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Only Connect: the Virtual Communities of Gertrude Stein and David Foster Wallace

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Only Connect: the Virtual Communities of Gertrude Stein and David Foster Wallace Only Connect: The Virtual Communities of Gertrude Stein and David Foster Wallace by Philip Miletic A thesis presented to the University of Waterloo in fulfilment of the thesis requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Language and Literature Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 2018 © Philip Miletic Examining Committee Membership The following served on the Examining Committee for this thesis. The decision of the Examining Committee is by majority vote. External Examiner Dr. Lori Emerson Associate Professor Supervisor(s) Dr. Aimée Morrison Associate Professor Internal Member Dr. Kevin McGuirk Associate Professor Internal-external Member Ian Milligan Associate Professor Internal Member Marcel O’Gorman Professor ii Author’s Declaration I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. iii Abstract My dissertation compares Modernist imaginations and applications of early radio with Late Postmodernist imaginations and applications of the early internet. The American authors that I focus on and compare in my dissertation are Gertrude Stein, a Modernist, and David Foster Wallace, a Late Postmodernist. My dissertation asserts that Stein and Wallace each incorporate the techno-cultural imaginations and feelings of community through the democratic poetics and aesthetics of their work. Both Stein and Wallace engage with facilitating literary communities that form around emerging mass media––for Stein, the radio, and for Wallace, the blog––and provoke readers to participate in auto/biographical practices as a mode of discussing American identity, community, and democracy. Where the orality of Stein’s texts invites readers’ auto/biographical engagement, Wallace’s written depictions of mental health, addiction, and loneliness prompt readers to share auto/biographical narratives/disclosures related to those topics in the reading group discussions. Altogether, my dissertation engages with a unique media archeological combination of literary analysis, media studies, and critical media production in order to suss out the dynamic exploration of identity, community, and democratic participation these authors and their readers feel for within the mediascape of their respective eras. iv Acknowledgements I have been extremely fortunate to have had such wonderful collaborations occur throughout the writing, revising, and making of this dissertation. Thank you to my supervisor, Dr. Aimée Morrison, for your outstanding mentorship, encouragement, advice, and for the insightful conversations we had over the several drafts of this dissertation. I am extremely grateful for the level of care and attention you have brought to my work and to my growth as a scholar. Thank you to my committee members, Dr. Kevin McGuirk and Dr. Marcel O’Gorman, for your invaluable feedback and unwavering support in the uniqueness of this project. Thank you to my examiners, Dr. Lori Emerson and Dr. Ian Milligan, for your thoughtful and engaging questions, and for our discussions that have inspired greater confidence in my work. All of your support has been beyond incredible. The critical media projects of this dissertation were made possible by all of the collaborators that participated in these projects. Thank you Stephen Trothen for your work on our radio installation, “Everybody’s Everybody’s Autobiography.” Your technical virtuosity and your attention to details contributed to the high level of quality in the installation’s design and execution. Thank you to those who brought their voices to the radio installation, making collaboration a truly beautiful sound. Thank you to the Critical Media Lab for supplying the resources and the space for making the radio installation. To Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Allie Fournier, and Joe DeLuca: thank you for the wit in your writing and the camaraderie you brought to our online reading group, Poor Yoricks’ Summer. And to the participants and guests on Poor Yoricks’ Summer, thank you for contributing to the success of the project. All of you made the dissertation a collaborative effort rather than a solitary activity, and that is precious. v For funding and financial assistance, this research has been supported by a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Doctoral Scholarship. I am also so thankful for the labour and care of the English Department’s administrative staff who, throughout the degree, ensured my applications, documents, and other forms of paper work were in order, and who made my PhD less stressful and more enjoyable: Tina Davidson, Margaret Ulbrick, Maha Eid, and Julie-Anne Desrochers, thank you. For their late-night conversations, support, and encouragement throughout the program, tremendous thanks to the following people: Keely Cronin, Eric Schmaltz, Chris Lawrence, Elise Vist, Jesse Hutchinson, Jennifer Harris, Kathy Acheson, Tim Conley, Chris Doody, Will Fast, Write Club members (including Lulu, Buddy, and Jasper), the First Person Scholar team, and my colleagues and mentors at the Centre for Career Action. Deepest gratitude to my parents and sister for their support. And finally, for incredible encouragement, patience, and love that inspired and motivated me throughout the PhD, for believing in me every step of the way and shooing away any shadow of a doubt I would have about myself, and for making me laugh uncontrollably, smile, and put aside work to enjoy the minutiae of everyday life, thank you Katrina and our dog, Bilbo. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures viii List of Abbreviations ix Introduction: 20th-Century America’s Electric Dreams of Community 1 Stein, Radio, and the Modernist Soundscape: Democratizing Sonic Modernity 32 Everybody’s Everybody’s Autobiography 91 Wallace, the Internet, and the Late Postmodernist Page/Screen: Democratizing Textuality 131 (My) Infinite Summer 196 Conclusion 257 Bibliography 270 vii List of Figures Infinite Summer Home Page 203 viii List of Abbreviations ADMAU A Dictionary of Modern American Usage ARRL American Radio Relay League BBC British Broadcasting Company BBS Bulletin Board System CMC Computer Mediated Communication CML Critical Media Lab EA Everybody’s Autobiography EFF Electric Frontier Foundation FCC Federal Communications Commission FRC Federal Radio Commission IJ Infinite Jest IRC Internet Relay Chat MUDs Multi-User Dungeons NAB National Association of Broadcasters NBC National Broadcasting Company RCA Radio Corporation of America WELL Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link ix Chapter 1, Introduction: 20th-Century America’s Electric Dreams of Community War of the Media In the September 4, 2017 issue of The New Yorker, the subheadline of Adrien Chen’s “Fake News Fallacy” article reads, “Old fights about radio have lessons for new fights about the Internet” (“Fake News Fallacy” 78). The article begins with Orson Welles’ infamous 1938 “War of The Worlds” broadcast that convinced many American listeners that they were under alien attack, introducing a moral panic around radio after the broadcast. Chen points out how this moment in American radio history sparked debates about the democratic access and participation of radio broadcasting in America. Welles’ broadcast contradicted many Americans’ ideas of radio’s alleged democratic quality and its role in providing American citizens with truthful news that countered the propaganda broadcasts of European fascists, Nazi Germany, and other “malicious tricksters like Welles” (78). For Chen, Welles demonstrated to America’s commercial broadcasters and politicians the powerful role of mass media technology in shaping the public’s imaginations, their politics, and their perspectives on the world. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), more than ever, felt obligated to take an “active role to protect [the American] people” (Chen 78). Chen connects this significant moment of American radio’s struggle to integrate or recuperate a democratic system within radio broadcasting to debates about the internet as a supposedly democratic medium. He writes, “The openness [of the internet] that was said to bring about a democratic revolution instead seems to have torn a hole in the social fabric.” The article details the way the conservative right accused radio broadcasting of “suppressing” conservative content on account of the content not being the “truth” just as the alt- right and the Trump Administration have accused internet platforms and “the media” of suppressing conservative content because that content is “fake news.” The picture accompanying 1 the article features laptops with tentacles like those of the aliens in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 adaptation of “War of the Worlds” with the caption “Radio, in its early days, was seen as a means of spreading hysteria and hatred, just as the Internet is today.” Yet, despite Chen’s focus on the internet of “today” (2017+), radio’s early days also share the same kind of hopes, imaginations, and debates that the early internet has in the 1980s and 1990s (when the so-called “democratic revolution” was said to be happening). My dissertation finds this comparison between the radio and the internet to be fruitful and focuses its attention on the early years of both radio and the internet when new arguments about democratic participation, community, and American identity were emerging with these media. In this dissertation, my comparative focus is on radio’s history in the 1920s-1930s and internet’s history in
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