Modernism, Subjectivity, Voice by Julie Beth Napolin a Dissertation
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The Acoustics of Narrative Involvement: Modernism, Subjectivity, Voice By Julie Beth Napolin A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Ramona Naddaff, Chair Professor Trinh T. Minh-ha Professor Carolyn Porter Professor Ramona Naddaff Fall 2010 The Acoustics of Narrative Involvement: Modernism, Subjectivity, Voice by Julie Beth Napolin Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric University of California, Berkeley Professor Ramona Naddaff, Chair The theory and history of the modernist novel traditionally emphasizes a shift away from “telling” towards “showing.” The project argues that the overly visual account of modernism misses a crucial opportunity to “hear” modernist narrative and composition. The project is an acoustics of modernist narrative backed by two case studies, the work of Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner. These writers propose a way of listening to the modernist novel and to the neglected importance of sounds and voices within it. I attend to Conrad’s peculiar transnational voice, Faulkner’s regional, southern voice, and their shared sensitivity to the physical, rhetorical, and musical properties of speech and writing. In Chapter One, “The Incanted Image: Vision, Silence, and Belonging in Conrad’s Theory of the Novel,” I pose an alternative reading of Conrad’s famous 1897 preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” . I argue that Conrad’s theory articulates his struggle to realize a form of narrative vision that might neutralize the most troubling effects of embodied voice. His theory of the novel, his struggle with voice, isolated him from his contemporaries while opening up new possibilities for the genre. Chapter Two, “Waiting for the Voice: Echo, Trope, and Narrative as Acoustic Displacement,” recuperates the acoustical and rhetorical dimension of Conradian narrative voice, largely illustrated by his famous storyteller, Marlow. I argue that in Conrad’s early narratives, a dramatic voice is separated from the speaker’s body in order to occupy the listener’s own. This voice is one effect of Conrad’s attempts both to theorize and craft a narrative that might appeal to his English reader’s sense of kinship. Exterior to that voice, however, is a pulsing world of sound. On the one hand, Conrad’s problems concerning his perceived foreign voice appear in “displaced,” racialized form through the sonic register of his novels, particularly those of non-European domains. On the other hand, there is a sonic imaginary “echoing” throughout letters, memoirs, and early novels that allow us to rethink the phrase, “the author’s voice.” In Chapter Three, “An Unorchestrated Voice: Faulkner, Song, and The Politics of Archival Listening,” I argue that Conrad’s sense of readerly involvement with the acoustical influenced Faulkner to a radical extent. Faulkner develops the novel as what I call an “archival” phenomenon, a haunting of narrative and the act of composition by sounds and voices. He registers the echoes of any one voice as it is accompanied by other voices that condition it, Faulkner tarrying in particular with sonic legacy of slavery. In his practice of composition, Faulkner revisits several voices and sounds that move between bodies, across gender and race. At the level of acoustics, this movement composes a compelling, modernist critique of racial identity. In that way, I conclude the project with a theory of an acoustical approach to literary history, one with significance beyond modernism. 1 For Mom Acknowledgments This project was made possible through the generous support of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Mellon Fellowship, the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship in the Humanities, the Dean’s Normative Time Fellowship, The Rhetoric Department Block Grant, The School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, and numerous Wollenburg Grants. I thank these foundations for their belief in my work since the earliest stages. I would like to extend my deepest thanks to my committee for their help and support, for overseeing this project at every stage, at times reading numerous drafts, and for offering wisdom when both the project and the profession seemed most terrifying and elusive. My dissertation represents the incredible chance to work with the scholars who most move, challenge, and excite me. There is no way to locate the origin of a project, but each of committee member represents a beginning: Narrative Involvement: I first met my chair, Ramona Naddaff, in her Modern Rhetoric Theory seminar. I was immediately struck by her rigor, style, grace of thinking, and unparalleled warmth. She is among the most supportive intellectuals I have encountered, exhibiting a dedication to the nuances of a given project, attending to and reading with deep respect and care for how those nuances might be best vivified and pronounced. When speaking with her, I find I cannot write quickly enough to keep up with the ideas. She is brimming with intellectual vitality. She has a way of reflecting your ideas back to you such the fragmentary starts taking real shape, and you leave the conversation wanting immediately to set to work. I thank her in particular for the warmth and strength with which she pushes my thinking, and the sympathy with which she reads and converses, what has sustained my belief that scholarship is a most ethical pursuit. Acoustics: I first met Trinh T. Minh-ha in a voicemail that accepted me to Berkeley, and then again in her Image, Music, Text and Film Deaesthetics seminars, two beginnings of my project on sound. I had read her work in college, a moment when I was first experimenting with new ways of writing about sound, music, and voice, and I saw in her scholarship a model of someone who was both an artist and a rigorous thinker, someone who, in refusing to choose between two seeming opposed modalities, changed what was possible in writing. The delicacy, care, and sensitivity with which she thinks, writes, and speaks often involves finding a small, ignored, or forgotten place in the life of the concept and crafting a place where it might speak to its fullest potential. It is that sense of artistic care for the detail, the passing notes of thought as they might be paused, heard differently, and allowed the space to live their own life that is among the moment influential forces in my thinking. Modernism and Voice: I first met Carolyn Porter in her Faulkner seminar. There I was awakened to the richness of modern literature, an experience that changed my intellectual course. She lives and breathes Faulkner in a way that could seduce even the most befuddled or skeptical; there is a certain regality of character and grace of thinking that convinces one that, in reading literature, he or she is doing something noble. I spent many afternoons at her dining room table where she went page by page responding to my drafts, providing guidance, clarity, and confidence. These meetings will be included amongst my happiest memories of Berkeley. I thank her for her groundbreaking scholarship and, most kindly, for the numerous Scarlet O’Hara impressions and old school critic anecdotes that provided much needed sanity. I thank her for an evocative speaking voice, one that I hear to myself when write of Faulkner; it is a voice that pushes me to be a better writer; I know when I hear it that I’ve hit on something worth pursuing. i Subjectivity: I first met Judith Butler when I turned over my copy of Bodies that Matter , shattered after reading it in college, and saw that she taught in Rhetoric in Berkeley. This convinced me of my growing sense that I must get myself to this place on the other side of the country as quickly as possible. My interest in what it means to be a critical listener started to take shape in her numerous public lectures and the Theories of the Subject seminar where I was introduced to some of the most central critics in my project. To say that she is a most rigorous, generous, athletic, and explosive thinker would be a gross understatement. To listen to her lecture, for even a few minutes, is so expansive and challenging that one feels a deeper space for thought carved out in the synapses. I thank her in particular for the art of the question: I learned in listening to and reading her that critical thought begins in the question, asking the ones that seem most unaskable, such that posing the question is an act of overturning. This project has been many years in the making and culminates work that began long before I arrived at Berkeley. I would like to thank my parents, and my brother and sister for their unconditional love and for supporting my education and all of my pursuits. I also thank my grandpa, and Leah Napolin and family for their support and encouragement. I would like to thank the Rhetoric Department, what remains one of the most exciting and important centers of thought in the country, for its initial and continued support of my work and study. It is composed of some of the most unique, gifted, and exciting scholars. In the Rhetoric Department, I thank Marianne Constable, Maxine Fredericksen, and Jane Taylorson for their support, advice, and warm care. At Berkeley, I had the opportunity to take seminars with gifted thinkers from around the world. I thank Adriana Cavarero, Shannon Jackson, Victoria Kahn, Catherine Malabou, Denise Riley, and Kaja Silverman for giving me the opportunity to study with them. I thank my colleagues for their support, for getting me through some tough stages, and above all, for the conversations that made Berkeley feel like the epicenter of thought: Diana Anders, Matt Bonal, Julian Carter, Daniel Coffeen, Erica Dillon, James Harker, Meredith Hoy, Michael Feola, Scott Ferguson, Amy Jamgochian, Ben Lempert, Erica Levin, Armando Manalo, Daniel Marcus, Amy Rust, Andrew Weiner, and Damon Young.