• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts LYRICAL STRATEGIES: THE POETICS OF THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN NOVEL A Dissertation in English by Katie Owens-Murphy Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2013 The dissertation of Katie Owens-Murphy was reviewed and approved* by the following: Robert L. Caserio Professor of English Dissertation Co-Advisor Co-Chair of Committee Kathryn Hume Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English Dissertation Co-Advisor Co-Chair of Committee John L. Selzer Professor of English Kathryn M. Grossman Professor of French Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies Robin Schulze Professor of English The University of Delaware Special Member Brian McHale Humanities Distinguished Professor of English The Ohio State University Special Member *Signatures are on file at the Graduate School. ii ABSTRACT Lyrical Strategies: The Poetics of the Twentieth-Century American Novel takes a comparative approach to genre by examining twentieth-century American novels in relation to the lyric, rather than the narrative, tradition. Narrative theorists have long noted that modern and contemporary novels paradoxically abandon the defining characteristics of narrative—plot, sequence, external action—for other rhetorical strategies. I argue for a strain of the twentieth-century American novel that is better suited to the reading practices of lyric poetry, in which we read not for story but for structural repetition, rhythm, figurative meaning, dramatic personae, and apostrophe. In the spirit of demonstrating what I take to be a pervasive phenomenon within twentieth-century fiction, each of my chapters traces a single lyrical trope through works by four different novelists ranging from modernist (Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Toomer) to postmodernist (Vladimir Nabokov, Don DeLillo, Chuck Palahniuk, Kathy Acker) as well as those who do not fall neatly into either category (Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Louise Erdrich, Russell Banks, Marilynne Robinson). By adopting a more flexible approach to literary forms that reverses our conventional reading practices, which tell us to expect sequential action from a novel and apostrophic states of mind from a lyric, this project produces fresh readings of narrative texts by shifting our attention, paradoxically, to their non- narrative components. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface………………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter One Introduction: Genres in Contest………………………………………………..7 Chapter Two: Repetition and Insistence…………………………………………………….23 Chapter Three: Rhythm and Insubordination……………………………………………….72 Chapter Four: Metaphysical Conceits……………………………………………………...130 Chapter Five: Dramatic Personae…………………………………………………………..181 Chapter Six: Narrative Apostrophe………………………………………………………...248 Coda: Genre Revisited……………………………………………………………………...300 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………...306 iv Preface This study rests on the counter-intuitive assumption that novels should not necessarily be read as novels. In fact, it asks that we abandon our common-sense reading practices by re-examining canonical works of twentieth-century American fiction through the lens of lyric poetry. Why should we adopt this approach, given that lyric and narrative have often been defined in contradistinction to one another? Why take this approach, now that lyric poetry has lost so much of its cultural and institutional power, whereas the novel remains so pervasive it has become a synecdoche for literature in general?1 Such an undertaking, I argue, enables us to better navigate a type of novel that looks quite different from the novel in its earlier iterations. As a number of critics have noted,2 modern and contemporary novels are remarkably non-narrative in both form and content, if we understand fiction as requiring a dynamic plot that is propelled by sequential (if not necessarily chronological) action. Conspicuously lacking plot, external action, and logical temporal succession, the twentieth-century American novels we have canonized in our university curricula, those novels that grace the Modern Library’s “Top 100” list,3 instead favor linguistic, epistemological, and ontological instabilities often generated by points of view that are limited, fractured, or unreliable, eliciting greater participation on behalf of the reader in the construction 1 Clifford Siskin refers to this general attitude as “novelism.” 2 See Wayne Booth, especially pp. 4-6, and Scholes and Kellogg, pp. 263. Robert Caserio locates a strain of modern fiction that rejects plot and story altogether; in rejecting plot, he argues, authors such as Stein, Lawrence, Woolf, and Joyce reject action and meaning in favor of “quietism, purposelessness, inhibition or suspension of will, passive or static states of mind and feeling, and speculation free of connection with deeds” (xiv). Peter Brooks also detects a rebellion against plot in the 20th century novel “engendered perhaps by an overelaboration of and overdependence on plots in the nineteenth century” (7). “Whereas plot continues in our time to be a dominant element in popular fictions of many sorts and to proceed on principles little changed from the nineteenth century,” he continues, “in those works that claim to challenge their readers, plot is often something of an embarrassment” (314). 3 In fact, the juxtaposition between the selections of the board and those of the readers reveals a dramatic difference in aesthetic taste. Readers generally favored fantasy and science fiction novels that rely quite heavily on plot in the traditional sense. Ayn Rand and Elron Hubbard dominate the readers’ top ten list, each appearing three times; James Joyce dominates the board’s, appearing twice. See <www.themodernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels.> 1 of textual meaning. This non-narrative tendency seems strangely paradoxical, even out of place, in a genre that relies on certain conventions for its coherence as narrative fiction, though it is right at home in the realm of the lyric, which is traditionally rooted in the aesthetic, synchronic, and subjective experience of a speaker. This project locates a strain of twentieth-century American fiction that is deeply indebted to the rhetorical strategies of lyric poetry. Consequently, readers must approach these texts with a different set of reading practices from those that are typically applied to narrative fiction. A number of the writers treated here are lyric poets as well as novelists, though they are much better known for their narrative fiction: Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, Vladimir Nabokov, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and Russell Banks, not to mention Faulkner and Hemingway, both of whom experimented (however unsuccessfully) with poetry in the early part of their careers. Nearly all of the authors I address have been labeled “poetic” or “lyrical” in one book review or another. This project provides one account of what, precisely, such labels might mean. Because broad, sweeping assessments of lyric run the risk of “narrativizing” poetry, however, this study will examine lyrical techniques at multiple levels and scales ranging from the word to the line to the work as a whole. Lyrical Strategies is an intervention within narrative theory, which has indeed neglected poetry—even narrative poetry—in favor of prose fiction.4 It also, however, represents a larger intervention into the field of literary studies in seeking to return our attention to the genre of the lyric and its attendant reading practices. The study of lyric poetry is valuable not only for its own sake but also, as I will argue, for a more complete understanding of the twentieth-century American novel. 4 For a recent estimation of this problem, see McHale 11-12. 2 Chapter one situates my project within classical literary criticism’s tripartite separation of literature into lyric, narrative, and dramatic forms, a division that is generally upheld and reinforced by twentieth-century genre critics. Despite its utility on a heuristic level, this model has prevented scholars from examining the fruitful kinships and overlaps across literary genres; it has also effectively placed genres in competition with one another for various forms of cultural and institutional power. Twentieth-century American writers, however, have been interested in transgressing the very generic boundaries scholars were policing, experimenting with elements of both lyric and narrative forms within their writing. Because broad, sweeping assessments of lyric run the risk of “narrativizing” poetry by treating verse as if it were prose, this study examines lyrical strategies at multiple levels and scales ranging from the word to the line to the work as a whole. Chapters two and three focus, therefore, on local units of meaning—phrases and refrains, syntax and lineation—and their relationship to the larger works they constitute. Chapter two explores the lyrical role of repetition within narrative texts by Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, John Dos Passos, and Kathy Acker. The repetition of sound patterns, words, and phrases for dramatic, mnemonic, or aural effect is commonplace within lyric poetry, which began as an auditory literary form, yet repetition is also a favorite device of experimental novelists who repeat words, phrases, and, in some cases, entire paragraphs in ways that disrupt the sequential progressions we tend to expect from narrative fiction.

Load more

  326

Copy Link