51³Ô¹Ï

Topic

Anaesthetic Modernism

Department of English

Date & location

• Thursday, May 15, 2025
• 9:00 A.M.
• Clearihue Building, Room B019

Examining Committee

Supervisory Committee

• Dr. Stephen Ross, Department of English, 51³Ô¹Ï (Supervisor)
• Dr. Magdalena Kay, Department of English, UVic (Member)
• Dr. Megan Swift, School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures, UVic (Outside Member)

External Examiner

• Prof. David James, Department of English Literature, University of Birmingham

Chair of Oral Examination

• Dr. Shailoo Bedi, Department of Educational Psychology and Leadership Studies, UVic

Abstract

Anglophone literary modernism has often been discussed in terms of its various attempts to shock its readership back to their senses, to reinvigorate a culture too used to convention. The notorious and persistent sentiments forwarded by Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis—to blast such a stagnant culture into a frenzy of radical creativity by embracing progress and cutting away stale traditions—are both familiar and useful touchstones. However, against the view of modernism as a strong, bombastic attempt to shock people back to their senses, my dissertation draws attention to a contrary understanding of anglophone literary modernism and defines it in terms of its pervasive anaesthetics: a mode of formal experimentation that takes anaesthesia and insensitivity as its key aesthetic elements. Anaesthetic modernism pertains to the multitude of experiences of insensitivity, numbness, and disembodiment that also made up a significant strain of modernist creation. Anaesthetic modernism connects the formal, stylistic, and thematic with the sensory, affective, and bodily, thus embracing aesthetics on broad terms and emphasizing the connections among content, form, and feeling in art. In this dissertation, I examine major works by Virginia Woolf, Malcolm Lowry, and Mulk Raj Anand that all represent anaesthetization, but do so in very different ways, ranging from how age, social expectations, and even language cut us off from direct sensory experiences, to self-medicating with alcohol and coping with the existential fallout of being suspended between cultures, to the defining limitations one’s social status can enact on one’s sensorium and identity. I weave literary criticism and close reading together with biological definitions of insensitivity and the embodied cognition model of consciousness in hopes of expanding the terrain of anglophone literary modernist studies.