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When the Foreign Became Familiar: Modernism, Expatriation, and Spatial Identities in the Twentieth Century

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When the Foreign Became Familiar: Modernism, Expatriation, and Spatial Identities in the Twentieth Century Marquette University e-Publications@Marquette Dissertations, Theses, and Professional Dissertations (2009 -) Projects When the Foreign Became Familiar: Modernism, Expatriation, and Spatial Identities in the Twentieth Century Danielle Kristene Clapham Marquette University Follow this and additional works at: https://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Clapham, Danielle Kristene, "When the Foreign Became Familiar: Modernism, Expatriation, and Spatial Identities in the Twentieth Century" (2020). Dissertations (2009 -). 909. https://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/909 WHEN THE FOREIGN BECAME FAMILIAR: MODERNISM, EXPATRIATION, AND SPATIAL IDENTITIES IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY by Danielle K. Clapham, B.A., M.A. A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School, Marquette University, in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Milwaukee, Wisconsin May 2020 ABSTRACT WHEN THE FOREIGN BECAME FAMILIAR: MODERNISM, EXPATRIATION, AND SPATIAL IDENTITIES IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Danielle K. Clapham, B.A., M.A. Marquette University, 2020 This dissertation uses the life writing and fiction of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce to challenge the mythic construction of the autonomous modernist subject through the lens of expatriation. I use the expatriate as a paradigmatic figure of modernism to scrutinize common perceptions of modernist expatriation as a dissociation with tradition and national politics. Instead, this project positions modernism as a movement deeply enmeshed in celebrity culture and the cooptation of foreign spaces. I employ a spatial mode of reading expatriate fiction through which the physical sites of expatriation become symbols of expatriate values and identity in conflict with local cultures. This methodology exposes the exploitation inherent in high modernist expatriation as a practice and challenges popular understandings of modernist expatriation as a liberatory movement. The project begins in Chapter 1 with an analysis of Paris as the paradigmatic space of expatriate modernism through Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. I argue that the spatial representations in both texts encouraged contemporary readers to view Paris through a largely American lens and lead to the construction and commodification of the expatriate myth by transatlantic tourists. In Chapter Two, I extend the conversation of tourism into Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls to offer a rereading of both texts as tourist narratives centered around the personal development of the expatriate protagonists. Finally, in Chapter 3, I use Joyce’s representations of Ireland to illustrate how his depictions of the space become progressively more fragmented and telescopic across the increasing distance of exile, demonstrating a rejection of the colonial space by rendering it unknowable. I conclude with a brief consideration of the cultural implications of modernist narratives of expatriation through a close reading of twenty-first-century tourist sites that draw on the myth of modernist expatriation. I argue that by extending the spatial methodology to twenty-first-century byproducts of modernism, we can see how early twentieth-century notions of expatriation have permanently altered our perspective on globalism and the “foreign” spaces of Western Europe. i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Danielle K. Clapham, B.A., M.A. Writing a dissertation is isolating, discouraging, and more than a little challenging. While plenty of stages in this process have been painful (revising comes to mind), I’ve always felt immensely lucky for the support of many wonderful, intelligent, and compassionate people along the way. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I wouldn’t have finished this without them. First, I’d like to thank my director, Dr. Leah Flack. From the very beginning of this process, Leah has been a model of compassionate and transparent academic identity. In our meetings, she was generous with her praise, practical with her advice, and straightforward with her criticism. Thanks to her help, I always knew exactly where I needed to go with the project, and never felt like my setbacks were insurmountable. She showed vulnerability in sharing her own failures and struggles as a writer and researcher and taught me that vulnerability and failure are strengths to be embraced. She is the exact kind of mentor I hope to be for my own students. I am proud to be one of her first dissertators, and I am grateful to have learned from her during my time at Marquette. I would also like to thank Drs. Heather Hathaway and Amy Blair for their insight and guidance during this process as well. Thank you to Dr. Hathaway for pushing the limits of this project and asking the hard question about who was being left out of my research and why. Thank you to Dr. Blair for pushing me to be a better teacher, to articulate my philosophy and methods in new ways, and to talk about teaching as a professional skill with my colleagues. Finally, thank you to Wendy Walsh for answering all of my various questions, helping me track down signatures for forms, and for cheering me (and all of the graduate students) on. In addition to my committee, I am blessed to work as a member of the staff at the Ott Memorial Writing Center, and my experience there was formative in my dissertation process as I figured out what kind of researcher, teacher, and leader I wanted to be. Thank you to all of my fellow tutors for being in conversation about academic work, about writing, and about being more ethical and just humans. Thank you to Dr. Jenn Fishman for always having an open office door when I needed to ask questions about logistics, university politics, and writing practices (and when I just needed to scream into the void). And a particular thank you to Dr. Rebecca Nowacek. Rebecca taught me that leadership does not have be top-down. She showed me a version of academia that values all labor, that deconstructs power dynamics, and that centers around inclusion. I am immensely grateful for her insight and her humanity. In addition to my academic support system, I have also been supported by an amazing group of friends since starting at Marquette. They are all my Milwaukee family. While all of my friends in this city have been invaluable as I worked on this project, I ii want to particularly thank the following people for their patience, their compassion, and their enthusiasm: Sareene Proodian, for keeping me level-headed, for listening to my complaints and frustrations, and for always bringing me back to reality; Hunter Deiglmeier, for being my research colleague, my work wife, and the best hype woman I could imagine; Heather James, for being willing to challenge my ideas, to collaborate to make Marquette a better place, and to support each other’s passions; and to “the fam”— Lindsay Galan Skinner, Zac Galan Skinner, Carrie Anderson, Kelsey Soya, Greg Soya, Anna Berg, Ramon Hernandez, Tory Bahe, and Keito Shimoyama—for providing a safe space to “feel the feels” and be who I am every day. To my family, thank you for always believing this was possible. In particular, thank you for my parents, Wendy and Roger Scholbrock. I know a lot of English majors, and I know that a lot of their parents “don’t get it” and discourage them from majoring in something so “impractical.” I want to thank them for never believing my dreams were impractical and for raising me to believe that following them is always a good idea. Thank you to my grandparents, Dean and Honkie Pickel for being there for every moment of my life since the beginning, for always asking how things are going, for always believing that I was doing something important (even if they didn’t always know what it was). Thank you to my sister and best friend Hannah (Maggie) Scholbrock for calling every day, for bragging about me to everyone, and for being there whenever things got hard. I am in awe of her. Finally, and most importantly, I want to thank my husband, Jake Clapham. People say graduate school is lonely, but that has never been true for me thanks to him. We got married two months into my graduate school education, and he has been there for every conference, every draft, every class, every victory, and every breakdown. I to thank Jake for believing me and for being proud of me; for reading my work and correcting my grammar; for asking questions about my research and keeping an eye out for books I might need or like; for encouraging me to take breaks and demanding that I celebrate the little victories in the process; perhaps most importantly, for letting me steer the ship for the last eight years of our lives. For his love, patience, and compassion, I dedicate this dissertation to him. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. i CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................... 1 Expatriation and Political Privilege .............................................. 6 Expatriation and Mass Culture..................................................... 10 Summary of Chapters .................................................................. 15 II. CREATING EXPATRIATE PARIS: MODERNIST LIFE-WRITING, CELEBRITY CULTURE, AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY MYTH- MAKING ................................................................................................
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