Voicing Modernism: Talk, Technology, and Aesthetics Sara Bryant Charlottesville, Virginia B. A., Bowdoin College, 1999 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Virginia August 2013 Bryant i ABSTRACT This project traces how modernists in the verbal and visual arts engage with embodied voice and its technological mediation. Through attention to theorists such as Kaja Silverman, Stanley Cavell, Mladen Dolar, and Bruno Latour, as well as through extensive archival research, I show how works of both British and American modernism from the 1920s to the early 1940s interrogate the political and aesthetic significance of the voice in modernity. Scholars such as Sara Danius and Douglas Kahn have provided compelling accounts of sound in modernity and modernism. Critical attention specifically to voice within the modern soundscape, however, has remained scant. Voice proves an elusive topic because even while blurring divisions between exterior and interior, subject and object, and mind and body in meaningful ways, it also proves resistant to the work of unsettling binaries such as human/nonhuman, phone/logos, and presence/absence. I demonstrate how modernist writers and filmmakers experiment with the shifting status of voice across media and genres as they explore concerns made urgent in the epoch of world war: technology’s purchase upon embodied experience, the gendered ramifications of this experience, and the troubled link between politics and aesthetics. This focus on voice in modernism allows me to link seemingly disparate artistic moments. My first chapter reads the filmmaker Dorothy Arzner’s meditations on gendered voice in her silent and sound films, situating her Hollywood career within modernist and feminist discourses about gender and filmic voice. The second chapter explores James Joyce’s specific encounters with sound film theory and practice and their significance for his cinematic understanding of Ulysses in the 1930s as well as his Bryant ii approach to voice in Finnegans Wake (1939). In my final chapter, I turn to Virginia Woolf’s attempt in her final novel, Between the Acts (1941), to conjoin human, animal, and machine sounds into a choral voice whose unison resists fascist conformity. By forging dialogues among modernist scholarship, sound studies, archival research, and theoretical work, I uncover modernism’s attempt to rework the conceptual boundaries of voice. My coda begins to consider how we might draw upon modernism’s simultaneously aesthetic and political work on voice as we grapple with notions of the posthuman. Bryant iii Acknowledgments My first thanks are due to my committee, a trio whose scholarship and intellectual engagement have long inspired me. Jennifer Wicke’s mentorship has been essential to my development as a scholar. I owe her my deepest thanks for her unflagging support of this project from its earliest stages as well as the insight and optimism she brought to bear on my work. Michael Levenson’s encouragement and enthusiasm have bolstered me throughout graduate study. He has seen this project through its multiple changes and been unfailingly patient and generous in his engagement with my writing. Rita Felski models the clarity of thought and expression for which I continue to strive. Various moments of persuasive clarity came about because I was envisioning Rita reading the work. Bonnie Gordon kindly signed on as my outside reader and provided incredibly useful feedback that will help to shape the next iteration of the project. I’m thankful, too, for the English faculty with whom I had the opportunity to take courses and develop my academic work, including Steve Arata, Alison Booth, Sylvia Chong, Johanna Drucker, Jessica Feldman, Susan Fraiman, Eric Lott, Victoria Olwell, and Cindy Wall. The late Greg Colomb and Jon D’Errico taught me so much about critical writing across the disciplines and writing instruction. The Little Red Schoolhouse online project was crucial to my well being throughout the later years of graduate school, fostering extensive collaborative work with my peers and allowing me to pay rent. I will be forever appreciative of the camaraderie and collegiality of my friends in the English graduate program. Special thanks to my writing group in the early parts of the dissertation—Sarah Bishop, Ben Fagan, and Mike Spiegel; to Carolyn Tate for her Bryant iv sustained friendship from the beginning and for being like family in the best sense; to Rob Stilling and Rebecca Strauss for the heart-to-hearts; and to Steph Brown, Laura Goldblatt, Walt Hunter, Angela Nemecek, Eric Rettberg, Scott Selisker, and Melissa White for their many kindnesses. I was so lucky, as well, to overlap for the first few years with Jim Cocola, Omaar Hena, Maggie Simon Fyfe, Paul Fyfe, Kim Shirkhani, and Andrea Stevens. An NEH Summer 2012 Seminar on “James Joyce’s Ulysses: Texts and Contexts” reinvigorated my thinking and showed me how wonderful the wide world of academia can be. Memories of a summer spent re-reading Ulysses and exploring Dublin buoyed me through my last year of graduate school. Thanks especially to Kevin Dettmar and Paul Saint-Amour for leading the seminar and to Emily James and Patrick Moran for making me excited again about the process of writing and for declaring their love of Virginia Woolf. To those friends outside of graduate school whose presence in my daily life I have missed greatly all these years—Jamie Romano, Laura Fitzgerald, Jae Choi, Erik Gellman, Bob Young, Adam Blackman, Christine Sinclair, Jared Lui, and many others—I hope now to be able to see you more often. I thank Anne Fernald for her interest in my work on Dorothy Arzner and for including my article in her special issue of Modern Fiction Studies on “Women’s Fiction, New Modernist Studies, and Feminism.” A version of my first chapter, on Arzner, first appeared in Modern Fiction Studies 59.2 (June 2012): 346-72, copyright © 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Bryant v As always, I am grateful to my parents, David and Christine, and my brother Sam. Knowing that they will love me no matter what has always made making life decisions a little bit easier. My thanks, too, to Patsy Bryant for joining our family and always being encouraging. I owe to my uncle, Jim Watson, my gratitude for providing me with an incentive to practice writing in my childhood: he paid me a dollar or two per letter I sent him, and I sent many. And, finally, Eric Song is the best first (and second, and third . .) reader one could ever hope for. I met Eric as he was finishing graduate school and I was just beginning. His energy, friendship, and love saw me through, even over long distances. Bryant vi Table of Contents: Introduction 1 Chapter 1 29 Dorothy Arzner’s Talkies: Gender, Technologies of Voice, and the Modernist Sensorium Chapter 2 77 Joyce’s “soundseemetery”: The Zukofsky-Reisman Ulysses Screenplay and Global Talk in the 1930s Chapter 3 128 Nonhuman Voice and Sociality in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts Coda: On Voice, Technology, and the Posthuman 162 List of Works Cited 169 Bryant 1 Introduction This project traces how American, Irish, and British modernists in the verbal and visual arts engage with the phenomenon of embodied voice and its technological mediation. Representations of embodied voice and the synchronization of voice with visual presence have been neglected within, even excluded from, studies of modernist aesthetics. In many ways, representations and practices of embodied voice are what modernism has been traditionally understood as forming itself against: naturalism, theatricality, self-explaining presence, and an emphasis on classical unity as opposed to fragmentation. I argue, however, that the speaking body becomes central to aesthetic and political issues in modernism, especially starting in the late 1920s as technologies of voice merge with visual technologies in the shift from silent to sound film. Douglas Kahn wrote in 1999 that “Modernism has been read and looked at in detail but rarely heard” (4). Since then, a range of scholars has provided compelling accounts of sound in modernity and modernism.1 The “new sound studies” has opened up the study of sound in a variety of disciplines, including literary studies, cultural studies, and the history of technology and science. The past few years have seen two major anthologies of critical work in sound studies.2 But sustained studies of the relationship between sound and writing are still few. As Adelaide Morris explains, “critics with a keen ear tend not to turn to literature” but to music studies and technology studies, and “most contemporary media critics tend to look rather than listen” (4). The “interplay between textuality and twentieth-century acoustic technologies remains largely undocumented and undertheorized,” she argues, for additional reasons as well, including Bryant 2 the lack of affordable daily recording technologies prior to the 1950s and, even since then, how “sound events remain difficult to archive and all but impossible to transcribe on the page” (4-5). Critical attention specifically to voice within the modern soundscape has been limited largely to accounts of radio’s influence and avant-garde resistance to synchronized talkie films.3 My project does not overlook the reasons behind this silence; on the contrary, I contend that modernism’s varied engagement with voice should be examined precisely because of the theoretical difficulties involved. Voice proves an elusive topic because even while blurring divisions between exterior and interior, subject and object, and mind and body in meaningful ways, it also proves resistant to the work of unsettling binaries such as human/nonhuman, phone/logos, and presence/absence. This project demonstrates how modernist writers and filmmakers experiment with the shifting status of voice in strategically disruptive episodes across media and genres.