©2016 Frederick Solinger ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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©2016 Frederick Solinger ALL RIGHTS RESERVED SOUNDING MODERNISM: AN AURAL HISTORY OF THE NOVEL, 1899-1963 BY FREDERICK SOLINGER A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in English Written under the direction of Dr. Rebecca Walkowitz And approved by _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October 2016 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION SOUNDING MODERNISM: AN AURAL HISTORY OF THE NOVEL, 1899-1963 by FREDERICK SOLINGER Dissertation Director: Dr. Rebecca L. Walkowitz This dissertation registers the attempts of modern novelists to make the printed word resound, to make the delight and din of the age leap off the page. Beginning with the historical moment in which the voice first took on a life of its own outside the body, Sounding Modernism is a record of the formal struggles experienced by authors who wished to write the voice, attempts that often led to their finding their own narrative voices. The twentieth century brought unprecedented breakthroughs in the recording and circulation of sound. Yet, within modernist studies, the auditory is often overlooked in favor of the visual, a critical absence this project seeks to correct. Sounding Modernism argues that early twentieth century breakthroughs in sound technology were crucial to the development of modernist fiction. Sound technologies not only captured and disseminated the spoken voice but also transformed and expanded the writer’s voice. This is apparent in the way a multiplicity of voices comes to dislodge an authoritative narrative perspective, in the depictions of previously unrepresented experiences, and in the attention paid to silence and inarticulate sound. Although a device like the phonograph originally gave primacy to the voice, the recordings it produced captured a wide array of sounds, whether those generated by the ii recording process itself or acoustics and ambience. A similar dynamic can be tracked in the texts that I study in this project, as authorial interest in the recorded voice ultimately leads to an assimilation into the novel’s form of the greater soundscape. Novels unsettled by the existence of the transmissible voice and the workings of these new machines gave way to those that sought to utilize the metaphors engendered by the new media and to represent vocality textually. At the same time, novels that incorporated the conventions of older literary genres like verse and drama to call attention to the rhythm, pulse, and vibration generated by physical space led to meditations on the psychological, existential, and linguistic implications of inhabiting the loud twentieth century. With this counter-history, I am not looking to enthrone the audible at the expense of the visual. Instead, I am sounding out the novel, documenting both what happens to the literary as it encounters and assimilates new technologies of sound and when and where in post-war literature we might yet still hear modernism’s originary echoes. Modern novelists heard a new world and heard the world anew. Through this, they created literary forms that could index the collapsing distinctions between foreground and background, music and noise. This was not simply a matter of reproducing the sonorous in the novel, but of rendering the novel itself sonorous. The modern literary engagement with sound created new models for the organization and structuring of experience and for the elevation of a plurality of narrative voices in lieu of a single controlling figure. Accounting for the auditory dimension of modernism allows us to observe new methods of storytelling, catalog narrative devices that have otherwise escaped detection, and hear the desire of the novel to be heard as well as read. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I would like to offer my most heartfelt thanks to the members of my dissertation committee for their encouragement and open inboxes, offices, and ears over the years; I consider myself very fortunate to have had committee members who each helped me focus on a different aspect of the project. Rebecca Walkowitz, advisor and dissertation director, has from day one kept me on track, kept my eyes on the larger matters pertaining to this dissertation and to the profession generally, kept me rooted when my notions threatened to fly off into the ether, and kept me in lemonade at numerous meetings in lower Manhattan. Despite not being able to identify me in a lineup when we first began working together Carter Mathes has given me his very all and was an invaluable sounding board—pun actually unintended—whose fingerprints can be found all over this project, given his expertise on the subject matter. Richard Dienst has been an all-around mentor and mensch whose thoughts on everything ranging from Derrida’s The Post Card to the Style Council’s Our Favourite Shop have been illuminating and whose words of support have reached me at moments when I most needed them—something I’ll never forget. Debra Rae Cohen first did me the honor of chairing a panel I assembled at the Modernist Studies Association convention in Boston and then, even with her numerous other commitments, agreed to serve as my outside reader. Her proposals and provocations will only serve to strengthen the work yet to be done. Thanks must also go to Elin Diamond for fostering my interest in sound studies and, when I found myself at a professional fork in the road, persuading me to take it. That iv fork led to Sukhdev Sandhu’s Listen to Britain! course at NYU, which introduced me to an entirely new slate of thinkers and inspired in me the belief that I could apply what I learned from him to purely literary objects. To my professors at Montclair State University, who convinced me in the first place to attempt a Ph.D. and to aim high—as one of your first graduates to attend an R1 doctoral program, I hope I have made you proud. Without the generosity of the Rutgers English Department, I would not have been able to have accessed materials that proved to be crucial to a number of arguments within this dissertation; at the various archives I am grateful to have been able to visit, I would like to single out Jennifer Cutting at the American Folklife Center for her enthusiasm and her services rendered that went well above and beyond. (I would like to thank, too, Sean Springer and Julie McIsaac for their hospitality, without which a trip to Toronto would not have been possible, and Brooke Palmieri and Alice Cullingworth for opening their home to me in London, thereby facilitating my research and fulfilling a lifelong dream.) Thank you to my friends and colleagues who have provided a platform for me to share my work in all kinds of settings. Thank you to Lisa Perdigao for allowing to present my work on Derek Jarman’s film Blue on her panel at NeMLA, as well as to my own panelists at that same conference, whose own work and passion for it made me feel a little less like I was out on my own. To John Melillo and Julie Beth Napolin, I greatly appreciate your accepting my invitation to be on my panel at MSA and for the pleasure of being able to present alongside your own brilliant work. My first chapter was aided immeasurably by the feedback of Lynn Festa and my peers in a dissertation workshop group at Rutgers. My gratitude goes out to Miranda McLeod and Melissa Parrish for v having arranged a workshop with the Modernism Interest Group at Rutgers in which my second chapter was discussed spiritedly and from which I took away a great deal. Speaking of spirits, my eternal thanks is with the so-called Montrose Circle for bringing literature to the unlikeliest and darkest corners of Brooklyn, and sometimes Manhattan; these intrepid souls are, besides my committee, the only individuals to have read, over a period of years, my entire dissertation, which explains why we met so often at bars. To the stalwarts—Mark DiGiacomo, Caolan Madden, Kyle McAuley, and Mimi Winick— thank you for being there every step of the way; to the periphery of the circle—Patrick Chappell, Becca Klaver, Alex Mazzaferro—my thanks to you, as with the aforementioned, goes far beyond your marginal comments. My endless affection must be expressed to the people who read not a single word but keep the department going—and kept me going, for that matter: Courtney Borack and Cheryl Robinson, my other mother, I thank you for the cheerleading and the caretaking during my time at Rutgers. To my family: I would not have been able to do this without you. The generosity of my sister Devon and my brother-in-law Eric during some very lean years—materially, emotionally, etc.—will never be forgotten, nor too will the joy you brought into all of our lives through Lexi. My nephews Michael and Nicholas have made me want to be a strong role model and their accomplishments have filled me with pride and I flatter myself to think my example has had any role in those. My sister Donna—you’ll never read this and that’s what I love about you, a reminder to me that there is life beyond academia. To my grandmother: You allowed me to believe in the impossible; and given the world that you came from, this document is one instance of just that. Mom, your love is sustaining; Dad, vi I hope with this you have finally forgiven me for not going through with law school. In addition to the aforementioned, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge my friends, who enabled all sorts of behavior, but who chiefly enabled me to realize that there’s more to life than books, although admittedly not much more.