The spatial discourse of realism and modernism in American fiction, photography, and poetry.
Abstract
The first three chapters establish the principles and methods underlying the spatial practice of realism. In Crane's Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes, and Riis's How the Other Half Lives, social environment is comprehensible only insofar as its ideational substructure (conceived space) corresponds to that which can be visually represented (perceived space). Chapter four reads the "cognitive dissonance" in Hine's Ellis Island photographic portraits as a transition to modernism seen through Hine's practice of drawing the viewer into the traditionally transient social space of southern and eastern European immigrants. Chapter five charts, in Stevens's "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" and other poems, the emergence of a modernist poetics of social space. Abstraction and change, as the social conditions of realism, become for Stevens the ineluctable first and second principles of modernism. Abstraction, change, and pleasure thus inform the aesthetic principles of Stevens's modernism as social fields able to re-articulate the discourse and daily life practice of space. This study establishes a discursive framework for reading a continuity in how realist fiction, social documentary photography, and modernist poetry represent social space. The work of French social theorist Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, provides the basis for spatially-informed readings of the fiction of Stephen Crane, the social documentary photography of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, and the modernist poetry of Wallace Stevens. Lefebvre's analysis of the spatial subtext of modern urban social reality, in particular its conceptual, perceptual, and communal spheres of influence, helps reveal a pattern that cuts across the realist and modernist text's representations of space: the attempt to create or discover a cohesive spatial environment at a time of great social, cultural, and technological transformation in America.
Collections
- OU - Dissertations [9315]
Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
Literary transculturation in Latino United States of America: An analysis of language in the works of Tato Laviera and Robert G. Fernandez.
Alvarez, Stephanie M. (2006)This dissertation studies the theory of transculturation and its application to the study of U.S. Latino literature. Specifically, I analyze Spanglish as a form of linguistic transculturation in the poetry of Tato Laviera ... -
Whose desires are they? The politics of subversion in works by E. M. Forster, Nathalie Sarraute, and Jean Rhys.
Caruso, Katharine H. (2006)This dissertation examines the ways in which we read representations of the feminine subject in works that have been deemed complicit in strengthening hierarchies of gender and/or race. Building upon feminist critics' ... -
The aesthetics of metamorphosis: Ovidian poetics in the works of Maria Luisa Bombal and Elena Garro.
Creager, Nuri L. (2004)The study begins with an analysis of the Ovidian concept of metamorphosis and its effects on the body, identity, and the corpus of the text. Chapter Two addresses the notion of "literary myth, " and contextualizes Bombal's ...