Multiple Modernisms: Essays on Non-Synchronous Periodization
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
MULTIPLE MODERNISMS: ESSAYS ON NON-SYNCHRONOUS PERIODIZATION By CARL F. MILLER A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2009 1 © 2009 Carl F. Miller 2 To my grandmother 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the members of my committee for their expertise and support during the writing of this dissertation. I extend thanks to my family for their encouragement during this process and throughout my undergraduate and graduate studies. My sincere gratitude goes to Christie Pagano for the motivation and understanding she has provided in the latter stages of composition. Most of all, I would like to thank Phillip Wegner for tirelessly meeting with me, reviewing my materials on a short timeline, and ultimately changing the way I look at the world. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.................................................................................................................... 4 ABSTRACT .......................................................................................................................................... 6 CHAPTER 1 THEORIES OF RELATIVITY: MULTIPLE MODERNISMS AND A SINGULAR MODERNITY ............................................................................................................................... 7 2 “SIGNATURES OF ALL THINGS”: PERIODIZATION AND TRANSITION WITHIN JAMES JOYCE’S ULYSSES ..................................................................................... 30 3 “WITHIN YOU WITHOUT YOU”: SGT. PEPPER AND THE HIGH MODERNISM OF ROCK AND ROLL .............................................................................................................. 67 4 WHERE ARE THE WILD THINGS?: THE MODERNIST REVOLUTION AND BEYOND IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE ......................................................................... 103 5 “THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH”: DON DELILLO’S UNDERWORLD AND THE PERIODIZATION OF MAJOR LEAGUE ARCHITECTURE ............................................ 142 Realism ...................................................................................................................................... 145 Modernism ................................................................................................................................. 154 Postmodernism .......................................................................................................................... 165 LIST OF REFERENCES ................................................................................................................. 180 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ........................................................................................................... 192 5 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy MULTIPLE MODERNISMS: ESSAYS ON NON-SYNCHRONOUS PERIODIZATION By Carl F. Miller August 2009 Chair: Phillip Wegner Major: English Multiple Modernisms: Essays on Non-Synchronous Periodization explores the concept of periodization and its value for the study of literature and a number of other artistic forms, offering both a historical analysis and a reconceptualization of traditional methods of studying these cultural phenomena. This project emphasizes instead how larger cultural logics work themselves out through a diverse range of different cases, ranging from specific works and artistic careers to genres, media, and forms. This study also confronts the isolation of canonical literature from other practices, such as popular music, architecture, and children’s literature. It is further unique in that it posits “non-synchronous periodization” for each of these forms, rather than subscribing, for example, to the notion of a uniform realist, modernist, or postmodernist period. This raises a number of historical questions that have largely been ignored within cultural studies, and offers what I hope are productive and original answers to them. 6 CHAPTER 1 THEORIES OF RELATIVITY: MULTIPLE MODERNISMS AND A SINGULAR MODERNITY The most troublesome passage in Marx has to do with the emergence of a new mode of production. The parturitional figure is well known although not absolutely indispensable: ‘new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society.’ The organic overtones have often been an embarrassment, particularly since the mother normally survives the birth of the child, while the older mode of production presumably does not. — Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity (77-78) This is a dissertation on the multiplicity of the expressions of modernism. I am exploring the concept of periodization and its value for the study of literature and a number of other artistic forms, offering both a historical analysis and a reconceptualization of traditional methods of studying these cultural phenomena. This project challenges the “genius” model that still dominates much of the work in literary and cultural studies, and emphasizes instead how larger cultural logics work themselves out through a diverse range of different cases, ranging from specific works and artistic careers to media, genres, and forms. This dissertation also confronts the potential isolation of canonical literature from other practices, such as popular music, architecture, and children’s literature. When the traditionally-accepted artistic periods of realism, modernism, and postmodernism have been applied to these practices, it has most often been with the understanding that development in all these forms are synchronous with one another. In looking at modernism across a wide range of temporalities, I shall posit a non-synchronous periodization for each of these artistic forms. This is in opposition to the generally accepted notion of a uniform “modernist period” located, for example, in the years between 1914-1945, and wherein all works produced in that moment are evaluated according to the criteria of modernism--usually to the marked detriment of many of them. While the logic of periodization is based on the scale of the economic mode of production, I will argue that there is 7 no such thing as a pure mode of production, a recognition that enables non-synchronous periods to develop in relation to the traditional realms of realism, modernism, and postmodernism. The chapters in this dissertation explain such different scales of periodiziation--those of individual text, genre, musical medium, and architectural practice--structured around the periodizing method of America’s foremost Marxist critic, Fredric Jameson. This project is complicated not only by the scale of its periods, but also by the subjects and works under analysis, which range from a canonical modernist text to children’s literature, rock and roll, and the American ballpark. As such, in addition to its Jamesonian framework, this project in many ways mirrors the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss in its assessment that the primitive is no less complex than the sophisticated modern. In The Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss emphasizes, “What is true of the constitution of historical facts is no less so of their selection. Every corner of space conceals a multitude of individuals each of whom totalizes the trend of history in a manner which cannot be compared to the others. What makes history possible is that a sub-set of events is found” (257). This dissertation accomplishes this by focusing on progression and transition within a number of forms. The thinking in the cultural logic of each of these formal sub-sets is different from those of the established macro-scales, and they necessitate equally sophisticated readings. When we read these texts within their own formal histories, their developments are rich and varied and contestatory. Of course, to accomplish this we need to focus on situational descriptions--a vital point within Jameson’s method that many readers are apt to overlook. For the fundamental--and unarguable--axiom of Jameson’s Marxism is that everything must respond to the larger cultural situation at hand. The largest historical periodizations are those of a situation that is cultural, political, and economic. In this logic of situation, all things produced during the “modernist 8 period” are modernist. However, more than simply positing the historical boundaries of a period, Jameson actually theorizes what that historical situation is, with the understanding that different cultural works will respond to this situation differently. Alain Badiou, in the opening of his provocative Ethics (2001), observes that “certain scholarly words, after long confinement in dictionaries and in academic prose, have the good fortune, or the misfortune--a little like an old maid who, long since resigned to her fate, suddenly becomes, without understanding why, the toast of the town - of sudden exposure to the bright light of day” (1). While Badiou speaks in reference to the term “ethics,”1 he could just as surely be talking about the concept of “modernism.” The understanding that aesthetic modernism was a movement of the past is evident in a number of crucial critical essays that have helped to shape the academy’s conception of the term. Maurice Beebe, in a 1974 essay titled “What Modernism Was,” states that “we can take some comfort in the realization that we can now define Modernism with confidence that we shall not have