ATTENTION AND DISTRACTION: CINEMATIC PERCEPTION AND SPECTATORSHIP IN MODERNIST TEXTS, 1897-1941 A Dissertation by BOO SUNG KIM Submitted to the Office of Graduate and Professional Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Chair of Committee, David McWhirter Committee Members, Anne Morey Jenelle Troxell Stefanie Harris Head of Department, Maura Ives August 2017 Major Subject: English Copyright 2017 Boo Sung Kim ABSTRACT Tracing sensory and affective experiences associated with cinematic modes of perception in modernist literature, this study reveals how modernist writers embraced the medium of cinematic language as a means to examine new forms of subjectivity, and how through this appropriation they attempted to reconfigure culture’s audiences by situating both author and reader in the position of spectator. Drawing on methodological approaches such as early cinema studies and reception theory, this study performs a comparative reading of modernist texts that feature spectator characters and that speak to issues of spectator/spectacle relations. Previous scholarship has regarded literary modernism as an elite craft refined in secret, inattentive or hostile to audiences, and modernist attributes as what makes an artist figure in the face of modernity. However, moving beyond the field’s focus on the relationship between the artist and the artwork, this study highlights the presence of art spectators both inside and outside of the textual space to redefine literary modernism as an active exchange between artists and audiences. By focusing on three different types of spectators that are seemingly vulnerable, uncritical, and passive—a child, a woman, and the masses, respectively, this study shows that modernists’ preoccupations with spectatorial subjectivity are not only indicative of their susceptibility to the rise of cinema spectatorship in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century but also promote a new method of reading that is audience-oriented and receptive to the effects of media change. As a response to the emerging media ii culture in the late 1890s, Henry James foregrounded spectatorial experiences and employed the language of early film to expose the gap between the old assumptions of literary readership and the actual culture’s audience. Dorothy Richardson used the silent cinema spectatorship in the 1920s as an essential backdrop for her feminist strategies to express critical dissent from dominant narratives of gender. Conceiving the masses as a new type of art spectators in the 1930s, Virginia Woolf valorized contingency and distraction, both of which she discovered from her own cinematic experience, to achieve a strategy that confronts the crisis of language in the age of machines. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to sincerely thank my committee chair, Dr. David McWhirter, and my committee members, Dr. Anne Morey, Dr. Jenelle Troxell, and Dr. Stefanie Harris. My deepest thanks go to Dr. McWhirter for his guidance and patience throughout this project. His unflagging encouragement and faith in my work sustained me when I had doubts about myself. I have been very fortunate to have Dr. Morey both as my committee member and as my teaching mentor; not only was I indebted to her acute editor’s eye, but I was deeply inspired by her charisma and her strong work ethic as a teacher. I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Dr. Troxell for her emotional support and her willingness to help me in every possible way. Her steady encouragement invigorated me to complete this work. I also deeply thank Dr. Harris for her incisive comments and feedback, which made me have a clearer view of this project. I want to express my sincere gratitude to Dr. Youngjoo Kim, who taught me the importance of joy in studying literature. Her calm perseverance has always been a great source of inspiration. My gratitude also extends to my friends for making my time at Texas A&M University a great experience. I would especially like to thank Dhrubaa De Mukherjee, Hwayoung Yi, Seung-Hyun Kim, and Soyoun Kim. Finally, thanks to my mother and father for their encouragement, patience, and love. This dissertation would have been impossible without their support. iv CONTRIBUTORS AND FUNDING SOURCES Contributors This work was supervised by a dissertation committee consisting of Professor David McWhirter (chair), Professors Anne Morey and Jenelle Troxell of the Department of English, and Professor Stefanie Harris of the Department of International Studies. All work for the dissertation was completed by the student, under the advisement of David McWhirter of the Department of English. Funding Sources This work was made possible in part by a dissertation fellowship from the Texas A&M University Department of English. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................... iv CONTRIBUTORS AND FUNDING SOURCES .......................................................... v TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................... vi CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION ................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER II SHOCK AND ASTONISHMENT: HENRY JAMES’S WHAT MAISIE KNEW AND THE RISE OF CINEMA SPECTATORSHIP .......................... 20 II.1. James in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction ............................................... 23 II.2. The Cinematographe as Jamesian Representational Technology ................... 36 II.3. Display, Diversity, Shock: Maisie’s Spectatorship and the Aesthetics of Astonishment .......................................................................................................... 46 CHAPTER III ATTENTION AND CONTEMPLATION: DOROTHY RICHARDSON’S FEMINIST SPECTATORSHIP AND PILGRIMAGE .................. 69 III.1. The Crisis of Attentiveness and the Implausibility of Absorbed Subjects .... 72 III.2. “A Place Like Home”: Richardson’s Alternative Spectatorship ................... 78 III.3. “The slow, attentive reading”: Punctuation, Depth and Scenes of Reading in Pilgrimage .......................................................................................................... 91 III.4. Miriam Henderson, the (In)Attentive Modern Subject ................................ 105 III.4.1. “German music, a line of German poetry, a sudden light on Clara’s face”: Aesthetic Encounters in Pointed Roofs ............................................. 107 III.4.2. A Promiscuous Style of Attention in The Tunnel ............................ 119 CHAPTER IV DISTRACTION AND CONTINGENCY: THE MASSES, TECHNOLOGY, AND NATURE IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S BETWEEN THE ACTS ........................................................................................................................... 132 IV.1. Woolf’s Rejection of Attentiveness in “The Mark on the Wall” ................. 135 IV.2. Distraction in the Age of Machines in Mrs. Dalloway ................................ 141 IV.3. “A shadow shaped like a tadpole” ............................................................... 146 IV.4. Art, Its Spectators and the Avant-Garde in Between the Acts ..................... 157 IV.4.1. “Intentional was it, or accidental?” .................................................. 173 vi Page IV.4.2. Why Isn’t Between the Acts a Film? ................................................ 179 CHAPTER V CONCLUSION .................................................................................. 184 V.1. The Emancipated Spectators ......................................................................... 184 V.2. Toward Spectatorial Modernism ................................................................... 186 WORKS CITED ......................................................................................................... 188 vii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION This dissertation investigates representations of spectatorial subjectivity and affective experiences associated with cinematic modes of perception in modernist texts. For most of its history as a discipline, modernist studies has focused on the exclusive relationship between the artist and the artwork. Only in the 2000s did it broaden its scope by including media and technology studies and by shedding light on how modernism built its audiences. While the new modernist studies has existed for more than two decades, literary modernism is still understood as an elite craft refined in secret, inattentive or hostile to mass audiences. This dissertation bridges the gap between recent considerations of modernism in relation to mass media and the pressing need for redefining literary modernism. It questions preconceived notions about literary modernism as high art or elitism and broadens the field’s focus beyond the relationship between the artist and the artwork to include and highlight the presence of art spectators both inside and outside of the textual space, so that literary modernism can be redefined as an active exchange between artists and audiences. Encompassing works published between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II, the term “high modernism” is closely connected to the idea of modernism as mass culture’s other and as adversary culture (Huyssen, “High/Low” 366). Recent modernist literary scholarship has worked to revise the definition