Twentieth-Century Poetry and Visual Culture: transatlantic Perspectives of European and American Modernism

[ES] Este estudio investiga el impacto de la cultura visual moderna en la poesía vanguardista desde una perspectiva que tiene en cuenta los intercambios transatlánticos entre el modernismo europeo y norteamericano. A principios del siglo veinte las imágenes formaban parte de una sociedad influenciada por los avances tecnológicos y el consumismo. Sensible a los métodos empleados por la cultura de masas y la publicidad, los poetas modernistas recurrieron al potencial de la experiencia óptica no sólo para promover sus obras sino también para apelar al sentido de la vista como el medio más rápido y efectivo en provocar una reacción en el espectador. Movimientos como el cubismo, el futurismo, el dadaísmo, el expresionismo alemán y el surrealismo francés ejercieron influencia sobre el experimentalismo británico y norteamericano. En Gran Bretaña el imagismo y el vorticismo tomaron como referentes las disciplinas de la pintura y la escultura para articular un lenguaje poético que reprodujera los efectos de la cultura publicitaria. En Estados Unidos poetas y artistas tales como William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane y los precisionistas utilizaron la imagen visual para recrear la energía de la metrópolis norteamericana. Otros modernistas en la línea de Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot y Ezra Pound expresaron en París su extrañamiento respecto de su patria escribiendo una poesía épica que se asentaba en el collage pictórico con el fin de proporcionar una visión plural que enfatizara las perspectivas interculturales. Asimismo, la aparición del cine y la fotografía inspira la poesía de Marianne Moore y H.D., cuya imagen cinemática puede interpretarse en favor de la democratización y la expansión del arte. El estudio de la cultura visual contribuye a conectar formas populares como los medios de masa con la estética de las bellas artes y de la poesía. La interrelación de los géneros literarios con las artes plásticas, el cine y la fotografía nos invita a reflexionar acerca de la condición ontológica del sujeto u objeto presentado en la obra artística así como la tensión entre arte y verdad en la época moderna. La estética de principios del siglo veinte participa en estructuras visuales e incluye nuevos modelos que emulan la realidad publicitaria y los medios de masas.[En] This study investigates the impact of modern visual culture on avant-garde poetry from a perspective that considers transatlantic exchanges between European and American Modernism. My argument is at the brink of twentieth century images were part and parcel of a highly technologized and capitalist society. Sensitive to the methods employed by mass culture and the advertising industry, Modernist poets relied upon the potential of optical experience not only to promote their works but also to appeal to eyesight as the fastest and most effective way to provoke a reaction in the viewer. Therefore, I pay heed to Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, German Expressionism and French Surrealism as a means of exploring the origin of avant-garde aesthetics and their bearing on the British and American experimentalism. In Great Britain, Imagism and Vorticism relied upon the disciplines of painting and sculpture to articulate a poetic language that reproduced the artifice of promotional culture. In the U.S. poets and artists such as Williams, Crane, Stevens and the Precisionists, utilized visual imagery to envision American city life and natural landscapes. Other Modernists such as Stein, Eliot and Pound conveyed their displacement from their homeland by engaging in an epic poetry that reproduced cross-cultural perspectives thanks to the collage effect. Likewise, the emergence of cinema and photography makes a direct impact on the poetry of Moore and H.D., whose mechanized image might be interpreted in terms of the democratization and expansion of art. The study of visual culture thus helps connect popular or low forms, such as media, with high forms in line with the fine arts and poetry. The interrelation of the literary genre with plastic and mechanical forms is significant because it invites us to think over the original thing and its duplicates as well as the tension between art and truth in modernity. All in all, early twentieth-century aesthetics participates in visual structures, opening up models that emulate the free circulation of commodities, whether they are tangible or intangible

Subversion and Transcendence in the Latin American Modern Travel Novel (1928-1976)

The focus of this dissertation is the role that travel plays in Latin American novels that stem from 1928 to 1976, specifically, Macunaíma, Los pasos perdidos, El reino de este mundo, and Mascaró, el cazador americano. Departing from the fact that this period of time in history was marked by political and cultural change and upheaval, different aspects and interpretations of travel as manifested in the novels of the corpus are explored as a means of subversion and transcendence to hegemonic discourses. Travel is viewed as a means of disruption, particularly of limits and borders, be they geographical, political, and cultural. The idea of a heightened sense of potentiality inherent in travel is also explored as part of the subversive and transcendent nature of travel. The beginning of the work delves into alternative spaces that are created by voyage. These spaces are described as differential spaces using Lefebvre’s definition of the term. Following a discussion of space, myth in travel is explained as an open system that resists particular power structures. Travel’s role in disseminating myths is also studied. Subsequently, the function of the Trickster as a mythological figure and as a peripatetic storyteller is analyzed. The final aspect considered in this study is the creation and the use of alternative semiotic systems that exist inside and outside of travel that subvert and transcend authoritative discourses of power

Urban Studies

This work contains a selection of papers from the International Conference on Urban Studies (ICUS 2017) and is a bi-annual periodical publication containing articles on urban cultural studies based on the international conference organized by the Faculty of Humanities at the Universitas Airlangga, Indonesia. This publication contains studies on issues that become phenomena in urban life, including linguistics, literary, identity, gender, architecture, media, locality, globalization, the dynamics of urban society and culture, and urban history

Blessed Motherhood, Bitter Fruit

Nelly Roussel (1878–1922)—the first feminist spokeswoman for birth control in Europe—challenged both the men of early twentieth-century France, who sought to preserve the status quo, and the women who aimed to change it. She delivered her messages through public lectures, journalism, and theater, dazzling audiences with her beauty, intelligence, and disarming wit. She did so within the context of a national depopulation crisis caused by the confluence of low birth rates, the rise of international tensions, and the tragedy of the First World War. While her support spread across social classes, strong political resistance to her message revealed deeply conservative precepts about gender which were grounded in French identity itself. In this thoughtful and provocative study, Elinor Accampo follows Roussel's life from her youth, marriage, speaking career, motherhood, and political activism to her decline and death from tuberculosis in the years following World War I. She tells the story of a woman whose life and work spanned a historical moment when womanhood was being redefined by the acceptance of a woman's sexuality as distinct from her biological, reproductive role—a development that is still causing controversy today

Leituras dialógicas do grotesco : textos contemporâneos do excesso

Doutoramento em LiteraturaMikhail Bakhtin tornou-se para os recentes estudos linguísticos e literários uma referência fundamental e o seu aclamado Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics representa actualmente uma obra obrigatória do dialogismo e da polifonia. Além de Das Groteske: Seine Gestaltung in Malerei und Dichtung de Wolfgang Kayser, deve considerar-se Rabelais and His World como uma das análises mais significativas na área do grotesco. O presente estudo baseia-se fundamentalmente numa fundamentação bakhtiniana do grotesco que é complementada por perspectivas que se tornam particularmente pertinentes nas áreas literárias em questão, o pós-colonialismo e a literatura feminista / feminina. Entre outros contributos de índole ensaística, encontramos os estudos de Mary Russo, Martha Reineke, Julia Kristeva e René Girard. Lendo dialogicamente as marcas dos textos de obras seleccionadas de Githa Hariharan, Salman Rushdie, Robert Coover, Ben Okri e Angela Carter demonstra-se que o grotesco é não só uma filosofia e estética abundante na literatura pós-colonial e feminista mas também um instrumento político e uma força interventiva na mudança de mentalidades.Mikhail Bakhtin is unquestionably a fundamental reference in contemporary linguistic and literary studies where his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics has become a landmark in the specific fields of dialogism and polyphony. Critics regard Rabelais and His World as a ground-breaking study of the grotesque, only equated with Wolfgang Kayser’s Das Groteske: Seine Gestaltung in Malerei und Dichtung. My analysis is based mainly on a Bakhtinian view of the grotesque which is complemented by perspectives more directly related with the fields in question, postcolonialism and women’s literature. Among these are counted Mary Russo, Martha Reineke, Julia Kristeva and René Girard’s studies. The dialogical readings of the selected texts by Githa Hariharan, Salman Rushdie, Robert Coover, Ben Okri and Angela Carter reveal that the grotesque is not only a philosophy and aesthetic abounding in postcolonial and women’s literature but also that it is a political tool and a powerful intervention force in the ongoing process of changing mentalities

Listen for the Desert: An Ecopsychological Autoethnography

What does it mean for human beings to be part of nature – not just as a conceptual justification for doing right by the planet, but actually as an embodied, emotional, and sensuous experience? What happens to the experience of being human when notions as fundamental as voice, absence, suffering, and psyche are re-encountered from a perspective rooted within, rather than apart from, the natural world? While this dissertation responds to these questions, it initially took shape in response to something that felt less like a research question and more like a summons. Following a startling experience of feeling called and claimed by a part of California’s Mojave Desert known as Jawbone, the author returned to Jawbone to camp without human company for a month. Interweaving ecopsychological perspectives with autoethnographic methodology allowed the author to share the story of her fieldwork in ways that disturb the expectation of an individualized, separate, and anthropocentric “auto,” or self. The experience of being with Jawbone, as well as the aftermath of that experience, prompted the author to explore what it means for humans to engage with the other-than-human natural world as a relational partner, as well as how an understanding that human beings are a part of the natural world invites those working in mental health fields to consider how their work can be of service to nature. The project that resulted is in part a love letter to a place, in part an ecopsychological exploration of the experience of relationship, and in part one human animal’s story about the grief and the joy of belonging deeply to ecology in an ecocidal time

Investigating on-call work in rail infrastructure maintenance

The use of on-call work in industry has now surpassed that of shiftwork and night work. Industries as a whole make use of on-call work daily as a way to maintain 24/7 operations whilst also reducing costs. Despite this, on-call work remains underresearched and no best practice or management guidelines are available. As the first substantial piece of human factors work examining on-call work in the rail industry, this thesis has the overall aim of increasing the understanding of on-call scheduling systems of work, and also to provide recommendations to the planning and management of on-call work in the rail industry which may also be applied in other industries. A semi-structured interview study with 72 rail maintenance on-call workers of Great Britain rail infrastructure owner and operator (Network Rail) explored on-call arrangements in place and the perceived unwanted consequences of this type of work. Anxiety, fatigue, and reduced well-being were perceived as the main consequences of working on-call. The findings also indicate that when discussing on-call there are three separate on-call situations; being on-call, receiving calls, and responding to calls; which influence the study variables differently. From the key themes identified initially an on-call questionnaire for managerial staff was developed and data from across the country generating 479 individual responses. A two-week diary study (one week on-call and the week after) with 26 participants aimed to collect real-time ratings. Results indicated that working on-call was perceived as a leading cause of stress, poor quality of sleep and fatigue. This is due to the inherent unpredictability of on-call work, which is the key differentiating factor between on-call work and other types of working-hours systems. Receiving and responding to calls were perceived as detrimental to general well-being both to workers and their families, fatigue, and performance. The work performed for this thesis allowed the development of the first on-call specific framework that identifies not only the key factors at play but also the relationships between them. It presents a set of principles or theories that other researchers can use to guide future research and that industry professionals can use to deliver more human friendly on-call work management processes and procedures

"Errant in time and space" : a reading of Leonora Carrington's major literary works

Part One deals with Carrington's association with the Surrealist movement and looks at her texts as dreams/nightmares. Born in 1917, Carrington arrived in Paris just before her twentieth birthday. The opening chapter deals chiefly with biographical material and creates a context for Carrington's writing within the Surrealist movement. Chapters Two and Three explore Carrington's main stories of this period, examining the stylistic devices that make them dream-texts.Part Two deals with the major crisis in Carrington's life and writing: her internment in a Spanish asylum. Chapter Four looks at the biographical events that led Carrington to be interned and suggests that her father and his associations with Imperial Chemical Industries had more to do with her internment than is commonly believed (Appendix I includes a transcript of my interview with her Spanish doctor and testifies to contacts with ICI). Chapter Five analyses the "mad" narrative "Down Below", where the repression of Carrington's "playing with language" is exposed through an impressive imagery of death. Chapter Six explores the stories written in New York immediately after release: "Cast Down By Sadness", "White Rabbits", "Waiting", "The Seventh Horse" and "As They Rode Along the Edge". The grotesque female bodies and the pervasiveness of the monstrous distinguish these stories as Carrington's chaotic, "creative" resurrection.Finally Part Three looks at Carrington's Mexican period, where her writing achieves a voice that, although resonant of previous moments, stops being tragic and becomes revolutionarily comic. Chapter Seven follows Carrington's life in Mexico, where she still lives, from 1942 to the present. Chapter Eight deals with four of her best Mexican writings: the novel The Stone Door, the play The Invention of the Mole, the short story "The Happy Corpse Story" and an unpublished letter to Remedios Varo (1958) included in Appendix II. Finally Chapter Nine deals at length with The Hearing Trumpet