New Writing: Modernism, Punctuation, and the Intermedial Text
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NEW WRITING: MODERNISM, PUNCTUATION, AND THE INTERMEDIAL TEXT BY SUSAN SOLOMON B.A. UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT, 2001 M.A. UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT, 2005 A.M. BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2009 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AT BROWN UNIVERSITY © Copyright 2013 by Susan Solomon iii CURRICULUM VITAE Susan Solomon was born in 1979 in New London, Connecticut. She graduated with a B.A. from the Honors Program at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, where she majored in English and German and minored in Women’s Studies. She spent 2001-2002 at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin as a Fulbright Student. In 2003, she returned to the University of Connecticut to earn an M.A. in English, where she also taught freshman writing seminars. In 2005, she entered the graduate program in Comparative Literature at Brown University and received her A.M. in 2009. In 2008-09, she participated in an exchange between Brown University and the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen. At Brown she served as a teaching assistant and instructor for the Department of Comparative Literature, and as a proctor for differences in the Pembroke Center for Teaching on Women and Gender and the Modernist Journals Project in the Department of Modern Culture and Media. Her essay, “Turning Points: Periodizing New Writing,” received the 2013 Albert Spaulding Cook prize for best comparative essay by a graduate student from the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would not have completed this dissertation without the extended fellowship support I received from the Graduate School, the Department of Comparative Literature, and the Modernist Journals Project/ Modern Culture and Media Department at Brown University. I am extremely grateful to Karen Newman, Robert Scholes, Kenneth Haynes, Susan Bernstein, Esther Whitfield, Susan Davis, Charles Auger, and Dean Brian Walton for their efforts in helping me to this end. I must acknowledge Carol Wilson-Allen and Charles Auger for their regular assistance in navigating the tangled administrative paths of the university and for their daily kindness. I am thankful to all of the graduate students in comparative literature with whom I have studied, learned from, and been supported by during my time at Brown University, especially those in my entering cohort; extra thanks to Signe Christensen for her unequalled friendship and comraderie. I would like to express my gratitude to Dana Gooley for teaching me to listen to the music Adorno wrote about, to Zachary Sng for his always thoughtful comments, and to Karen Newman for the opportunity to teach an undergraduate seminar related to this project as well as for her guidance and encouragement. I am grateful to Arnold Weinstein, from whose lectures I have learned a great deal about modernism, and more recently to Michelle Clayton, whose teaching of Ulysses energized my last months here. My heartfelt thanks to Margaret R. Higonnet for introducing me to comparative literature, teaching me to be a scholar, and for her dedicated mentorship over the past 14 years. I owe limitless thanks to my committee members, each of whom I deeply admire as scholars and teachers. Thank you to Ravit Reichman for her advice and encouragement since this project’s earliest phase as a short paper in her Modern Novel seminar and for acting, unknowingly, as a wonderful role model. I am grateful to Kevin McLaughlin, Robert Scholes, and Susan Bernstein for the massive amount of time they have dedicated to this dissertation by reading, commenting on, and discussing it in its various pieces and forms over the past four years. To Kevin for his guidance and intellectual inspiration since my first semester at Brown, for his patience, and for persisting as an advisor despite tremendous responsibilities as Dean of Faculty. To Susan for her patience, attentive reading, encouragement, and for her high standards. And to Bob for his generosity as a teacher, employer, and friend, for insisting that I include James Joyce in this project, for his confidence in me, and for continuing as an active member of this committee even in his retirement. Thanks to my mother for being a loving parent and for teaching me to read closely. To my father, in memoriam, for being proud of me and for teaching me never to take the easy way. To Wyle, Sung-Hee, Moise, Stephanie, Carly, and all of my family, including Oskar, for being supportive. And to Nick for putting up with me throughout this process and always believing in me. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: Counterpoints: Music, Language, and Intermediality .................................. 1 Chapter Two: Turning Points: Periodizing New Writing................................................. 60 Chapter Three: Joyce, Adorno, and the “Perverted Commas” of Unreality................... 114 Chapter Four: Keeping Time in the Space of To the Lighthouse ................................... 167 Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 202 vi 1 INTRODUCTION New Writing: Modernism, Punctuation, and Intermedial Text. This dissertation sets its eye on the sliding index of the “new” in the advancing motion of avant-gardism and in the very idea of modern-ism during the early twentieth century. Punctuation, I argue, plays a central but paradoxical role in the modernist premise of making it new. Its significance operates on the levels of structural and visual form and on the levels of the logical and temporal syntaxes of writing. It produces seams or reveals ruptures between and within the mediums of literary writing, music, and pictorial art. It is punctual and it periodizes; it serves as an instrument and a symbol of modernism’s temporal self- awareness. I understand the avant-garde as a subset of modernist art that has an extreme interest in the historicity of its form. However, in the context of modernist studies, the term “avant-garde” has been used in a very precise way to denote art that does not submit to the paradigm of aesthetic autonomy, which from one point of view applies to precisely the opposite of what I intend by the term. I will dwell on this point briefly, in part because this line of criticism traces itself to the work of Theodor Adorno, whose writings on newness, new music in particular, supply a basis for this project’s title and likewise play a vital role in the present study. Modernism and the Avant-garde For Adorno, new art not only defines itself against the past, but against its contemporary society: all art, he emphasizes, “is defined by its relation to what it is not” 2 (“Sie bestimmt sich im Verhältnis zu dem, was sie nicht ist”; 3; Ästhetische 12). Art, writing, and music become linked to their contemporary culture by means of their antagonism to it. He stresses the importance of form in this social connection, “Die ungelösten Antagonismen der Realität kehren wieder in den Kunstwerken als die immanenten Probleme ihrer Form. Das, nicht der Einschuß gegenständlicher Momente, definiert das Verhältnis der Kunst zur Gesellschaft” (“The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form. This, not the insertion of objective elements, defines the relation of art to society”; 160; Aesthetic 6).1 This is to say that the art’s medium registers and reflects its surroundings more authentically than its representation does. This would also suggest, for example, that the form of an avant- garde manifesto conveys as much about itself and its period as the content it supports. Peter Bürger and Andreas Huyssen entirely discard the category of newness both from their definition of modernism and of the avant-garde, because the new fails to distinguish between the two entities. “[T]he historically unique break with tradition that is defined by the historical avant-garde movements” (60), writes Bürger, should not be reduced to the “developmental principle of modern art as such.” Both he and Andreas Huyssen classify modernism as autonomous aestheticism maintaining the boundary between art and life, “which for the most part insisted on the inherent hostility between high and low” (Huyssen viii), and the avant-garde, in contrast, as a force working to 1 The German text will be supplied before English, unless it is incorporated into the syntactical structure of my own sentence. All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted with a page number. 3 collapse that border “often by incorporating elements of mass culture into the work of art or by promoting specific political programs” (“avant-garde,” Columbia).2 Both scholars draw heavily from Adorno’s writings on artistic autonomy, and Huyssen even describes Adorno as “the major theoretician of the Great Divide” (x). As a result, many readers have interpreted his vision of autonomous art as a proposal for “hibernation” (Schulte-Sasse xviii) from a hostile society and have seen his view of other sorts of cultural production to be “kitsch” conformities to the culture industry that he and Horkheimer had theorized in the 1940s. Yet Adorno clarifies his concept of autonomy repeatedly, for instance by stating, “Vermöge ihrer Absage and die Empirie—und die ist in ihrem Begriff, kein bloßes escape, ist ein ihr immanentes Gesetz—sanktioniert sie deren Vormacht” (“by virtue of