BA, Oberlin College, 2010, English

Can words ever express a truth beyond language? Virginia Woolf explores this persistent question most directly in two of her late novels, The Waves and The Years. The two appear to sit at opposite ends of the spectrum of her writing, The Waves embodying interiority and vision and The Years embodying exteriority and fact. The apparent realism of The Years, following on the heels of the impressionism of The Waves, has caused many critics to dismiss it as an aberration. But in fact the later novel is far from a regression to traditional realism: it takes up where its predecessor leaves off, attempting to find a transcendence through language while looking honestly at the conditions and limits of that transcendence. Examining them as a pair illuminates both novels, showing The Years to offer a surprisingly strange and even mystical model of language and the world.

Committee: David Walker (Advisor); Jennifer Bryan (Committee Member); Sandra Zagarell (Committee Member) Subjects: English literature

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 (PhD), Ohio University, 2023, English (Arts and Sciences)

This project aims to interrogate modernist symbolism of the dog as representations of human alterity by focusing on the importance of the dog as a robust modernist trope used to articulate the problems of being human in an increasingly industrialized, modernized society. This dissertation explores how the dog functions as a symbol with attention to class, hierarchies, kinship arrangements, sex and sexuality, but also considers the dog as a literal dog, outside of human constructs. While Darwinian theory undermines the supremacy of the human by showing how species interrelate, the dog is of particular importance because of its coevolutionary partnership with humans, having the capacity to expose the precarity of human ascendency and dissolve the human/animal boundary. The dog's capacity for destabilizing the category of human can convey humanity's degradation, but the dog is also an analogue for human constructions, articulating questions of class, gender, and sexuality. Intimacy between humans and dogs also issues new ways of thinking of kinship. Lastly, this dissertation examines modernist texts for their subtle advocacy for the better treatment of animals by imagining animal subjectivity, by humanizing the animal, or by carefully studying animal behavior.

Committee: Carey Snyder (Advisor); Vladimir Marchenkov (Committee Member); Edmond Chang (Committee Member); Nicole Reynolds (Committee Member) Subjects: Animals; British and Irish Literature; Gender; Glbt Studies; Literature; Modern Literature; Russian History; Womens Studies; Zoology

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

M.A. (Master of Arts in English), Ohio Dominican University, 2022, English

This paper focuses on the forms of narration that do not fit the traditional definition and deserve more profound study. These types of narration have marked influences from British Imperialism that have made lasting effects on their structures. Beginning in the age of Old Imperialism and continuing throughout the present day, many groups of narrators were viewed as “less appealing” because they are not rich enough, white, or male. However, because of these power structures, atypical forms of narration become more significant as they allow these “less desirable” narrators to tell their story through the use of frames or assumed personas. Through close reading and research, connections can be made between atypical narrators and the cultural ideas of a society. These ideas result in the development of or lack of empathy when a group considers those they view as “others.”

Committee: Jeremy Glazier (Committee Chair); Martin Brick (Advisor) Subjects: 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

M.A. (Master of Arts in English), Ohio Dominican University, 2019, English

Works of Modernism often portray figures at odds with nature, society at large, or the self. These figures may seem outwardly sick or lost, but their problems may emerge from some deeper place of irresolute confusion. In the figure of the Captain in Conrad`s The Secret Sharer, Michel in Gide`s The Immoralist, or Clarissa Dalloway and her psychic counterpart, Septimus Warren Smith, in Woolf`s Mrs. Dalloway, we see a battle taking place. In Rousseauian terms, the battle already exists between the wills: the general will versus the will of wills. However, how does this fractionalization of will correspond to these characters or to the state of each author around the time of writing the work? Can we see some of this same complexity of Modernism discussed by Freud in his theory of the drives of men and women, specifically in the death drive [Thanatos] as it emerges in these fictional personas and the challenges of the will each faces? Can we read the characters as avatars of the authors, questioning the tenets of Modernism, challenging personal identity and uncovering the deeper paradoxes that life in the Modern world initiates among the creative-minded? Do the writings of Henri Bergson in his Creative Evolution, a masterpiece of the era, also aid the reader to better ascertain how and why these characters bear out some of the similarities, maladies, and challenges of each of their respective author's life experiences? Does a desire for creatively solving problems and resolving Modern challenges to identity predispose a character or author, for that matter, to an emotional or psychological cataclysm of sorts? Applying some of these author's non-fictional writings or other biographical sources may also help to resolve some of these questions, as well as allowing the reader to better grasp the impact of Modern societal forces and personal contacts within their lives.

Committee: Martin Brick Ph.D. (Advisor); Jeremy Glazier M.F.A. (Other) Subjects: 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

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1985, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1981, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1978, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Literature