American Discourses of Acceleration and the Emergence of an Alternate Practice of Modern American Prose Writing in the 1920S
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AMERICAN DISCOURSES OF ACCELERATION AND THE EMERGENCE OF AN ALTERNATE PRACTICE OF MODERN AMERICAN PROSE WRITING IN THE 1920S Dissertation zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Dr. phil. an der Universität Osnabrück, Fachbereich Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft vorgelegt von Svenja Fehlhaber Dezember 2017 Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Peter Schneck (Universität Osnabrück) Zweitgutachter: Prof. Dr. Andrew S. Gross (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen) CONTENTS I Introduction 3 PART I: DISCOURSES OF ACCELERATION IN THE UNITED STATES DURING THE FIRST WAVE OF ACCELERATION II Discourses of Acceleration 25 II.A The Nexus of Early Film and Acceleration in the United States 28 II.A.1 Acceleration and the Birth of the Popular Moving Picture 28 II.A.2 The Dynamic of Acceleration in the Domain of Early American Film 33 II.B Scientifically Engineering the American Metropolis: City Planning, High-Rise Buildings, Offices and the Discourse of Acceleration 45 II.B.1 Critique and Remedy: City Planning in Modern America 46 II.B.2 Speed-Pioneering in the Domain of American Business 54 II.C Re-Synchronizing American Letters: The Nexus of Acceleration and Canonization 65 II.C.1 Accelerating American Letters 67 II.C.2 Conceptual Consolidation and Canonization within the Domain-Specific Discourse of Acceleration 73 PART II: WRITING AGAINST THE DISCOURSE OF ACCELERATION: AVANT-GARDE WRITERS OF A DIFFERENT KIND AND THEIR ALTERNATE PRACTICE III Writing Against the Discourse of Acceleration in the 1920s 94 III.A Waldo Frank and City Block (1922): A Spiritual Vision of an Alternate Life and Literature 101 III.A.1 Self-Distancing and a Spiritual Vision: Waldo Frank’s Position as a Cultural Critic and Author 102 III.A.2 Recovering ‘Wholeness’ in the Modern American Novel: City Block 117 III.B Nathan Asch and The Office (1925): An Ethical Critique and a Vision of a ‘Good Life’ in Modern America 159 III.B.1 A Different Stance: From Assimilation to Self-Distancing 160 III.B.2 The Prospect of ‘Failure:’ Nathan Asch’s The Office 172 III.C Critical and Popular, yet American and Modern: The Intermediate Stance of Mary Borden and Flamingo or the American Tower (1927) 215 III.C.1 In-Between Association and Critique: Mary Borden 216 III.C.2 Balancing out the New and Fast: Mary Borden’s Flamingo or the American Tower 227 IV Concluding Remarks: Acceleration and Deceleration Then and Now 270 Bibliography 281 2 I INTRODUCTION The Seven Arts group was too ready to disregard and despise [...] very admirable and very American poets like Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams. [...] Modern writers have chosen, quite properly I think, to return from hazier emotions and sentiments to those clear, energetic, and pure sensations which lie immediately under the skin. [...] E.E. Cummings’ poetry is appearing in the magazines. At its best it is a verbal dance, a dance of words in the pure state, almost of vowels and consonants. Impacts and recoils are felt vertically and horizontally over several lines of type. One has a little the sensation of a suave, well-lubricated roller-coaster – without scenery. W.C. Blum. “American Letter,” 1921 (563, 565, 567) In the May 1921 issue of the influential American magazine The Dial, co-editor James Sibley Watson, using the pseudonym W.C. Blum,1 published an “American Letter” in which this statement is included. Not only Watson’s pseudonym is a tribute to the American avant-garde writer William Carlos Williams (cf. Golding 67, fn. 2; Willis, “American Modern”). In the statement as such, Watson defends Williams against a group of cultural critics known as the ‘Seven Arts group,’ who wrongfully ‘disregarded’ and ‘despised’ Williams as well as a number of other acclaimed writers, whose approach to the modernization of literature Watson finds ‘very admirable and very American.’ In his description of E.E. Cummings’ poetry, Watson identifies the qualities that, in his view, distinguish modern American letters: a rationalization of the verbal material (‘pure state;’ ‘without scenery’), an intense stimulation of the reader’s sensorium through sound patterns (‘vowels and consonants’) as well as a pleasing (‘suave’) reading experience created by ‘vertical and horizontal’ patterns in the poetic structure, which are ‘energetic’ enough to generate a sensation of thrill and fast movement (‘roller-coaster’). With his “American Letter,” Watson assumed an authoritative position in the Dial because, it seems, he considered it necessary to put the Seven Arts critics in their place and to clarify to Dial readers the legitimate way of revolutionizing American writing for the modern age: formal and stylistic experimentation that aims at an economization and condensation of linguistic material to provide the modern reader with a textually induced sensation of speed – a sensation she allegedly desires. One of the critics Watson attacked with his statement is Waldo Frank, the associate editor of – and prolific contributor to – the ‘little magazine’ The Seven Arts. Only one year after Watson’s intervention, Frank published an experimental novel, with which he blatantly failed to meet the criteria of ‘good’ American writing that Watson identifies in his “American Letter.” In this forgotten novel, titled City Block, Frank not only critically negotiates the value of acceleration, which informs Watson’s – and allegedly also Williams, Moore, and Cummings’ – approach. He 1 Watson co-edited The Dial between 1920 and 1929 with Scofield Thayer. 3 moreover uses an ‘alternate’ approach to modern prose writing that confounded many American critics in the domain of avant-garde letters at the time. Taking Watson’s and Frank’s conflicting standpoints as well as the regulatory dynamic into focus that comes into relief in the introductory quote, this study explores a forgotten, ‘alternate practice’ of modern American prose writing which appeared in the 1920s in experimental novels about modern city life, such as City Block, and was met with critique at the heyday of modernism. As of yet, the circumstances that informed the emergence of this particular practice in the novels written by a number of unconnected American writers as well as its politics, its aesthetic guise and its long-term neglect have not been explored by critics of American modernism. The present study takes on this long overdue challenge. It is my contention that the dynamic process through which American literary modernism was consolidated as an intensely stimulating, economized speed-aesthetic by authors and/or critics such as Watson at least partly accounts for the roughly simultaneous appearance of the ‘alternate practice’ in experimental American prose as well as the initial rejection of (or, at least, the inattention to) it. My study will demonstrate that Waldo Frank’s City Block is only one work that exemplifies this unacknowledged practice of 1920s’ experimental writing, which I label ‘alternate’ due to its reactive (albeit not reactionary) relation to a contemporary set of norms and imperatives that had been established in the domain of modern American letters and beyond throughout the previous decades. This practice was part of the great wave of literary experimentation that swept America during the first decades of the twentieth century. Taking a dual trajectory, this thesis not only re-examines the emergence and early consolidation of American literary modernism through the lens of temporality. It also directs the critical attention to three unrecognized experimental writers and their forgotten 1920s’ novels, which depict urban America without resorting completely to a speed aesthetic: Waldo Frank and City Block (1922), Nathan Asch and The Office (1925) as well as Mary Borden and Flamingo or the American Tower (1927). In these novels, correspondences in thematic focus, aesthetic composition and agenda come into relief, from which an alternate practice of American experimental writing can be deduced. In doing so, this study will isolate a literary phenomenon that has yet received no critical attention in modernist studies. The so-called roaring twenties, the decade during which Asch, Borden and Frank published their novels about modern city life, have gone down in American history as the period in which “the forces and fruits of modernity [...] [had] all come together” in the modern metropolis (Mohl/Betten 31). In 1925, the Chicago School sociologist Ernest W. Burgess observed: “Nowhere else have the enormous changes which the machine industry has made [...] registered themselves with such obviousness as in the cities” (“Growth” 23). The 1920s were the decade during which the promises of modernization seemed to finally materialize for many Americans, 4 albeit certainly not all. Right before the grave historical caesura of the 1929 Wall Street Crash, America experienced a sustained period of post-war prosperity. The economic structure seemed unshakable. More than half of the country’s population was now living and working in the nation’s urban centers, where a modern, thrill-saturated entertainment culture – replete with penny arcades, nickelodeons, jazz bars and taxi dance halls – boomed (Steen 59; cf. Anderson 14, Bendixen 76). The skyscraper, “an urban machine-structure” that “enacted the twentieth-century traits of functionalism, efficiency, and speed,” had become “a fact of life throughout the United States by the early 1920s,” as Cecelia Tichi observes (289). Meanwhile, the technological innovations of the age – the electronic telegraph, the telephone, the automobile, rapid-transit transport,