Search

Sherwood Anderson’s literary Midwest reflects many of the idealistic characteristics resulting from the region’s frontier, agrarian origin. The most prominent of these characteristics is the region’s emphasis on and appreciation of human particularity. His novels Winesburg, Ohio and Poor White document the region’s unique relationship with individual particularity and how this particularity clashed with a new industrial lifestyle. The two novels reflect the Midwest’s unique understanding of individuality and offer an explanation for why the region’s response to an industrial cultural overhaul was so damaging for the Midwest’s identity, as the traditional identity was supplanted by an industrial one.

As one of the earliest man-made transit structures to run from the west to the east side of the city, the Regents Canal had and still has a profound impact on both Londoners and the city itself. By examining this waterway as more than just a brief moment in the greater development of British industrial transportation and instead focusing on the social and cultural legacy of this space, I demonstrate how the Regents Canal embodies E.P. Thompsons idea of the industrial transition, ultimately revealing how a rich history of community, connection, and conflict manifested in this liminal space during the 19th century and beyond. This study does so by first exploring the unique duality of this waterway and how it embodied particular characteristics of the city of London in this moment of transition towards the industrial. Then discussing how the lived reality along the banks of the canal was radically different from what the Regents Canal company so carefully planned as the designers seemed to overlook the fact that a canal would promote movement. This created conflict as previously separate classes of people were brought closer together than ever before and as the city of London progressed further in the process of industrialization. Finally, this paper seeks to understand the attempted forced cultural assimilation of canal workers through the 1877 and 1884 canal acts as the age of canals came to an end to shed light on the working-class agency and messiness present during this moment of radical industrial and cultural change.

In this dissertation I explore the complex, often contested, relationships between humankind and nature. I consider the changing state of these relationships as they are influenced by factors rooted in science, technology, and economics. I also examine these relationships as they relate to human activities with agriculture. Considering the present state of environmental crisis and the abundance of evidence indicating the deleterious activities of humankind as primary causes for the many global calamities, I argue for revising industrially-driven ideologies; particularly those driven by the economic paradigm of capitalism and self-interest. Additionally, I submit that a return to kinship with nature will be most effective with educational strategies that break from the routines and curricular focus ingrained within mainstream public schooling institutions today. Cultivating an ecological worldview through ecological literacy is proposed. This, I believe, can form the foundation for effective, sustained, and meaningful change towards (re)connecting to nature and healing by reversing environmentally-degrading industrial practices.

This dissertation focuses on contemporary American fiction that explores the intertwined histories of genetics and industrialism. I argue that Jeffrey Eugenides, Louise Erdrich, and Richard Powers interpret industrial and scientific texts from the early twentieth century to tell a previously untold history of the era. Emphasizing the connections between emerging understandings of genetics and new methods of manufacturing, they present the story of how the gene made life seem buildable. These writers trace fantasies of the literal mass production of Americans, exposing how immigrants, Native Americans, and women became particular targets of an industrial impulse toward standardization. Yet the novels in my study also recover an alternative history of the gene, in which it possesses a range of abilities enabling it to resist efforts to industrialize not just social, but also organismal, life. Genes are portrayed in these fictions as agents of transformation as well as replication, thus inspiring optimism about the possibility of unsettling the future of corporate capitalism in American life. Chapter One argues that Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex draws parallels between Henry Ford's factory, Thomas Hunt Morgan's genetic laboratory, and the Stephanides family lineage to show how naturally occurring mutations subvert the pursuit of exact reproduction. Chapter Two examines Louise Erdrich's Tracks, and its portrayal of the Pinkham Medicine Company's commercial hybridization of plants. Pointing to the genetic reversion that often accompanies hybridity, Erdrich undermines Pinkham's efforts to cultivate a uniform American populace from diverse racial roots. Chapter Three discusses Richard Powers' depiction of corporatization in Gain, focusing on Procter and Gamble's pursuit of self-perpetuation by crossing not merely into legal, but also embodied, personhood. Turning to chromosomal chiasmus as a mechanism that makes reproduction a process inherently variable, and therefore unstable, Powers portrays the genetic body as a dubious model for corporate longevity. Taken together, my central texts address the relationship between fiction and history, literature and science, and human and industrial reproduction.

This dissertation analyzes the ways in which the new mode of industrial organization associating mass production with mass consumption in the early twentieth century--what we call Fordism--had profound cultural repercussions on urban spatial practices. I address Fordism as a mode of socialization that deployed industrial techniques to reconstitute the very nature of social relations. This attempt at broad socialization through technological means reflected a type of technical thought coalescing in the industrial practices of the early twentieth century that both brought spatial practices into its service and radically altered existing social relations. As such, Fordist ideas formulated to address efficiency in industrial production extended to the city, its architecture, and its inhabitants, construing them as technological artifacts subject to the same economies of scope and scale, and requirements of production and consumption as the manufacture of automobiles, demonstrating that Fordist modes of production permeated not just manufacturing processes but also the organization of management structures, the architectural layout of factories and offices, the social spaces of the city, and popular conceptions of individuality, subjectivity, and the body.

This study focuses on Italy's transition to industrial modernity (in the years from the end of the Risorgimento to the rise of Fascism) from the perspective of some of its iconic objects: wristwatches, bicycles, cigarettes, and cameras. Through the combined analysis of their reception (engendering new social practices like tourism, sport, and photography) and their representation in contemporary art (literature, painting, photography), this research reconstructs the gradual transformation of Italy into a modern nation. These objects reveal a cultural laboratory of the nation's quest for a shared modern identity, both in the positive overlapping of tradition and modernity (challenging a polarized critical approach to the age), and in the interaction of concurring perspectives (derived from ads, newspapers, public debates, and literary and visual sources). By exploring the singular contrast between the social phantasmagoria surrounding these newly mass-produced items, and their striking symbolization in art as antiques, this study highlights a hidden moment of tension in the negotiation of modernity, which finds intellectual expression in the deliberate affinity of these objects with Baroque poetics. In reading the meaning of this reference to the 17th century, this work advances two main arguments. First, on an intellectual level, such allusions indicate not only, against the background of the coeval recovery of the 17th century, an important trait d'union between European and Italian Modernism, but also, against the background of the Italian scholarly debate regarding the Baroque (leading De Sanctis and Croce to equate it with their 'decadent' present), a significant instance for re-evaluating the vital or 'positive' aspect of the fin de siecle, challenging its established definition as Decadentism. Second, on a socio-cultural level, the experimental Baroque epistemology of these objects envisions, on a micro-scale, a peculiarly Italian quest for a singular modernity, which embraces the excitement of modernization while either containing it within the influence of the nation's past heritage, or re-elaborating it in new solutions.

In the context of the post-industrial city, an urban regionalism has evolved through dormant industrial systems. Transportation infrastructure and industrial spaces have taken on a perceived sense of use and memory within the realm of the urban landscape, but these elements are typically forgotten in the creation and formulation of land-use. Current architectural and urbanistic focus increasingly tackles the role of disused infrastructural space and decommissioned industry as they interact with the contemporary city. This thesis investigation focuses on Birmingham's Railroad District - replete with its industrial heritage, historic relic, fallow ground, decommissioned remnants and regional character - to establish parameters that situate design within the District's lineage. The historic, industrial character of the region becomes a design measure in which to engage these urban conditions.

ABSTRACT For more than fifty years, Philip Levine has successfully written verse and prose on a number of subjects and themes including the complexities of familial relationships, the anarchists of the Spanish Civil War, the importance and effects of memory in life, race relations in the United States, the poet’s Jewish identity, and the very struggles that writing meaningful poetry involves. A cursory look at the scholarship on Levine’s poetry reveals that these are the topics frequently discussed and analyzed. However, as anyone can recognize in the criticism on Levine’s verse, Levine’s reputation does not rest so much on his attention to these themes and topics as it does on his presentation of and sympathies with individuals working in the context of modern industrial society. This dissertation identifies and analyzes Levine’s presentations of work and working-class individuals. Starting with the argument that more scholarship needs to be performed on Levine’s poetry than what currently exists, the dissertation’s first part points to Levine’s reputation in and contributions to American poetry. Proceeding to undertake the further study called for in part one, the second part of the dissertation identifies representative examples of working-class elements within Levine’s poetry and places them within historical context as far as poetry is concerned in general. Part three specifically looks at the ways in which Levine’s poetry expresses and relates to Marx’s idea that all of history revolves around the concept of class struggle. The final section of the dissertation explores how Levine’s poetry represents Marx’s theory of alienation among the working-class, identifying and analyzing key examples from throughout the poet’s oeuvre.