Browsing by Author "Peppis, Paul"
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Item Open Access Visuality and Free Verse(University of Oregon, 2023-07-06) Roethle, Christopher; Peppis, PaulMore than a hundred years after Whitman, vers libre, and the Imagist movement, many poets still have a remarkably indistinct understanding of what it means to write in free verse, as the form is too often defined by what it is not rather than by what it is. In this dissertation, I examine work by Sadakichi Hartmann, Marcel Broodthaers, Philip Metres, and Derik Badman at the limit of what we might consider free verse poetry to argue that free verse is not just a linguistic form but a visual construct that must be “seen” in those terms to be understood. Following my Introduction, Chapter Two examines the early and nearly unclassifiable vers libre of Sadakichi Hartmann, a Whitman acquaintance and early adopter of French Symbolism whose characteristic line in 1898’s Naked Ghosts combines elements of prose poetry, free verse, meter, and rhyme in a package explained as much by his interpretation of Japanese painting as by Whitman or the Symbolists. Even before Imagism, Hartmann wrote verse that functioned, in some ways, like an image itself. Chapter Three investigates the groundbreaking museum installations of Belgian visual artist Marcel Broodthaers, which some critics consider a form of three-dimensional free verse. Broodthaers’s installations encourage a multiperspectival approach to “reading” that consistently breaks its own protocols, shedding light on itself and other linguistic systems to expose the insufficiency of the signifier/signified chain. This chapter also examines the more recent verbal-visual poetry of American poet Philip Metres, who applies Broodthaers’s techniques to page-based free verse. Finally, Chapter Four examines the hybrid form of contemporary American comics poetry, with emphasis on Derik Badman’s Colletta Suite, to argue that comics poetry may be a new form of Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” and possibly the revitalized dramatic poetry Olson anticipated at the end of his 1950 essay. In each case, free verse steps into the realm of a visuality that was always there ahead of it, waiting for the linguistic elements of the prosody to catch up. By examining these works, we may begin to perceive a more positive than negative definition of the form.Item Open Access Static Chaos: The Great War and Modern Novels of Sterility(University of Oregon, 2012) Stoeckl, Sarah; Stoeckl, Sarah; Peppis, PaulThe Great War was unprecedented both in its devastation and in the significance people attached to it, which this dissertation contends led to a crisis of representation that manifested in literary tropes and discourses of sterility. Some authors used sterility to represent the war as a cultural and historical apocalypse, others as a basis for questioning how literature, Western civilization, and humanity itself could continue after such a catastrophe. "Static Chaos" theorizes how thematic renderings of sterility work alongside modernist formal experimentation to sever reproductive literary traditions. The widespread instances of sterility reveal the deep effects of the war on non-combatants as well as combatants, as demonstrated through analysis of novels by a diverse group of authors from Britain and United States--Rebecca West, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Claude McKay, and Ford Madox Ford. The study moves chronologically yet it also follows a narrative logic of thwarted human sexual experience beginning with novels focused upon problematic virginity, then those depicting the inability or unwillingness to procreate, and then one preoccupied with pregnancy overshadowed by illegitimacy and stillbirth. This dissertation draws upon trauma theory and grief and mourning theory, which reveal how, in addition to individual experiences of psychological trauma, the war disabled traditional means of coping, leading to a widespread inability to mourn that was traumatizing in itself. I name this state "traumatic grief" and argue that its pervasiveness led authors to break with a longstanding interconnection between making war and making babies. "Static Chaos" also expands theories that diagnose narrative's mimetic relationship to human sexual intercourse and sexuality, particularly those of Judith Roof and Lee Edelman who assert narrative's heterosexuality based on its traditional logic of continuation. I argue that post-war formal experimentation in modernist literature renders narrative metaphorically sterile by disrupting reproductive traditions and conventions. These formal components include generic manipulation, representations of inversion and paradox, ambiguous or inconclusive endings, and parodic or circular plot structures. Together with themes of sterility, these formal elements work to depict the post-war world as fixed in a barren wasteland, trapped in static chaos.Item Open Access Standing at the Precipice: Restrained Modernism in the Fiction of E.M. Forster, Nella Larsen, and Elizabeth Bowen(University of Oregon, 2014-10-17) Bash, Rachel; Peppis, PaulIn the field of literary modernism, value has been assigned most often to texts that display a certain kind of innovation: aggressive, destructive, and difficult. Other, quieter texts have been relegated to the periphery of the modernist canon. This dissertation, contributing to the work of the New Modernist Studies, argues for an expansion of how critics define innovation and, by extension, modernism. Through close reading and thorough analysis of critical reception, I explore a <“>restrained<”> modernism in the stories and novels of E.M. Forster, Nella Larsen, and Elizabeth Bowen, demonstrating how their innovation proceeds from and depends on their performance of clarity and their deconstruction of traditional forms from within. These three authors strategically deploy familiar traditions like the female bildungsroman, social satire, and the tragic mulatta tale in order to explore the queer agency of restrained subjectivities trapped inside. Forster, Larsen, and Bowen defy critical accusations of timidity, conservativism, and failure, critiquing the totalizing identity categories of nation, race, sexuality, and gender and suggesting the quiet yet radical power of a literary--and modernist--restraint.Item Open Access The Science of Sound: Recording Technology and the Literary Vanguard(University of Oregon, 2014-09-29) McGinn, Emily; Peppis, PaulThis project is a comparative study of Irish and Latin American modernisms and the literary responses to the advent of recorded sound. It focuses particularly on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, Leopoldo Lugones's short stories "La fuerza omega" and "Yzur," and Jaime Torres Bodet's novel Proserpina rescatada. It examines how each author grapples with the dislocation of the human voice from the body made possible through new recording technology. This selection of texts displays a range of engagements with this new technology, from a critique of rising positivism and machines in the early twentieth century, to experiments with aural metaphors in the wake of sounded film, and finally to the 1930s, when sound recording becomes an arm of government surveillance against its citizens. In each instance, the circulation of sound technology causes a shift in modes of representation that require new definitions of what it means to be human in an increasingly mechanized world.Item Open Access Networks of Modernism: Toward a Theory of Cultural Production(University of Oregon, 2016-02-23) Hannah, Matthew; Peppis, PaulIn “Patria Mia,” his 1913 series of essays in New Age magazine, Ezra Pound uses a metaphor for modernist cultural production that informs and structures this dissertation. “If it lie within your desire to promote the arts,” he writes, “you must not only subsidize the man with work still in him, but you must gather such dynamic particles together; you must set them where they will interact, and stimulate each other.” Salon hostess Mabel Dodge Luhan, in Movers and Shakers, announces a similar transformation in interpersonal relations: “Looking back on it now, it seems as though everywhere, in that year of 1913 . . . there were all sorts of new ways to communicate, as well as new communications.” I argue that these new forms of communication and interaction described by Pound and Dodge not only characterize the early twentieth century but also empower transnational experiments in literature, art, and politics that we now call “modernism.” Because of dramatic and wide-ranging developments in communications and travel technologies, modernists in the early years of the twentieth century cooperated and communicated regarding their experiments in new dynamic ways that make modernism an especially collaborative project. Before the Great War casts a dark shadow over the promises of modernity, editors, writers, artists, political radicals, hostesses, and intellectuals met in small private salons, published in alternative periodicals, and joined avant-garde movements. Reading these collaborative events illuminates the interactivity that crystallizes modernism as a cultural mode of production. To analyze collaborations in the development of modernism, I construct network graphs that visualize the webs of interaction I study. Rather than rely solely on diachronic readings of modernist texts, these visualizations provide a synchronic model for modernist cultural production as simultaneous connections, constituting a modernist totality. To analyze these network graphs, I apply concepts from network theory and sociology, two disciplines that begin in the modernist moment. Thus, this dissertation is both a theory of cultural production and an effect of that cultural production. The network is itself a modernist concept.Item Embargo Multiethnic Intellectual Traditions and Reinvention of America in Early Twentieth-Century Ethnic American Literature(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Jung, Junha; Peppis, PaulThe interwar period was a time when the American community and the meaning of its membership were dismantled, contested, and demanded to be redefined through a series of events, such as the Great Depression, the Great Migration, the settler-colonial nation’s territorial expansion in the Midwest, and the related attempt to consolidate its border in the South. In the context of this dissertation, being American is less a legal-administrative matter of nationality. Rather, it is a set of epistemological conditions that are used to naturalize the boundary called American and to exclude others from it. By discussing the works of H. T. Tsiang, Zora Neale Hurston, Charles Eastman, and Américo Paredes, this dissertation demonstrates how these multiethnic author-intellectuals commonly critiqued the liberal notion of the human defined in terms of the possession of scientific rationality. In response to the specific historical conditions their communities were facing, the four writers drew on their own ethnic intellectual traditions to reinvent the social scientific, legal, and political discourses through which Americanness is defined and imposed. Multiethnic literature formally renders multiethnic communities’ shared critique of the figure of the English-speaking, property-owning man as a model American while suggesting alternative ways of being American.Item Open Access Guest Editorial- "The Long Road to Knowledge"(University of Oregon, 2017) Peppis, PaulItem Open Access Extending the Line: Early Twentieth Century American Women's Sonnets(University of Oregon, 2017-09-06) Wakefield, Eleanor; Peppis, PaulThis dissertation rereads sonnets by three crucial but misunderstood early twentieth-century women poets at the intersection of the study of American literary history and scholarship of the sonnet as a genre, exposing and correcting a problematic loss of nuance in both narratives. Genre scholarship of the sonnet rarely extends into the twentieth century, while early twentieth-century studies tend to focus on nontraditional poem types. But in fact, as I show, formal poetry, the sonnet in particular, engaged deeply with the contemporary social issues of the period, and proved especially useful for women writers to consider the ways their identities as women and poets functioned in a world that was changing rapidly. Using the sonnet’s dialectical form, which creates tension with an internal turn, and which engages inherently with its own history, these women writers demonstrated the enduring power of the sonnet as well as their own positions as women and poets. Tying together genre and period scholarship, my dissertation corrects misreadings of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sarah Teasdale, and Helene Johnson; of the period we often refer to as “modernism”; and of the sonnet form.Item Open Access Experiments with China in American Modernity(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Lester, Jason; Peppis, PaulExperiments with China in American Modernity explores formulations of China within America’s early and interwar modernist period. I propose the concept of “transpacific experimentalism” to identify an emergent, sustained aesthetic engagement with China, grounded in empiricist, scientistic, or otherwise humanist claims, which can be understood through John Dewey’s theory of creative imagination. This dissertation resonates with the continuing expansion of new modernist studies, offering new methodological approaches and archival challenges to a field which has been historically constricted to a narrow high modernist canon. By tracing a constellation of texts situated on the disciplinary interstices of modernist studies, Chinese area studies, and Asian American studies, I do not intend to further horizontally expand the category of American modernism, but to reveal the extent to which it has always already been historically, culturally, and aesthetically transpacific–a term which, following Hua Hsu, “describes a physical space” connecting the United States to Asia, “as well as a horizon of possibility.” From the transpacific birth and circuits of Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine and Ezra Pound’s living Chinese character, to Witter Bynner’s collaboration with Jiang Kanghu and the recovery of Sino-US poets and scholars of American modernism, this dissertation argues for a new mode of reading which unearths the horizontal aesthetic relations which emerged across American and Chinese modernity.Item Open Access Disabling Modernism: Literature, History, Embodiment(University of Oregon, 2021-11-23) Steele, Alexander; Peppis, PaulBefore history had christened modernism, the movement had emerged in disabled concepts and forms. It was “degenerate art,” as Hitler infamously put it, before it was modernism. Yet when scholars and many readers examine modernist literature, disability often disappears from the discussion, even though physically or cognitively impaired characters feature extensively. This dissertation considers the stakes of representing deafness, impotence, prostheses, blindness, and shell shock in literary art—especially when that task is taken up by able-bodied writers, and when encountered by their able-bodied readers. “Disabling Modernism” argues that, in distinction to adjacent early twentieth-century public discourses surrounding non-normative bodies, modernist literature significantly destabilizes and denaturalizes disability—often in historicallyunprecedented ways—while also placing dynamic images of disablement among its central concerns. Many powerful sociopolitical actors, including eugenicists, legislators, and social theorists, worked to erase disability from the public sphere in the early twentieth century. The overlooked vein of “disabling” modernist literature evoked throughout this study seeks instead to recuperate and prize that which modernity has so often desired to eradicate. “Disabling Modernism” examines literature of this period that commits to nuanced, candid, and often uncomfortable dialogues with disability. This discomfort is meant to span the spectrum of embodiment, reaching and affecting both able-bodied and disabled communities, though likely in different ways. While this dissertation centers disability within our understanding of modernism, it does so by turning primarily to under-studied writers who rarely are given space to speak, let alone to one another: Carson McCullers, Wyndham Lewis, Jean Toomer, and Rebecca West. Each chapter focuses on key texts by these authors: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940); Blast (1914) and Snooty Baronet (1932); Cane (1923); and The Return of the Soldier (1918). But the arguments made throughout reach beyond the literary and aesthetic into the historical and theoretical realm, braiding them together. These four careers are viewed as complex, even historic, sites rich with unexpected value. This dissertation displays how unnerving pasts can reveal much about the social, political, and even semiotic structure of the present, and it asks us to rethink how modernism intersects with disability.Item Open Access Crafting Radical Fictions: Late-Nineteenth Century American Literary Regionalism and Arts and Crafts Ideals(University of Oregon, 2016-02-23) Roberts, Rosalie; Peppis, PaulThis dissertation demonstrates that Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), Mary Hunter Austin’s The Land of Little Rain (1906), Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), and Mary Wilkins Freemans The Portion of Labor (1903) exemplify the radical politics and aesthetics that late nineteenth-century literary regionalism shares with the Arts and Crafts Movement. Despite considerable feminist critical accomplishments, scholarship on regionalism has yet to relate its rural folkways, feminine aesthetics, and anti-urban stance to similar ideals in the Arts and Crafts Movement. Jewett, Austin, Chopin, and Freeman all depict the challenges of the regional woman artist in order to oppose the uniformity and conventionality of urban modernity. They were not alone in engaging these concerns: they shared these interests with period feminists, sexual radicals, and advocates of the Arts and Crafts Movement like John Ruskin and William Morris, all of whom deeply questioned industrial capitalism and modernization. Jewett, Austin, Chopin, and Freeman envisioned women’s Arts and Crafts communities that appealed to readers through narratives that detailed the potential uniqueness of homemade decorative arts and other aspects of women’s material culture. For Arts and Crafts advocates and regionalists, handcrafted goods made using local folk methods and natural materials fulfilled what they saw as the aesthetic requirements for artistic self-definition: The Country of the Pointed Firs and The Land of Little Rain embrace the destabilizing effect queer and feminist characters have on a presumably heterosexual domestic environment, and they formally resist the narrative structures of industrial modernity, emphasizing the Arts and Crafts ideal union between woman artist, natural environment, and communal bonds. The Awakening and The Portion of Labor expose the suffocating impact of industrial capitalism and sexism on women artists who strive for connection with their local environments and communities and cannot achieve their creative goals. I prove that all four texts do more than simply interpret regionalism through the Arts and Crafts Movement as a means to launch their critiques of industrial modernity, they transform the meaning of regionalist Arts and Crafts aesthetics and politics in late nineteenth-century American literature.Item Open Access Catholic Poets of the Great War(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Kerr, Mina; Peppis, PaulThe First World War poetry canon has long been defined by the works of Anglo-Protestant, agnostic, officer class soldier poets. Though the hegemony of this canon has painted the war as a faith-destroying event, poetic representations of the war involving and often celebrating religious faith were plentiful. Catholicism was a major religion in countries on both sides of the conflict: in 1910, 65% of Europeans were Catholic, including more than 40 million French citizens, 35 million Italians, 38 million Austro-Hungarians, and nearly 6 million people in the British Isles (Liu, Jenkins). This dissertation traces representations of Catholicism in British Isles First World War poetry across a variety of contexts, ranging from high modernist works to Catholic poetry written for popular audiences. Likewise, I investigate the influence of Catholicism upon representations of the war by non-Catholics, including uses of Catholic imagery by secular poets as well as influences of Catholic authors upon non-Catholic ones. I argue for the incorporation of Catholic First World War poetry into anthologies and teaching materials based on the widespread significance I establish of both Catholic poetry and wartime imagery derived from Catholicism.Item Open Access A Historical Contextualization of Reproductive Rights and Autonomy in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying(University of Oregon, 2022) Hall, Grace; Peppis, Paul; Williams, Timothy; McWhorter, BrianIn the 1930 quintessential American modernist novel, As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner tells the story of a poor family, the Bundrens, living in the Deep South. The novel follows fifteen separate narrators, including all seven family members, as the children and husband of Addie Bundren transport her body to a town forty miles away so she can be laid to rest. Particularly interesting is the novel's portrayal of gender, and more specifically reproduction, which centers around the two characters of Addie and Dewey Dell Bundren and themes of sexual and reproductive autonomy. This thesis interrogates the central theme of women’s reproductive rights and autonomy in the novel by synthesizing the disciplines of history and English. It contextualizes close readings of the text in terms of the twentieth-century national birth control and abortion movements, attitudes towards women’s reproductive rights in the US, and the lived experiences of specifically poor rural white southern women. This contextualization clarifies how the book responds and reacts to the contexts in which it was written and which it portrays, thus illuminating how the novel illustrates the convergence of literature and history. The novel depicts the oppression of women, including the abuse of Addie Bundren’s dead body by her mostly male family, criticism towards Dewey Dell’s pregnancy, and her rape, among other issues. Given Faulkner’s identity, it is possible to view him as an ally to the male oppressors in the novel. Many prior critics support this viewpoint. My thesis, however, argues that Faulkner constructs the women in the story as moral centers and uses the novel to illuminate and raise awareness for women’s reproductive struggle in this time period. The historical lens helps to support this counterargument by providing the context that shows that the portrayals of women and their oppression in this time are historically sensitive and accurate, while also avoiding falling into stereotypical or misogynistic representations of women in the Deep South. By using this historical and textual evidence, this investigation proves that Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying presents significant and progressive claims about the reproductive experiences of women in the time period, thus challenging current ideas of Faulkner’s gender politics and the assumption that his identity restricted him from producing an early feminist work. On a broader scale, the thesis shows how literature can be read as a historical document, and how history can be used to contextualize and deepen understanding of the politics and themes that appear in literature.