Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, English

Material Modernism: Nature, Resources, and Aesthetics, asks how natural resources, from their extraction, refinement, and consumption, influence modernist aesthetics. How might directing our attention to the paper shortages in the British Commonwealth in the 1940s enliven perceptions of the debates over modernist aesthetics and nationhood in little magazines like Horizon and BIM, which circulated across the Atlantic? How do we answer for the ubiquity of rubber in the fiction of classic modernists like Joseph Conrad and James Joyce as well as its influence on the career of British Consulate turned Irish revolutionary, Roger Casement? What does the linking of character development to the development of land in Doris Lessing's The Grass is Singing and Sam Selvon's A Brighter Sun tell us about futures cultivated through land dispossession? These questions indicate important links between the transnational networks that constructed twentieth century geopolitics and transnational modernism. Modernist literary projects circulated within systems that often seemed surprisingly boundless, yet systems of imperialism and histories of over extraction were the inciting conditions for their existence. Therefore, when read together, transnational modernism and the influence of natural resources enliven our understanding of past patterns of thinking and shed light on our current moment of extreme extraction and climate crisis.

Committee: Thomas S. Davis (Advisor); Adeleke Adeeko (Committee Member); Jesse Schotter (Committee Member) Subjects: Aesthetics; Environmental Studies; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2016, English

Broadcasting Friendship: Decolonization, Literature, and the BBC analyzes the politics and form of literary radio broadcasts produced in London and broadcast to the West Indies, South Asia, and Africa during the decolonization era. This dissertation focus on the relationship between individual agency and institutional power in the BBC's Overseas Service and the U.S. grant funded Transcription Centre. I argue that writers working within metropolitan broadcasting institutions found friendship to be a productive political and aesthetic concept even as liberal models of friendship were being used as tools of British soft power. By showing how literary radio broadcasts were used for both cultural imperialism and anti-colonialism, we can better understand the interrelated developments of late modernism and postcolonial literature across multiple media. While my dissertation joins recent debates on mid-century literature and radio and transnational modernism, it is the first comparative study of the intersections of radio, literature, and cultural politics in the decolonization era. Each chapter focuses on a different concept of friendship and brings together a range of media with original archival research conducted at the BBC Written Archives Center, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, and other collections. In Una Marson's Jamaican literary magazine, The Cosmopolitan, and “Calling the West Indies” programs for the BBC, for example, we find the idea of cosmopolitanism being nurtured through poetry, while the Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand portrays interpersonal friendship between English citizens and Indian subjects as an incentive to political action in his novel, Across the Black Waters and his World War II BBC propaganda talks. In the BBC's Caribbean Voices and the Transcription Centre's Africa Abroad radio programs, we see writers like George Lamming and Lewis Nkosi examining the development of international communities of writers of African descen (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Pranav Jani Dr. (Advisor); Thomas Davis Dr. (Advisor); Adeleke Adeeko Dr. (Committee Member); Peter Kalliney Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: African Literature; Asian Literature; British and Irish Literature; Caribbean Literature; Mass Media