horrors of war in the novels Jacob's Room and The Things They Carried. Nietzsche and Woolf develop new modernist styles, forsaking the conventions of nineteenth-century realism. O'Brien pays homage to high modernism and to Woolf in his novel through direct reference and through the modernist strategies utilized to present the unpresentable. The strongest bond between these two novels is each text's metafictional acknowledgement that it has failed even before it has begun, echoing Nietzsche. The novels Jacob's Room and The Things They Carried circumvent language's limitations and make the reader feel that s/he understands war and will therefore seek peace.

Committee: Rachel Carn (Committee Chair) Subjects: Literature

MA, Kent State University, 2016, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

This thesis argues that modernist authors James Joyce and Virginia Woolf experimented with representing both the passage of time and nonhuman materialities and things in their works in order to present a more accurate and complete vision of life at the beginning of the twentieth century. Their literary experiments in representing quotidian life prompted these authors to thoughtfully consider how nonhuman materialities punctuate and structure the flow of modern life. The works of Joyce and Woolf respond to the historical event of the standardization of time in 1884, as local and private experiences of the passage of time continued to be superseded by global standardized time throughout the beginning of the twentieth century. Joyce and Woolf ultimately structure the the temporality of their works around an ecological temporality of things, effectively subverting a standardized structure of temporality, to demonstrate that the passage of time is not experienced uniformly by all materialities. Their works not only advocate for a continued legitimacy and value of alternate human experiences and understandings of the passage of time, but they also illuminate how nonhuman materialities exist and endure through time. Drawing from the work of new materialist scholars, this thesis investigates how Joyce's Ulysses and Woolf's To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts represent the nonhuman and the material in the modern world, as well as how the nonhuman and the human experience a multiplicity of temporalities.

Committee: Ryan Hediger Ph.D. (Advisor); Kevin Floyd Ph.D. (Committee Member); Tammy Clewell Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Environmental Philosophy; Literature

Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2014, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

Louisa May Alcott's revision of the representation of passion in Behind a Mask, or a Woman's Power (1866) in connection with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) is something that has not been widely discussed in scholarly studies since the reintroduction of these Blood and Thunder novels by Madaline Stern in 1975. Both Bronte and Alcott demonstrate in their novels that passion is a positive attribute, but, through Jane, Bronte demonstrates that hysterical passion must be sincerely controlled and internalized in order to positively contribute to a woman's life. Alcott, on the other hand, suggests that women merely need to act as proper gentlewomen and use their passionate ways in assisting them to do so. Jane Eyre and Behind a Mask are two texts that represent women with very passionate personalities, which are portrayed as positive aspects of these characters. Alcott's suggests through Jean, that passion should be a tool used by women to achieve happiness; which is very different than Bronte's demonstration of controlled passion and proper Christian, gentle behavior. Through the analysis of passion and the different representations of passion in these two texts we can see that Alcott's work is revising the idea of passion compared to Bronte's earlier representation of internalized control in Jane Eyre.

Committee: Rachel Carnell Ph.D (Committee Chair); Adam Sonstegard Ph.D (Committee Member); James Marino Ph.D (Committee Member) Subjects: Gender; Gender Studies; Language Arts

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2007, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

Virginia Woolf's diaries have traditionally been used by scholars to augment discussion of her “real” and “major” works—the fiction and non-fiction whose publication she supervised in her lifetime—with details of their genesis, composition, and production. But as Quentin Bell, Woolf's nephew and biographer, suggests, the diary itself is a major work, able to stand alongside her fictional masterpieces To the Lighthouse and The Waves (D1 xiii). The diary has been available nearly in its entirety for over fifteen years, and yet it is almost never considered as a text on its own. Of all of Woolf's work, the diary is at once her most traditional (in its reliance on the “plot” of her own life and its day-to-day form) and her most modern and experimental (in the ways in which she often shatters the traditional diary form, uses it to her own ends, and distances it from the published, grand, monolithic male diaries of the past). The six published volumes suggest broad questions about audience, authorial intention, issues of the body and embodiment, and the development of Woolf's modernism, while allowing for an extended look at her development as a writer, reader, wife, sister, and thinker. This project provides a comprehensive reading of the diary, and examines certain issues and themes through a series of individual “lenses” which correspond to biographical and thematic elements. Woolf once likened her diary to a “deep old desk,” and this metaphor of the desk—that solid fixture with many drawers, cubbyholes, nooks and crannies—informs my work. Much as the desk is made of compartments, my project will look at discrete themes and topics from Woolf's diary in separate chapters, while addressing in each several overarching concerns that inform the diary as a whole.

Committee: Tamar Heller (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English

M.M., University of Cincinnati, 2005, College-Conservatory of Music : Music History

Although Libby Larsen's opera Mrs. Dalloway (1992) is not Larsen's most frequently performed opera, its subject matter and musical content offer a wealth of cross-disciplinary avenues for investigation. Mrs. Dalloway challenges the traditional linear pattern of operatic plot, blurs boundaries of gender and madness, and emphasizes characterization above all else, thereby presenting numerous possibilities for gendered interpretations. In order to explore musical and literary interpretations of gender, madness, and identity in Mrs. Dalloway, this thesis will analyze these issues with respect to the interaction of literary and operatic criticism. Larsen corroborates Woolf's literary ideals musically. Her compositional tools, for example, confirm Woolf's notion that there is not a clear division between sanity and insanity, and that gender is ambiguous. Larsen also parallels Woolf's literary style in a musical manner, by such techniques as recurring musical gestures.

Committee: Dr. Karin Pendle (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English; Music

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2008, English

England has historically conceived of chastity in two ways: 1) virginity prior to marriage followed by continence – i.e., self-restraint from sexual intercourse – within marriage and 2) simplicity of clothing and ornamentation. This dissertation, Fashioning Chastity: British Marriage Plots and the Tailing of Desire, 1789 and 1928, focuses on a time when these two definitions coexisted. British marriage plots typically concentrate on two female characters: one who overvalues fashion and engages in pre-marital sexual activity (only to make a poor marriage or become a fallen woman) and another who favors conservative dress and guards her chaste reputation (for which she is rewarded with an affectionate marriage). While the fallen women's scandalous sexuality attracts critical attention, the marriage plot's heroines – perhaps because they appear to reify orthodoxy – tend to generate less analytical attention. This dissertation examines the latter group: the overlooked, chaste protagonists. By unpacking sartorial motifs in Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796), George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859), Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895), and Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928), I illustrate how these authors use clothing's symbolic relation to contemporary issues to complicate the appearance feminine, chaste sexuality. Ultimately, this dissertation draws upon and contributes to feminist and sexuality studies by helping us to better understand the complexity of female chastity throughout the long nineteenth century. While Enlightenment thinking led contemporary religious, marital, and sartorial discourses to back away from defining husbands as the undisputed rulers of their households, the Marriage Act of 1753 solidified the importance of female virginity, as verbal spousehoods were no longer legally binding. Concurrently, republican and capitalist belief systems deified the pursuit of happiness in marriage and promoted the interests of the rising middle-class, emphasizing women as the (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Marlene Longenecker PhD (Advisor); David Riede PhD (Committee Member); Amanpal Garcha PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: English literature; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, English

This dissertation redefines lyric narrative—forms of narration that fuse the associative resonance of lyric with the linear progression of narrative—as both an aesthetic mode and a strategy for responding ethically to the political challenges of the period of late modernism. Underscoring the vital role of lyric narrative as a late-modernist technique, I focus on its use during the period 1925-1945 by British writer Virginia Woolf, American expatriate poet H.D., French filmmaker Germaine Dulac, and German critic Walter Benjamin. Locating themselves as outsiders free to move across generic and national boundaries, each insisted on the importance of a dialectical vision: that is, holding in a productive tension the timeless vision of the lyric mode and the dynamic energy of narrative progression. Further, I argue that a transdisciplinary, feminist impulse informed this experimentation, leading these authors to incorporate innovations in fiction, music, cinema, and psychoanalysis. Consequently, I combine a narratological and historicist approach to reveal parallel evolutions of lyric narrative across disciplines—fiction, criticism, and film. Through an interpretive lens that uses rhetorical theory to attend to the ethical dimensions of their aesthetics, I show how Woolf's, H.D.'s, Dulac's, and Benjamin's lyric narratives create unique relationships with their audiences. Unlike previous lyric narratives, these works invite audiences to inhabit multiple standpoints, critically examine their world, and collaborate in producing the work of art. Hence, contrary to readings of high modernist experimentation as disengaged l'art pour l'art, I show that avant-garde lyric narrative in the late 1920s—particularly the technique of fugue writing—served these authors as a means of disrupting conventional, heterosexual, patriarchal, and militarist social and political narratives. During the crises of the 1930s and the Second World War, Woolf, H.D., Dulac, and Benjamin turn to the lyr (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Sebastian Knowles (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English

Doctor of Musical Arts, The Ohio State University, 1996, Music

The 1975 Pulitzer Prize for music was awarded to American composer Dominick Argento for his song cycle, From the Diary of Virginia Woolf. For this composition, Argento selected eight excerpts from Virginia Woolf's diary ranging chronologically from 1919-1941. Each of the eight entries depicts a different aspect of Virginia Woolf's life. This document is designed to enhance future performances of Argento's song cycle by offering a performer's analysis of the composition in relationship to Virginia Woolf's life. Eight chapters correspond directly to the eight Argento settings. The chapters are divided into three sections: 1) Virginia Woolf's eight complete diary entries as they appear in A Writer's Diary; 2 ) Biographical perspectives of Virginia Woolf containing pertinent information about hew life and works; 3) Examination of the musical and dramatic elements employed by Argento in each song. Deeper knowledge of the complexities of Virginia Woolf affords performers a heightened perception and insight into Dominick Argento's From the Diary of Virginia Woolf.

Committee: C. Woliver (Advisor) Subjects: