Reading British Modernist Texts: A Case in Open Pedagogy

In this paper we discuss the application of open pedagogical strategies in a library session for undergraduate students. I, Mantra Roy, was then the humanities librarian at the River Campus Libraries at the University of Rochester. Dr. Bette London of the English department was teaching the course Making Modernism New Again in Spring 2017. My colleague, Joe Easterly, the digital humanities librarian, worked with the platform, CommentPress, that enabled our implementation of open pedagogical practices. By enabling students to gain agency in their own learning and by using literary texts in the public domain, we adopted open pedagogy in praxis

'Against the World': Michael Field, female marriage and the aura of amateurism'

This article considers the case of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, an aunt and niece who lived and wrote together as ‘Michael Field’ in the fin-de-siècle Aesthetic movement. Bradley’s bold statement that she and Cooper were ‘closer married’ than the Brownings forms the basis for a discussion of their partnership in terms of a ‘female marriage’, a union that is reflected, as I will argue, in the pages of their writings. However, Michael Field’s exclusively collaborative output, though extensive, was no guarantee for success. On the contrary, their case illustrates the notion, valid for most products of co-authorship, that the jointly written work is always surrounded by an aura of amateurism. Since collaboration defied the ingrained notion of the author as the solitary producer of his or her work, critics and readers have time and again attempted to ‘parse’ the collaboration by dissecting the co-authored work into its constituent halves, a treatment that the Fields too failed to escape

The Names of the Dead: Shot at Dawn and the Politics of Remembrance

Bette London is a Professor of English at the University of Rochester. She is the author of The Appropriated Voice: Narrative Authority in Conrad, Forster, and Woolf and Writing Double: Women’s Literary Partnerships. She is currently completing a book entitled Posthumous Lives: World War I and the Culture of Memory

Tracing landmarks: intimate contextualization in transnational academic autobiography

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Department of English, 2021.In this dissertation, I examine three autobiographies written by transnational, academic women to bring the connection between geographical place and experiences of subjectivity into sharper focus. Environmental context and landscape often feature prominently in personal narrative, but for autobiographical writers who chronicle transnational moves, the myriad differences between influential places intensify their understanding of the mutability of identity politics and the significance of relational community. Further, the confluence of transnational migration with academic pursuit adds greater dimension to the writers’ perceptions and presentations of their life stories; scholarly training, and the simultaneous privileges and exclusions of academia, are evident in the structure and content of the autobiographical works that are central to this study. Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days, Susan Rubin Suleiman’s Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook, and Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands illuminate the simultaneously unsettling and creative potential of living between nations and academic institutions; their texts offer both intimate and theoretically rich conceptualizations of the landmarks and routes that have shaped their personal and professional identities. This dissertation builds upon feminist readings of women’s autobiography by examining two critical focal areas - positionality and relationality - from the nuanced perspectives of diasporic, academic women. In my close readings of these personal narratives, I ask the following critical questions: How do these writers’ memories of past locations provide insight about their early experiences of subjectivity and foundational community? How do the writers define their present location, how does this terrain compare to past locales, and how does it inform their notions of identity and available community? How does the writers' academic training influence their rhetorical choices, and their analyses of shifts in place, experiences of subjectivity, and power structures? I contend that for feminist scholars who lead transnational lives (and for whom text is such an integral part of identity) the personal narrative can function as a surrogate homesite through which they can move freely between place and time and reclaim some intimacy with multiple essential contexts - the histories (national and familial), cultures, and webs of affiliation that comprise their lives

Re-membering the author : bodies and specters in nineteenth-century literary culture

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Department of English, 2016.In nineteenth-century England, devoted readers collected and displayed authorial relics, made literary pilgrimages, and persistently suggested that authors haunted both their former homes and their literary texts. Reading, for these audiences, both remembered (recalled) and re-membered (re-assembled) the body that generated the text. While both nineteenth-century literary biography and novels pay exacting attention to the author’s physical body, however, they cannot fully incarnate that body. Challenging the traditional polarization of haunting and materialism, literary biographers and authors, and bodies and texts, this dissertation proposes that a “necromantic summons” of the author was a defining feature of nineteenth-century literary culture. Negotiating between flesh and imagination, this summons produces specters within the text, always inviting pursuit of the author’s body while refusing full access. This dissertation examines four test cases of nineteenth-century authorial embodiment. The parable of authorship enacted by the 1831 edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, explicitly focused on embodiment and re-animation, hinges on the interaction between Mary Shelley’s 1831 preface and the novel’s narrative. While the preface demands that we seek the body of the “young girl” who wrote Frankenstein, the text both consistently re-creates this figure and conceals it amidst male bodies. Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield chronicles the male author’s simultaneous attempts to embody his memories and preserve corporeal autonomy. Unable to erase his body from the labor of writing, he seeks to displace signification onto the novel’s female bodies, revealing deep anxieties about gender, embodiment, and labor. In exposing the problems faced by the female artist, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette engages the tension between imagination and reality, the body and the specter. Lucy continuously emphasizes the centrality of her body to her “heretic narrative,” yet she also reveals that body as a spectral construct. Considering each of these three novels alongside contemporary biographies and literary criticism demonstrates both readers’ craving to receive the bodies promised by the novels and their awareness of the task’s impossibility. The proposed exhumation of Shakespeare’s remains, examined in the dissertation’s epilogue, presents a limit case: nineteenth-century readers and critics were forced to choose between the physical remains of the author and his imagined body

Tarrying with useless things : reparative readings of Victorian social inequality

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Department of English, 2016.This project investigates how garbage objects served as figurative representations of disenfranchised social groups, dramatizing the devaluation of minority persons in relation to the normalized position of the bourgeois British man. However, rather than merely indexing the debasement of these maligned groups, I assert that the figurative link with garbage objects proved to be generative. Using Eve Sedgwick’s notion of “reparative reading,” an exegetical approach that accords plenitude and compassion onto its objects, I suggest that Victorian authors deployed garbage as a reparative metaphorical mechanism in order to confer positive valuations on marginalized populations. The first chapter looks at how Rider Haggard’s She and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone pit seemingly useful British commodities against useless imperial things. While the novels initially appear to privilege domestic commodities’ abilities to achieve British characters’ desired ends, they also impart a mysterious “shine” onto imperial things. This mystical quality destabilizes notions of temporally-mediated utility. These imperial things, as metonyms for colonized cultures, challenged Western hegemonies built on presumptions of temporal superiority vis-à-vis the colonies. The second chapter foregrounds the profusion of starved, poor bodies in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton. These decomposing forms attest to the depredations faced by the urban poor as the result of industrialization. This “starving” also gestures towards a way of disinvesting in normalizing forms, yielding more equitable relations between the poor and bourgeoisie. Chapter three interrogates the category of the “redundant woman.” I suggest that the redundant single woman is depreciated in economically-inflected discourses, as is reflected in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford. However, when reinterpreted through evolutionary approaches, she accrues great value, due to her ability to withstand the dangers of sexuality. I track this revaluation in several New Woman novels, chiefly Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins. My last chapter focuses on Oscar Wilde’s numerous acts of self-plagiary. Read through the period’s anxieties about degeneration, Wilde’s non-originality highlights aesthetic and sexual decline, typified in the textual body of the queer plagiarist. Yet, when read locally, these moments of textual repetition yield important differences. By extension, this textual novelty metaphorically posits that gay male identities are not paltry copies of heterosexuality

Beyond black British? The novels of David Dabydeen, Monica Ali, Zadie Smith, and Hanif Kureishi

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Department of English, 2014.My dissertation examines a series of novels written over the last twenty years by writers who are customarily identified as second-generation black British, including David Dabydeen’s The Intended (1991), Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005), and Hanif Kureishi’s The Body (2002). I ask the following critical questions: How useful is the category of black British writing and the label black British to Dabydeen, Kureishi, Ali, and Smith? How do these writers respond to the institutionalization of black British studies through their fiction? I argue that Dabydeen, Ali, Smith, and Kureishi convey varying degrees of ambivalence towards the broad category of black British literature and the term black British, and in doing so, they problematize scholars’ attempts to position them and their novels within these categories. In particular, these four authors challenge the category of black British writing, the term black British, and the expectation that they will adopt the task of speaking for other black and Asian Britons by ‘writing back’ to a multiplicity of sources. In chapter one, I claim that although Dabydeen questions the essentialist and heterosexist notion of black British identity prevalent during the 1970s by rewriting Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), he also stresses the usefulness of the label and the category of writing. In chapter two, I affirm that Ali interrogates first-generation black British male writers’ portrayal of the flâneur by emphasizing the protagonist’s identity as a British Asian flâneuse and translator of London. At the same time, Ali engages with some of the typical concerns of black British literature by redefining the London represented in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). Chapter three assesses how Smith moves past E.M. Forster’s privileging of the notion of ‘place,’ as well as the central role that place plays in black British fiction, by distancing On Beauty from his novel Howards End (1910) and her first novel White Teeth (2000). Finally, chapter four investigates how Kureishi repudiates the fundamental premises of black British literature by ‘writing back’ to his own canon of fiction and by paying homage to Mary Shelley and Oscar Wilde

Offending women : modernism, crime, and creative production

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Dept. of English, 2007.Offending Women: Modernism, Crime, and Creative Production contributes to the expanding, interdisciplinary field of modernist studies by examining the female criminal and her often-overlapping sites of representation in American silent film, literature, and journalism. Using depictions of the female offender as the point of intersection, I analyze works that bridge the gap between ‘low’ culture and a ‘high’ modernism seemingly disdainful of the popular. My research considers how an increasing interest in crime brought the female offender to the forefront of modernist culture and rendered visible new, often violent potentialities in female representation. While criminological discourses sought to identify and contain the female offender and newspapers warned the public of her threatening presence, fictional narratives often enabled fantasies of subversion and reflected an increasing openness to seditious female subjectivity. I begin by examining films by Cecil B. DeMille and Tod Browning that focus on the origins of upper- and lower-class female offenders respectively. I then turn to Dorothy Davenport Reid’s film The Red Kimona and Sophie Treadwell’s play Machinal, which present sympathetic images of female murderers that were ‘ripped from the headlines’ of national newspapers. Finally, I examine the journalistic writings of Janet Flanner and Gertrude Stein, both of whom praise the criminal for challenging social and aesthetic norms. During a period marked by the attainment of suffrage, the female criminal often served to highlight woman’s volatile relationship to the law and underscore the shifting implications of her offenses against it. All of the narratives I examine seem to ask, if a woman is not yet equal before the law, is she truly obligated to play by its rules? In many cases, the period’s crime narratives provide a contradictory answer to this question, celebrating images of female subversion, while curbing such subversion through tidy endings that emphasize apprehension and reform. While these depictions of criminality reflect an increasing cultural tolerance of new models of female subjectivity, the offender is not a straightforward exemplar of women’s liberation. Rather, she enables fantasies of rule-shattering behavior while simultaneously exploring the dangerous implications of such rebellious disregard for legal, gender, and class norms

Editorial modernism : Eliot, Moore, Pound

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Department of English, 2016.Editorial Modernism: Eliot, Moore, Pound argues that modernist studies should look beyond its usual focus on authorial works to examine the crucial role of the "authoreditor" in the construction of literary modernism. Writers such as T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound redefined the scope of literary authorship in the twentieth century by intervening in the production and reception of literature as manuscript editors, book and periodical editors, editorialists, and publishers. By tracing the ways in which these author-editors selected, designed, arranged, and revised books and periodicals, Editorial Modernism opens fresh domains for investigation into the forms of modernism, while presenting new narratives about the careers of Eliot, Moore, and Pound that reveal the editorial influences and experiences that shaped their development as artists and critics. In addition to recuperating the varied editorial activities of these poets as objects of sustained critical analysis, the dissertation explores in the final section how digital tools for scholarly editing and textual analysis could better account for the historical editorial agencies inscribed in literary works. The opening chapter of Editorial Modernism reexamines Eliot’s editorship of The Criterion by submitting recent arguments about his development as a poet and critic during the 1910s and 1920s to the test of his concurrent editorial experiments in this magazine and other periodicals. This study establishes how Eliot’s periodical writing and editing allowed him to explore perspectives on aesthetics and culture often at odds with his unfolding authorial persona. Chapter Two shows how Moore’s elaborate editorial preparations for her first authorized volume of poems, Observations (1924), are the culmination of her interactions with previous editors of her poetry in little magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition to the studies in Chapter Two, the impact of Moore's role as an editor of The Dial magazine from 1925 until it closed in 1929 is investigated in a coda to the general introduction through a look at the poetry and prose she began to publish again in the 1930s. Chapter Three analyzes the ways in which Pound’s early Cantos cast the poet in various editorial roles with respect to his source materials, arguing that Pound's developing poetic, like those of Eliot and Moore, must be understood in terms of his changing editorial perspective. In the epilogue, passages from Pound's Cantos are further used to demonstrate how digital methods for textual editing and analysis could better register and represent historical literary editing. By shifting the focal point of digital scholarly editing and the analytical methods examined from the work of the author to that of the author-editor, Editorial Modernism challenges outmoded assumptions about the scope and function of literary authorship that continue to underpin the way modernist literature is studied, analyzed, and reproduced. In its study of the imbricated roles of authors and editors, Editorial Modernism provides ways to analyze groups of literary activities that, as scholars such as Jerome McGann and George Bornstein have argued, are isolated by disciplinary and methodological boundaries that did not obtain in their historical moment. As author-editors, Eliot, Moore, and Pound renegotiated relationships between writers and readers, and these relationships are materialized in the texts and volumes they edited. The dissertation sets the tone for an expanded interpretation of editorial agency in modernist studies, textual studies and scholarly editing, and the digital humanities