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Narrative, Image, and Technology in Twentieth-Century Literature By Looking to Remember: Narrative, Image, and Technology in Twentieth-Century Literature By Irene Yoon A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Elizabeth Abel, Chair Professor Namwali Serpell Professor Steven Lee Professor Suzanne Guerlac Summer, 2017 © 2017 Irene Yoon All Rights Reserved 2 Abstract Looking to Remember: Narrative, Image, and Technology in Twentieth-Century Literature Irene Yoon Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Elizabeth Abel, Chair Looking to Remember argues that technological developments in visual culture produce a distinct literary tradition of modernist memory work that spans the long twentieth century. In the course of this century, innovations in glass architecture, photography, film, and digital processing made the lives of others suddenly appear as visible as one’s own. Against a broad backdrop of theoretical engagements with visual culture, modernism, and memory studies, I highlight four authors—Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, W.G. Sebald, and Teju Cole—whose narrative explorations of visual technologies expand the boundaries of individual memory. The tradition they constitute unites modernism’s familiar emphasis on private consciousness with its less familiar attunement to the reverberations of atrocity across national boundaries. By focusing on the aftermath of two World Wars, the Cold War, and the “War on Terror,” I propose a visual aesthetics of secondhand witnessing that reimagines individual subjectivity in the context of transnational communities. These authors connect disparate moments and places through a shared concern with the ethics of mediated witnessing. This dissertation interrogates the murky boundaries of war and peace, the public and the private, the seen and the remembered, from the early twentieth century to our own time. My dissertation begins by situating Woolf’s invention of her novelistic tunneling method within a broader European cultural scene that witnessed the construction of Bauhaus’s celebrated glass curtain wall and the emergence of Maurice Halbwach’s sociological term “collective memory.” By exploring the danger of seemingly transparent access to private and public memory in the aftermath of the twentieth century’s first “total war,” I demonstrate how Woolf resists the nationalism of the interwar period by cultivating a non-appropriative form of collective identification. From the deceptively transparent mediation of glass in Mrs. Dalloway, I turn to Nabokov’s interrogation of photography’s apparently unmediated access to distant times and places. Doubly displaced by the Russian Revolution and the Second World War, Nabokov initially rejects photography’s claim to objectivity in favor of memory’s imaginative idiosyncrasies. But he eventually includes nearly two-dozen family photos in the final version of Speak, Memory, recasting the Cold War era’s promotion of a monolithic history as a stereoscopic interplay of image and text. Confronted with the glut and precarity of images decades later, W.G. Sebald transforms Nabokov’s stereoscopic method into an oscillating cinematic vision. Fracturing glass slides and slowing Nazi films to a funereal pace, Sebald reframes remembrance as the perpetual fluctuation between imaginative projection and material screens. His readers confront the past through unending processes of visual identification and dis-identification with victims and perpetrators of atrocity alike. In dialogue with Woolf, Nabokov, and Sebald, novelist 1 and photography critic Teju Cole expands the optics of witnessing derived from the human eye to drone technologies that obfuscate individual responsibility. By analyzing the foreshortened visual perspective and attenuated bodily remove of digital technology in Cole’s Open City, together with his writings on and about the Internet, I conclude my dissertation with an examination of a post-9/11 world in which technology instantiates, as well as records, acts of violence. 2 A CKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not have seen the light of day without the continuous support, clear-eyed guidance, and providential good humor of many wonderful people along the way. First and foremost, I would like to thank my dissertation advisor, Elizabeth Abel, awe-inspiring scholar, teacher, and human being. There aren’t enough words to express fully my gratitude for her many patient and incisive readings of my work, her dynamic mind and generous spirit, and her steadfast encouragement and belief in this project at moments where I glumly wondered if there was ever going to be any there there. I am unspeakably lucky to count myself one of the many recipients of Elizabeth’s boundless care and wisdom. I have encountered no shortage of incredibly giving readers and mentors among the faculty at University of California, Berkeley. I wish especially to extend my heartfelt thanks to Namwali Serpell and Steven Lee for their many years of kind, careful, and transformative attention to my work and the opportunities to learn from the inspiring examples of their own scholarship up close. I am indebted to Oliver Arnold, Mitch Breitwieser, Kathleen Donegan, Eric Falci, Mark Goble, Joshua Gang, Suzanne Guerlac, Scott Saul, and Katie Snyder, who have profoundly enriched this project with their insights and my development as a scholar and teacher over the years with their generosity and support. The late Alex Zwerdling provided an unforgettable model for how sensitivity to the past and empathy for and consideration of others can create not only beautiful writing and scholarship but also an extraordinarily thoughtful, kind, and humorous person. I am beyond grateful for the opportunity to have worked with him on his last book and to have gotten to know him in the process. As a graduate student at Berkeley, I’ve had the pleasure and very good fortune to take part in some remarkably vibrant and sustaining communities. To the members of Elizabeth’s dissertation writing group, Anna Abramson, Erin Greer, Sookyung Lee, Gina Patnaik, Jocelyn Rodal, Rasheed Tazudeen, and Michelle Ty, I remain ever inspired and heartened by your creativity as scholars, keenness as readers, and warm support as friends. To my fellow graduate student mentors in Berkeley Connect, Serena Le, Leila Mansouri, Stephanie Moore, and Jonathan Shelley, thank you for your thoughtful feedback on my writing and for sharing your own work and uplifting devotion to your students. To the incredible women of Namwali’s contemporary literature group, Sarah Chihaya, Katie Fleishman, Eva Hagberg, and Sunny Xiang, I am grateful for the space we created to sharpen and encourage one another in our writing and in our lives. To John Paulas, Ramona Naddaff, and everyone at the Townsend Center for the Humanities, thank you for welcoming me into your community with such generosity and care. Your passion for helping students, writing well, and finding pens really carried me through this last stretch. The years I spent writing this dissertation, in other words, were years buoyed equally by friendships born of collaboration and the collaborations born of some really wonderful friendships. The profound kindness and dazzling genius of my roommates Lili Loofbourow and Aaron Bady have transformed both the breakfast table and the Internet into places of daily illumination, inspiration, and delightful glimpses of fluffy puppy faces. I want to thank my favorite karaoke partners and brilliant scholars, Monica Huerta and Jerry Zee, for their big hearts, minds, and laughs that have made everything from snowman ladders to photography criticism, senior prom to dissertation research, exciting and worthy adventures. Katie Ferris, Jamie Henderson, E’lana Jordan, Keerthi Potluri, Michelle Rosendahl, and Wendy Xin have infused the last several years with much needed beauty, celebration, and emotional support. Their fierce friendship, strength, and intelligence made perseverance possible. With every i opportunity to share work, ideas, and the odd margarita, Jessica Crewe and Luke Terlaak Poot proved extremely supportive friends and inspiring writers. I simply could not have made it through the last nine years or this dissertation without my fellow Angelenos, Rebecca Gaydos and Samia Rahimtoola. Their exceptionally sharp and capacious minds, steadfast encouragement, and unique appreciation of the Vegas museum scene have left indelible marks all over this dissertation. From our early encounters on Gchat and in Glasgow, respectively, Sarah Chihaya and Gina Patnaik have been among my most cherished interlocutors and friends. This project, and any desire to produce subsequent ones, owes much to their insight and support. I would like to conclude by acknowledging, with much gratitude and affection, my ever- growing family: my parents Ted and Julie; my siblings Eddie, Mary, and Jennifer; their partners Erin, Andrey, and Jean-Marc; and my nieces and nephews Sam, Ella, Rachael, Riley, Tamara, Jacob, and Hannie. Without their incredible and myriad forms of love and support, I would not be here. Without my parents’ brave decision over four decades ago to leave their home in South Korea for an unknown future in Southern California, this project would not be here. It was an encounter with photographs of my mother as a young girl in an otherwise unrecognizable black- and-white world that first inspired the questions of memory,
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